Doctrine and Disease in the British and Spanish Colonial World

Each chapter of this volume centers on a key moment during this period of remarkable upheaval, including Jesuit co-optation of Indigenous knowledge in Peru, the Catholic Church’s dissemination of the smallpox vaccine across the Spanish Empire, Puritan collective fasting during smallpox outbreaks, and the practice of eating dirt as Obeah resistance among enslaved people in Jamaica. Throughout, the contributors explore how the porous geographical borders of the transatlantic world meant that medicine and religion were translated through and against each other, over and over again. Residing at the nexus between two largely discrete areas of inquiry, this collection provides significant insight into the numerous points of juncture between medicine and religion in the Atlantic world.

In addition to the editor, the contributors to this volume include Matthew James Crawford, Crawford Gribben, Rana A. Hogarth, Philippa Koch, Allyson M. Poska, Catherine Reedy, and Rebecca Totaro.

Kathleen Miller is Visiting Scholar at Queen’s University Belfast and a Residential Research Fellow at Folger Shakespeare Library. She is the author of The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England.

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Kathleen Miller

1. The Secularization of Nature: Jesuit Missionaries and Indigenous Healing Knowledge in Early Modern Peru (1590–1710)

Matthew James Crawford

2. Vaccinating the Name of the Lord: The Catholic Church and the Extension of Smallpox Vaccination in the Spanish Empire (1803–1810)

Allyson M. Poska

3. John Owen, Plague, and the Meanings of Disaster

Crawford Gribben

4. Maternal Bodies: Religion, Medicine, and Politics in Early America and the Atlantic World

Philippa Koch

5. Printing England’s Plague Past in New England

Kathleen Miller

6. Contagious Fasts: Occasional Worship and Medical Practice in England and Massachusetts Bay Colony

Catherine Reedy

7. Enslaved Bodies and the White Imagination: (Mis)Perceptions of Dirt Eating on Jamaican Plantations

Rana A. Hogarth

Afterword

Rebecca Totaro

List of Contributors

Index

Download a PDF sample chapter here: Introduction

History

           Early Modern

           Eighteenth-century

Religious Studies & Religion

           History of Religion