In 1970, the University of California published the second, revised edition of John Leddy Phelan's seminal study, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World. Since the publication of Phelan's first edition in 1956, most subsequent related historiography has upheld Phelan's implicit argument that a wave of millennial fervor swept the Franciscans of sixteenth-century New Spain. This thesis contends that millennialism was rather an intellectual movement of a small number of friar-historians including Toribio de Benavente 'Motolinia', (1482/91-1569), Geronimo de Mendieta, (1528-1604), Andres de Olmos (d. 1571) and Pedro Oroz (d. 1597). Through the rhetorical tool of a Joachite schema of divine history, the millennialist, most especially Mendieta, protested the policies of the Spanish crown which attacked the power and position of the Franciscan order in the second half of the sixteenth-century. In addition, millennialism was a technique which allowed the Franciscan historians to escape the confining methodologies of scholastic historiography. Finally, by tracing the development of millennial thought in the Franciscan order, this thesis clarifies many terms such as millennialism, Messianic, mystic and millenarianism that authors mistakenly employ interchangeably through most of the historiography / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_26278 |
| Date | January 1995 |
| Contributors | Fleming, Martin Van Buren, II (Author), Greenleaf, Richard E (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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