Blacks of the Rosary: Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil

Community fashioned from a “remembered African past” (p. 160) is what Elizabeth Kiddy is after when she writes about Africans and their descendants as participants in the Catholic brotherhoods of the rosary in Minas Gerais, Brazil. She ranges ambitiously over three centuries, narrating the ups and downs of the brotherhoods from the eighteenth century through to independence, the Empire, and the Estado Novo and on up to our own times. In the frontier mining towns of Minas Gerais, where priests were scarce or absent, the brotherhoods became centers of religious practice, organized by the lay faithful who built churches and hired their own chaplains, the first rosary brotherhood being established in São João del Rei in 1708. The brotherhoods’ autonomy was increasingly curtailed by a Roman Catholic Church jealous to reestablish authority over what it regarded as dangerously independent parishes and theologically dubious practices. Throughout the nineteenth century, priests took...