La Conquistadora

Book excerpt: While most books about Mary emphasize her role as the compassionate mother of God, this book uncovers her significant role as an active and often belligerent patron of warfare, as seen from the mosques and castles of medieval Iberia to the cities and shrines of colonial Mexico and finally to present-day New Mexico. Amy Remensnyder explores Mary's prominence on and off the battlefield in the culturally and ethnically diverse world of medieval Iberia, where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived side by side, and in colonial Mexico, where Spaniards and indigenous peoples mingled. As this array of peoples turned to her to articulate their identities, Mary was drawn into both hostile and peaceful cross-cultural encounters. Although Mary became an icon of the Christian conquest of Muslims, medieval Muslims and Christians shared her, sometimes even joining together in rituals of worship in her churches. In the New World, some indigenous peoples of the Americas appropriated from the Spanish the idea of Mary as Conquistadora, using it to reinforce the identity they fashioned for themselves as native conquistadors. Offering a ground-breaking look at the Virgin Mary, La Conquistadora connects medieval and early modern understandings of this iconic figure to reveal her enduring legacy.