Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New

This comparative interdisciplinary study of the rise of Christianity in the late Roman Empire and in colonial Mexico reveals that epidemic disease undermined pre-Christian societies, contributing respectively to pagan and Indian interest in new forms of social and religious life. Christian clerics and monks in early medieval Europe and, later, Jesuit missionaries in colonial Mexico, reacted by introducing new beliefs and practices and accommodating indigenous religions as well.

Daniel T. Reff is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. He is an anthropologist and enthnohistorian who has done research in northern Mexico, the American Southwest, Spaink and Portugal. He is the author of several articles on colonial Mexico in such journals as American Anthropologist, American Antiquity, and Ethnohistory. He is the author of Disease, Depopulation, and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518–1764 (1991). He has been a resident scholar at the School of American Research and is the recipient of major research grants as well as a University Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.