Now in Paperback
Public Lives, Private Secrets
Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish
America
Ann Twinam
“Beautifully written, capaciously documented, and
compellingly argued, this book
contributes enormously to the colonial Spanish America
historiography on race, social
status, and culture, as well as on how these themes were played
out in daily life as
concerns for honor, gender, and sexuality. Twinam has tackled the
major themes and
concerns in our field and has done so with masterful
sophistication and élan.”
Ramón Gutierrez
University of California, San Diego
“Twinam’s examination and assessment of
‘honor’ as viewed by the elites of Spanish
America supersedes all previous work on the topic. No other work
in either English or
Spanish compares to her treatment of family ties, sexual
behavior, social mores, public
opinion, legal practices, and imperial policy.”
Asunción Lavrin
Arizona State University
Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
illegitimate offspring of elite
families in colonial Spanish America appealed to the Council and
Cámara of the Indies in
Spain to purchase gracias al sacar legitimations. Their
applications provided intimate
testimony concerning their own lives, accounts of their
parents’ sexual relationships, and
details regarding the impact of illegitimacy within their
families and communities. Bourbon
officials in Spain debated which petitions merited approval, and
in the process forged
policies concerning gender, sexuality, illegitimacy, and the
family.
Scattered throughout the Archive of the Indies, the petitions
were difficult to locate until the
author determined the pattern of how they were archived and was
able to access this
extraordinarily rich new source for Spanish American social
history. For this book, she has
not only analyzed the gracias al sacar documents of some 240
illegitimates, but also traced
the histories of those involved in eighteen major archives in
Spain, the Caribbean, Mexico,
and South America.
The collective biographies of the gracias al sacar parents, and
of their illegitimate
offspring—as infants, children, and adults—reveal a
Hispanic mentality that consciously
differentiated between the public and private spheres. Colonial
elites distinguished between a
private circle of family, kin, and intimate friends and a public
world where status (honor)
was negotiated with outside peers. This bifurcation was distinct
yet permeable; an individual
might “pass” to negotiate a public status different
from a private reality. Thus, an unwed
mother might enjoy the public reputation that she was a virgin,
the bastard son of a priest
might be treated as legitimate, and a mulatto could be
transformed into someone white.
The author explores how the probability for passing varied
throughout the Spanish Empire,
and how it narrowed as the eighteenth century drew to a close.
She also demonstrates that
the inability to conceptualize passing beyond the scope of the
individual exacerbated social
tensions prior to independence.
Ann Twinam is Professor of History at the University of
Cincinnati.
Available Now
pp. 447 2 maps
paper isbn: 0-8047-3148-9 $24.95 m
cloth isbn: 0-8047-3147-0 $60.00 s
An American Bible
A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777-1880
Paul Gutjahr
“A fascinating journey through the history of the
Bible in America, unprecedented in its
scope, erudition, and imagination.”
—Jon Butler,
Yale University
“This pathbreaking study of the production of Bibles in the
early history of the United
States is a splendid effort in every way. The great magnitude of
the subject has
frightened other scholars away. But Gutjahr, unintimidated by the
many dimensions of
his theme, has successfully illuminated a very great deal about
printing practices in early
America, the economics of the book trade, the vicissitudes of
American taste, as well as
the religious meanings of the printed scriptures.”
—Mark A. Knoll,
Wheaton College
“An American Bible is an extremely compelling piece of
cultural history that succeeds
in making rich rather than schematic sense of the major dramas
that lay behind the
production of over 1,700 different American editions of the Bible
in the century after the
American Revolution. Gutjahr’s book is especially powerful
in demonstrating how
nineteenth-century efforts to purge the Bible of textual and
translational impurities in
search of an ‘authentic’ text led ironically to the
emergence of entirely new gospels like
the Book of Mormon and the massive fictionalized literature
dealing with the life of
Christ.”
—Jay Fliegelman,
Stanford University
During the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century,
American publishing experienced
unprecedented, exponential growth. An emerging market economy,
widespread religious
revival, educational reforms, and innovations in print technology
worked together to create a
culture increasingly formed and framed by the power of print. At
the center of this new
culture was the Bible, the book that has been called “the
best seller” in American
publishing history. Yet it is important to realize that the Bible
in America was not a simple,
uniform entity. First printed in the United States during the
American Revolution, the Bible
underwent many revisions, translations, and changes in format as
different editors and
publishers appropriated it to meet a wide range of changing
ideological and economic
demands.
This book examines how many different constituencies (both
secular and religious) fought
to keep the Bible the preeminent text in the United States as the
country’s print marketplace
experienced explosive growth. The author shows how these heated
battles had profound
consequences for many American cultural practices and forms of
printed material. By
exploring how publishers, clergymen, politicians, educators, and
lay persons met the threat
that new printed material posed to the dominance of the Bible by
changing both its form and
its contents, the author reveals the causes and consequences of
mutating God’s supposedly
immutable Word.
Paul Gutjahr is Assistant Professor of English and American
Studies at Indiana University.
Available Now
pp. 254 52 illustrations
cloth isbn: 0-8047-3425-9 $39.50 s
January 27, 2001