To Love Honor And Obey In Colonial Mexico: Summary

Patricia Seed’s To Love, Honor and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574 – 1821 is a very insightful book that educates the reader on how the themes of love, honor and obedience change within Colonial Mexico from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth centuries. In her book, Seed highlights some major issues: the role of parents and their children in choosing marriage partners, reasons for marriage, issues of “honor”, and how the role of the church and state have changed over time. This book, “argues to the contrary, that the institutions of social control and cultural values of colonial Spanish society both alerted significantly during this period. Beginning in the seventeenth century, the Catholic Church suffered …show more content…
A main portion of this section of the book, showed how the father’s role impacted a couple’s marriage as during this time period, honor did not involve keeping their word but rather honor meant the status and social position one held in the community. It was not uncommon for people to marry solely to gain social status in this time period and daughters would listen to whom their fathers wanted them to marry, often resulting in a higher social status. The third and final section of the book focusses on the time period from 1779-1819. Seed attempts to analyze and explain the outcomes of the new system, royal bureaucracy, which was put in place for marriage selection. This new system awarded the new officials with the power to limit the individual couple’s freewill for who they wanted to marry and ultimately increased the parent’s role in deciding who their children should be wed to. During the time period of 1779-1819 in order to increase the power of state, limitations were also put on the church in an attempt to decrease the individual’s power of