Tráfico de saberes. Agencia femenina, hechicería e Inquisición en Cartagena de Indias (1610–1614)

Abstract

Mayan ideas about the materialization of the divine creates an altogether new spiritual entity that cannot be dismissed as a simple ‘replacement’ of older pre-Columbian icons (the ‘Replacement model’, 7). Rather, it is a protean fusion of two separate traditions of spirituality that prompts the question of whether Christianity remade Maya spirituality or vice versa. The most significant contribution of Idolizing Mary (the title itself a pun on the Spanish obsession with eradicating icons of pre-Columbian spirituality called ídolos) is not in providing us with a splendid object biography of a religious icon but in the fact that Solari moved heaven and earth to track down relevant Yucatec Mayan materials in order to provide an Indigenous perspective on holy matters and particularly on the Virgin of Itzmal. Citing sources as divergent as the books of Chilam Balam to last testaments and wills from small Maya towns in which the inheritance of domestic icons of the Virgin is documented, Solari demonstrates that the pathway to bringing clarity to the transformation of Roman Catholicism into Yucatec Catholicism runs through Mayan-language sources and down the tap root of deep Maya history.