Religion in Sixteenth-Century Mexico: A Guide to Aztec and Catholic Beliefs and Practices

Abstract

Cheryl Claassen and Laura Ammon have produced a wonderful encyclopedia with an introductory study about religion in New Spain during the first century of colonization. The work is accessible, divided into 118 alphabetically organized entries that are each broken into sections for fifteenth-century Mexico, fifteenth-century Spain, and sixteenth-century Mexico. The topics chosen include the more obvious (such as human sacrifice and omens), but some of the most exciting entries discuss less predictable themes (such as the color blue or bees).Though many readers may want to immediately turn to the reference section, they would miss the skillful narrative summary of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as a thoughtful analysis of the historiography on religion in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Mexico and Spain. For instance, Claassen and Ammon are influenced by David Chidester's definition of religion as a sphere of “the transcendent, the sacred, the ultimate,” through which humans attempt to understand “what it means to be human” (p. 1). Their study of the Aztecs was greatly influenced by Davíd Carrasco's work on religiosity and ceremonial life, which focuses on the activities and institutions meant to constantly reinforce the Indigenous people's relationship with what they considered sacred (p. 2). For the study of the Spanish, they rely on Walter Mignolo's work on how scholarship has generally viewed early modern Catholicism as obscure and cultlike, producing primarily negative portrayals of the church, and Stafford Poole's work on Spain's unique situation as a site of convivencia where religious worldviews coexisted as a complex network of relationships (p. 3). Finally, Claassen and Ammon are influenced by how Poole's and Mignolo's work on the Catholic Church in Spain shows how there was a strong basis of flexibility in the Catholic Church that ultimately allowed for a new mestizo/Creole religiosity in sixteenth-century Mexico. Claassen and Ammon rely on Gruzinski's work on mestizo/Creole religiosity to understand much of this process while also acknowledging that it is not the authors' responsibility to judge what is “a valid expression of Christianity” and what is not (p. 5). The rest of the introduction is a brief but well-written and informative summary of the history of religion and religious institutions in both Mesoamerica and Spain and how they began to intertwine during the first century of Spanish colonialism.Claassen and Ammon's most valuable contribution is the alphabetically organized section on key terms, which comprises the majority of the work. This resource is useful to both students and scholars due to its organization as a reference work. This is not only useful for the unfamiliar but especially important for how we understand Catholicism, which has changed and adapted a number of traditions over the last 500 years. The book will be very useful for teachers to direct their students to, since one of the more challenging issues in teaching twenty-first-century students is just how much has changed in the Catholic worldview and practices since the sixteenth century. In fact, continual change in how humans interact with nature plays an important role in why Claassen and Ammon wrote and organized the book as they did: “We believe that the keyword approach lays bare the creative blending of modern Catholicism in Mexico, a blending greatly facilitated by the shared organization of religious practice into cults. These cults are fading away in the 21st century as modern life is increasingly experienced in cities, away from nature, and in non-agricultural pursuits” (p. 64).However, there are a number of small issues with Religion in Sixteenth-Century Mexico that will require readers to cross-check the information made available. Sometimes the secondary sources that Claassen and Ammon rely on are themselves the subject of debate, and those debates do not always appear clearly in some of the entries. For instance, in the discussion of the precolonial Aztec concept of the soul, and specifically the term yolia, the authors accept that scholarship on the Aztec soul is established fact. However, recent scholarship challenges the basis of some of these long-accepted arguments. For instance, Justyna Olko and Julia Madajczak argue that yolia is actually a neologism created in the early colonial period and not a precolonial Indigenous belief as Claassen and Ammon present it. More clarity on some of the debates surrounding complicated and controversial ideas such as this would have been a welcome addition to this impressive work.Ultimately, this work is an extremely useful resource for scholars and students of Mexico during the colonial period and beyond. Both scholars and students will find themselves frequently looking at this work for reference as an accessible starting point in what is the complicated and controversial topic of religion in the first century of colonization in Mexico.