Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, Clothing the New World Church: Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520–1820, University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana, 2021, 408 pages, hardback, ISBN 9780268108052, $50.00.

Maya Stanfield-Mazzi’s Clothing the New World Church: Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520-1820 highlights some of the essential building blocks of the social and material history in textile production and use within the context of the Church in Spanish America. Stanfield-Mazzi presents a starting point for her investigation by looking at the seventeenth-century painting Mass for the Dead and Souls in Purgatory from the Church of San Pablo de Cacha, Peru, and the various textile items that feature in it. Evident from this artwork, church textiles are defined not only as clothing that would be worn by members of the church or religious statuary, a common practice throughout the colonial era in Spanish America, but wall and furniture coverings, as well as altar frontals.