The epilogue caps off the book’s argument by examining two formative Catholic religious devotions that structured narratives about identity, community, and citizenship in both Old and New Granada. The narratives provided by the Virgin of Chiquinquirá (New Kingdom) and the Lead Books and relics of Sacromonte (Granada) reconstituted these two “kingdoms” as Christian spaces whose inhabitants, despite whatever pre-miracle ethnic markers they might have carried, were re-branded as native Christians. Those devotion-driven Christian identities made them constituents of a wider, circum-Atlantic community, even as the inclusion of native meanings and symbols molded and transformed Christianity in order to adapt it to fit local exigencies.

The first chapter establishes the groundwork for thinking about social differences in society by reviewing the major political milestones that transformed multi-confessional medieval society. Reaching back to the first fourteenth century pogroms that drove Spanish Jews to convert en masse to Christianity, to be repeated again in the fifteenth century, the chapter explores how the terms “New Christian” and “Old Christian” emerged and later solidified as the primary divisions in sixteenth-century society.