John F. Schwaller

Cave, City, and Eagle's Nest: An Interpretive Journey through the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2 (review)

The Mapa de Cuauhtinehan is one of a number of sixteenth-century pictorial manuscripts to have become the focus of significant scholarly attention in recent years. Although the manuscript map has been known for many decades, in 2001 it was purchased by Angeles Espinosa Yglesias. He provided access to a team of scholars who developed the studies in this collection. This book is the result of numerous meetings in Mexico and the United States where the scholars studied the manuscript and then approached it from their several disciplinary backgrounds. It is a massive and richly illustrated work that provides a model for the collective study of important early colonial pictorial manuscripts.

Reminiscences of Mexico: A Conversation with Richard Greenleaf

Dr. Richard Greenleaf has been one of the most influential historians of colonial Latin America in general, and of the Inquisition in particular. He received his university and graduate education in his home state at the University of New Mexico. His professional career took him to Mexico City during the exciting period of the 1950s and 1960s. From there he went on to be one of the guiding forces in the consolidation of the Latin American Studies program at Tulane University. This interview was conducted in the summer of 2007 at Dr. Greenleafs residence in Albuquerque.

Representing Aztec Ritual: Performance, Text, and Image in the Work of Sahagun (review)

a nearly decade-long delay between the symposium and the publication of the papers presented, some of the contributions, for obvious reasons, lack the inclusion of current research. Because of the diversity of topics encapsulatedwithin this singlemonograph, Archaeology of Formative Ecuador is an important contribution to the literature. Not only is this diversity thought provoking but it also highlights the prehistory of a country that is often paid short shrift, especially in comparison to the literature dedicated to Peruvian prehistory. For those interested in South American archaeology, this is a valuable contribution. This volume is also available electronically from the publisher at www .doaks.org.

Wild Country Out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journals of a Colonial Mexican Nun, and: Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico (review)

themNewWorld and hoped to make some of it French rather than Spanish or Portuguese. When Romans toured the southeast, he saw a world that Europeans knew much better than they had in the uf731uf735uf736uf730s, but the lands he toured were newly part of the British empire. As in Laudonnière’s account, colonial possession of these lands necessitated detailed knowledge of them. Thanks to the University of Alabama Press and the volumes’ editors, we have access to these explorers’ knowledge, to use for our twenty-first century interpretations.

Sahagun and the Transition to Modernity (review)

stood by the Maya not only to be usurpers of the body of Christ but also men who had falsely placed themselves in the structural position occupied earlier by Maya rulers (bygone mediators to the ancestors and gods). Because of this falseness, the priests were viewed as illegitimate—lacking parents and, therefore, devoid of true humanity. Throughout his text, Sigal fully recognizes and comments upon the cultural specificity of sexual and gender terminology and attempts to offset his use of modern theory/vocabulary by defining Maya sexual vocabulary and attitudes wherever possible. However, the same contemporary theoretical tools that he employs so successfully in illuminating Maya sexual desire create certain difficulties in comprehension because of opaque and sometimes inadequately explicated modern terminology. Further, the limitations of the documents under consideration seem to force a discussion of Maya sexual desire and fantasy that is primarily male-defined. As a result, the marriage between modern theory and colonial Maya studies can occasionally seem an uneasy one.This, along with some editorial problems, may make the text challenging for many readers. Nonetheless, given prior scholarship inMaya studies, Sigal’s handling of the topic is to be applauded for its frank discussion of the role that sexual desire plays in the construction of colonial identity and for creating a space for future inquiries along these same theoretical lines.

Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth Century Mexico by William B. Taylor (review)

Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth Century Mexico. By William B.Taylor. (Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1996. Pp. xv, 868.

The Expansion of Nahuatl as a Lingua Franca among Priests in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

75.00.) Massive is the word which springs to mind in considering William B.Taylors most recent contribution to colonial Latin American historiography. It is truly as comprehensive a work on the topic as one is likely to enjoy.The fruit of many years in the archives, it will stand as a cornerstone for future research on the eighteenth-century Mexican Church.This is the first major study of the Bourbon Church in Mexico, since Nancy Farriss wrote in 1968. At its most basic level Taylors work is a view of the Bourbon reforms in Mexico.This broad range of changes which occurred in the administrative structure of the Spanish overseas empire is seen through the prism of the clergy and their parishioners. It is a unique undertaking in which the scope and consequences of the changes are analyzed through one of the parts, rather than focusing on the part to draw conclusions about the whole.Taylor has chosen to analyze two different areas in an attempt to come to grips with issues of commonalty. He has focused on the large archdiocese of Mexico, which stretched from Tampico in the north to Acapulco in the south, measuring some 150 miles wide, and the diocese of Guadalajara, located in western Mexico, nearly reaching Saltillo in the north, and widening as it flowed to the southwest. Deep within Taylors work he seeks to understand four seeming paradoxes of late colonial Mexico (p. 4). How could the colonial system stand for nearly four centuries without a standing army, given that it was based on a relatively rigid social system with little upward mobility and much real inequality? Were parish priests of the late colonial world truly separate from the world and at the same time of the world? What then would lead some of these priests to fully back an insurgency which could bring about the loss of their own position of privilege? Last, how did anticlericalism develop in the region when the Church was not perceived as in decline?The seeking of answers to these questions provides the reader with a deep subtext which runs through the work. This book is divided into four large parts. The first part, consisting of three chapters, sets the stage for the study. It considers the nature of change under the Bourbon reforms, the physical geography of the two regions under consideration, and the nature of local religious traditions in the parishes.The second part takes the parish priests as its theme. In six chapters, Taylor studies the process whereby young men became priests in eighteenth-century Mexico. He looks at their career patterns, their sources of income, their outside occupations as judges and teachers, the aspects of their daily life and labors, and lastly their occasional failings. …