Men of God: Mendicant Orders in Colonial Mexico

A broadly researched cultural history, Men of God offers a path to understanding 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 from how to raise a boy to the friars’ 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.

Asunción Lavrin is professor emerita of history at Arizona State University. She is the author or editor of many books, including Brides of Christ: Conventional Life in Colonial Mexico; Women, Feminism, and Social Change: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890-1940 (Nebraska, 1998); and Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (Nebraska, 1992).