The Formative Years of the Missionary College of Santa Cruz of Queretaro 1683-1733 de Michael Brendan McCloskey (1910-1970) - 1955

xiv+128 pages with bibliography and index. Quarto (10 1/2" x 63/4") bound in original publisher's blue cloth with gilt lettering to spine and pictorial insignia to front cover in original jacket. Publications of the Academy of American Franciscan History, Monograph Series volume 2. First edition.
The emergence of late-colonial mission complexes in the northern reaches of New Spain in the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and early-nineteenth centuries was largely the work of a new type of Franciscan friar, the collegiate friars who were members of colegios apostolicos de Propaganda Fide, apostolic college-seminaries chartered by Spanish churchmen under the aegis of the Roman curia's missionary commission. The colleges were founded beginning in 1683 in New Spain and other parts of the Spanish American colonial empire, and were based on similar institutions in the Spanish kingdoms founded just before those in the Americas. From Texas and Nuevo Santander in the northeast to Sonora and Alta California in the northwest, the latter the last frontier mission territory entered by the Franciscans in North America, friars from the colleges worked across a range of lands and locales, some of which had been the locations of missions attempted by other missionary religious before them (such as in the Sierra Gorda), and many which represented new thrusts of Spanish claims to regions and the peoples therein. Between these territories and the vast distances between them and the missionary colleges that sent the friars to each, collegiate Franciscans developed networks linking the colleges, their missions, and the men and ideas of each institution as men passed to and from all of these locations over the period from 1683 to the early nineteenth century with the realization of independence in Mexico (1821) and the reduced nature of the missionaries' labors in the decades that followed under national governments. As an example of the sharing of ideas across space and time in the Spanish imperial context, this essay explains such movements in terms of networks, opportunity, and the expedient use of available concepts to effect new missionary labors in established and newer territories, respectively, over the period of the colleges' evangelization efforts in the later colonial era in New Spain. Condition: Corners bumped. Jacket spine ends chipped, spine toned, closed tear at front heal hinge, some closed edge tears with tear and chip at back head else very good in like jacket.