Men of God

A broadly researched cultural history, Men of God offers a path to understand the concept of religious masculinity through an intimate approach to the study of friars and lay brothers in colonial Mexico. Though other scholars have focused on the missionary work of the Augustinian, Franciscan, and Dominican friars, few have addressed their everyday lives and how the internal discipline of their orders shaped the men within them. In Men of God Asunción Lavrin offers a sweeping yet intimate history of the mendicant friars in New Spain from the late sixteenth century through 1800. Focusing on these individuals' lives from childhood through death, Lavrin explores contemporaneous ideas on how to raise a boy to their training as novices, and the similarities and differences in the life experiences of lay brothers and ordained members. She discusses their sexuality to reveal the challenges and failures of religious manhood, as well as the drive behind their missionary duties, especially in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Men of God also explores the concepts and realities of martyrdom and death, significant elements in the spirituality of the mendicant friars of colonial Mexico.