During the early modern period, unprecedented migration caused diseases to take hold in new locales, turning illness and the human body into battlegrounds for competing religious beliefs as well as the colonial agendas in which they were often ensnared. This interdisciplinary volume follows the contours of illness, epidemics, and cures in the early modern British and Spanish Empires as these were understood in religious terms.
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.
Edited by:
Kathleen Miller
Imprint: Pennsylvania State University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 21mm
Weight: 426g
ISBN: 9780271099828
ISBN 10: 0271099828
Pages: 208
Publication Date: 03 June 2025
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
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
Kathleen Miller is a Visiting Scholar at Queen’s University Belfast and a Research Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is the author of The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England.
