Stanfield‐Mazzi, Maya (2021) Clothing the New World Church: Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520–1820, University of Notre‐Dame Press (Notre‐Dame), xvii + 432 pp, £40.00 hbk.

The sixteenth-century Iberian conquest of the Meso-American ‘New World’ coincided with the Council of Trent's strong impulse to define boundaries and to extend standards in liturgical practice (decencia or ‘decency’). The thrust of missionary Catholicism into the Hispanic world resulted in remarkable and enduring forms of syncretic artisanal accomplishment in the production and modification of pre-Hispanic textiles and ritual materials to the new Catholic liturgy. Maya Stanfield-Mazzi's Clothing the New World Church is an extensive study of the indigenous practices of artisanal pre-Hispanic woollen, feather, as well lowly cotton work in response to colonial imperatives that in many cases show the adaptation of pre-Hispanic and pre-colonial artisanal and artistic form not just to Hispanic Catholicism but to the global sphere of Spanish Empire. Iberian Catholicism was highly attentive to the hierarchy of materials in liturgical (‘order of service’) and ecclesiastical usages. Liturgical fabrics could convey transcendent qualities, including iridescence, luminosity, passion (i.e. emotional provocation): uplifting symbols of life and resurrection. Their production and display fortified new Christian communities. In five chapters, Stanfield-Mazzi sets out the ways in which indigenous working of silk, woollen, feather and cotton and lace arts brought indigenous practice into the colonial space, and were in turn displaced or modified by global currents unleashed by European exchange. The book also brings into focus the craftspeople: ‘oficiales’ (skilled indigenous workers who did not pay tribute) and craftswomen – illiterate and thus anonymous. Their descendants continue to work in these crafts, including silk production, weaving, embroidery, lace and fabric-dying in contemporary South and Central America. The ‘most decent’ material for liturgical surfaces was silk, a pan-Eurasian product spun from silkworm cocoons. Silk's rareness, its shininess and its capacity for iridescence pointed at transcendence. Much sought after by the new churches of the Hispanic world, silk came to the New World through imports but also the introduction c. 1550 of silkworm-farming and the application of indigenous dyes, including the brilliant cochineal reds of the Alta Mixteca. But the flowering of Mexican silk-production was brief, and sharply dropped off following the appearance of low-cost Chinese silk in the 1580s together with a Tridentine suspicion of indigenous ‘idolatry’, which was alleged in indigenous presentation in these beautiful forms. ‘Global silk’ together with Tridentine ideology proved too strong for a frail emergent transplant. The second chapter assesses embroidery, a craft that brought the colour and luminescence of stained glass into New World liturgical fabrics. Indigenous embroidery adapted to Tridentine suspicions by emphasising emblematic designs over narrative ones. The great craft of indigenous embroiderers could not however earn them more than a ‘second class position’: they could never become masters; Iberian guild restrictions bit hard into indigenous crafts practices. The highly original third chapter demonstrates the productive contact of indigenous feather work and Tridentine Catholicism. Pre-contact feather work was highly advanced by 1520: Aztec iconography attests to this. It dazzled the conquistadors, combining New World bird plumage including that of the humming bird (a genus unknown in Europe) to produce iridescent impact. Stanfield-Mazzi shows that this fascination with Mexican feather work resulted in the export, from New Spain's bishoprics, of feathered mitres – bishops' hats – to Habsburg Europe. The towering Tridentine reformer Carlo Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan (1564–1584), wore a Michoacán feather mitre: a sign of a global Catholic community and a shining object of transcendence. Chapters 4 and 5 address Inka transfers of pre-Hispanic craft practices into Catholic liturgical imaginary. Inka woollen capes (q'umpa), worn by elites and prohibited to commoners by pre-Hispanic sumptuary restriction asserted what Stanfield-Mazzi suggests is ‘state power’. These found a new purpose in liturgical decoration, including that of the elite acolytes who served the new Church. The fifth chapter introduces the outlier of the Chachapoya, who had in pre-Hispanic times resisted the Inka and maintained independence in the Levante, bordering on Peruvian Amazonia. Here missionary Catholicism was slow to arrive. The Chachapoyas were cotton-cultivators, and had long used cotton to mummify their dead in what Stanfield-Mazzi describes as their ‘unique ideology of death and the afterlife’. Without heavy Tridentine hand, Chachapoyan painted cotton work developed as ecclesiastical fabric with full expression of global Catholicism. Clothing the New World Church is a powerhouse of original fieldwork and incorporation of literature in art history, textiles history and Church history. The book's illustrations include many reproductions from Hispanic churches and museums, and technical drawings of weaves and other fabric-making processes. A useful glossary of textile and liturgical terms helps to orient the lay reader. This study of indigenous appropriation of and incorporation into Catholic church liturgy and decoration shows brilliant craft and artistry, and offers a beguiling picture of continuity into the Latin American present.

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