The fact that rowdy captain Nicolás de Aguilar, arrested by order of the Inquisition in New Mexico in 1662, owned a copy of Fray Francisco de Pareja’s bilingual catechism in Spanish and the language of Florida’s Timucua Indians remains an intriguing oddity, since virtually no contact existed between Spain’s two seventeenth-century North American colonies. No governor, lesser official, or Franciscan friar appears to have served in both places. We have no firsthand comparison of the native peoples of Florida and New Mexico or of their responses to colonization. Hence, Galgano’s challenge.
Feast of Souls takes its place in the parade of comparative studies animated by the Columbian quincentennial and graced recently by David J. Weber’s Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (Yale Univ. Press, 2005). While Weber treats unincorporated Indians all over Spain’s American empire, mainly in the second half of the eighteenth century, Galgano confines...
