In Service of Two Masters is an institutional history of the Franciscan mission of Santa Rosa de Ocopa in the colonial viceroyalty of Peru. Located in the eastern jungle region, with its harsh climate, Ocopa presided over one of the largest mission fields in the New World. Cameron D. Jones's aim is to put Ocopa into the “wider political and intellectual context” of the Bourbon reforms, the Enlightenment, and Atlantic history, and he succeeds in this (p. 6).
In the eighteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church extended a European project of creating colleges de propaganda fide to the Americas. This policy turned established monasteries, like Ocopa, into institutes to train missionaries in native languages. Doing so removed the monasteries from local control, so that rather than reporting to the provincial of the order in Peru, they reported to the commissary general of the Indies in Spain. That, and the fact...