""Charles Witschorik brings great skill, sensitivity, and a historian's keen sense of change over time to the issue of how preachers communicated their ideas about women and gender to their listeners. Working at the intersection of gender studies, religious studies, and colonial and 19th century Mexican history, Witschorik has produced an original, deeply researched, and compelling analysis of changing ecclesiastical discourse in a period of tremendous challenges."" --Margaret Chowning, University of California, Berkeley ""This book elegantly places the words of preachers at the heart of Mexico's social evolution from colony to nation state. . . . The mobilizing power of the sacred is brought home by dramatic references to female and male stereotypes that interacted and shifted adaptively over time, producing ultimately a feminized view of piety and the church itself. . . . He has thus simultaneously achieved a longue durée analysis of preaching in Mexico, and a richly informed explanation of some of its powerful tools to reach and transform the population under challenging circumstances."" --Brian Connaughton, Professor of History, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico City ""Charles Witschorik's analysis of the multifaceted forms in which gender was deployed in sermons in New Spain, from the Baroque period to the consolidation of independence, offers an incisive history of the Catholic Church struggle for political space in peoples' imaginaries. This is one of the very few studies of sermons, the vehicle used by priests on an everyday basis, to create a religious public sphere."" --Ivonne del Valle, Assistant Professor of Spanish, University of California, Berkeley