Nahua and Maya Catholicisms

This book examines ecclesiastical texts written in Nahuatl and Yucatec Maya to illustrate their role in conveying and reflecting various Catholic messages—and thus Catholicisms—throughout colonial Central Mexico and Yucatan. It demonstrates how published and unpublished sermons, confessional manuals, catechisms, and other religious texts betray “official” and “unofficial” versions of Catholicism, and how these versions changed throughout the colonial period according to indigenous culture, local situations, and broader early modern events. The book’s study of these texts also allows for a better appreciation of the negotiations that occurred during the evangelization process between native and Spanish cultures, the center and periphery, and between official expectations and everyday realities. In many cases, these negotiations ensured that the religious instruction prescribed for and experienced by one differed from that of the other. Whereas many studies on colonial religion have focused solely on the Nahuas and their texts, this book employs both Nahuatl and Maya religious texts. This allows for a unique comparative study that expands beyond Central Mexico to include Yucatan. Such a comparison allows this book to illustrate important subregional and regional similarities and differences between the evangelization efforts made among the Nahua and Maya, and to expand beyond a monolithic understanding of colonial Catholicism to better visualize the diversity that religious texts both created and reflected.