Despite the ubiquity of regional saints and their deep symbolic influence on life and history in Latin America, comparatively few scholars have studied the discourse of saintliness in cross-regional perspective. Ronald J. Morgan’s elegant volume reviews the early Spanish American history of the saint’s Life (Vida), a genre of sacred biographical writing reflecting the colonial societies in which they were written.
The actual subject of Spanish American Saints, its title notwithstanding, is not the saints themselves but the work of their hagiographers in New Spain and Peru. Aspiring, often defiant biographers used their pious works to influence the public reception of exemplary Christian heroes in both the Universal Church and their own devotional communities. These authors (male religious or secular clergy) and their immediate audience (mainly literate criollos and peninsulares) were “relatively elite” members of colonial society (p. 33). Morgan argues that hagiographers’ claims about local...
