Much has been written about the three largest male mendicant orders — the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians — in colonial Mexico. Most of this literature has focused on how the friars missionized the indigenous populations during the sixteenth century, fought against encroachments on their doctrinas (indigenous parishes administered by the mendicants) by the secular clergy starting in the seventeenth century, and suffered crisis and decline caused by an expanding, absolutist, and anti-monastic Bourbon monarchy in the late eighteenth century. In a deeply researched and clearly written institutional and cultural history of New Spain’s mendicant orders, Karen Melvin shifts attention away from these topics to explore how the orders functioned within Mexico’s cities, and in the process shaped urban religious environments.

Melvin’s change in focus allows her to offer significant correctives to traditional arguments about mendicant history. Most important, she contests the narrative of mendicant decline beginning in the 1570s after the golden age of heroic, early evangelization of the Indians came to a close. She counters that the mendicants simply adapted to the changing social trends of colonial Mexico. By the 1570s the indigenous populations were collapsing due to waves of Old World epidemics, but cities populated by Spaniards (both immigrants from Spain and creoles born in Mexico), mestizos, Indians, and blacks were burgeoning. Rather than decline, the mendicant orders expanded rapidly to serve these growing cities. In fact, they continued to grow in fits and starts until the 1730s in terms of monasteries and membership. Furthermore, this growth occurred in part because urban work attracted orders — particularly the Carmelites, Mercedarians, and discalced Franciscans — that had not participated in the earlier missionary endeavors.

The author also balances the traditional narrative of acrimony between the mendicants and an expanding secular clergy. True, bishops emboldened by the Council of Trent’s elevation of episcopal authority sought to curtail and regulate mendicant doctrinas, and this caused long-running disputes. But the orders and secular clergy generally enjoyed amicable relations in the cities because urban friars provided spiritual services such as preaching, confessing, praying, and celebrating masses for the dead that the limited number of secular clergy simply could not fulfill. Offering these services, Melvin points out, became the orders’ main work by the seventeenth century. In essence, the Mexican mendicants moved away from their unusual sixteenth-century missionary work to return to their traditional, late-medieval European activities. The urban Mexican faithful responded positively to this shift in obligations, rewarding the orders with alms and requests for the foundation of new mendicant houses.

Last, Melvin confronts the storyline of mendicant crisis by the late eighteenth century as the Bourbon monarchy stripped the orders of their doctrines and enforced reductions in professions. She grants that most mendicant orders, with the exception of the Carmelites, shrank in membership from their early eighteenth-century heights, but demonstrates that this drop did not decimate the orders. Instead, they continued to provide a broad range of spiritual services to the urban population. Furthermore, they initiated new services favored by the monarchy, especially founding primary schools for the urban poor and, in the case of the Franciscans, engaging in urban missions to reinvigorate piety and correct moral lapses.

This fine monograph contains much more about the particularities of each mendicant order’s pious activities and identities, their relationships, and conflicts with each other, and their connections with the laity that cannot fit into a brief review. Historians interested in early modern religious orders or colonial Latin American religion will find this material valuable and this book in general a rewarding read.