Download or read book Nahuatl Theater written by Barry D. Sell and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: European religious drama adapted for an Aztec audience

Download or read book Nahuatl Theater Death and life in colonial Nahua Mexico written by Barry D. Sell and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death and Life in Colonial Nahua Mexico presents seven dramas from the first truly American theater. Composed in Nahuatl during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most of these plays survive only in later copies. Five are morality plays. Presenting Christian views of moral reform, death, judgment, and punishment for sin, they reveal how these themes were adapted into Nahua culture. The other two plays dramatize biblical narratives: the stories of Abraham and Isaac and of the three wise men. In this volume, Barry D. Sell and Louise M. Burkhart offer faithful transcriptions of the Nahuatl as well as new English translations of these remarkable dramas. Accompanying the plays are four interpretive essays and a foreword that broaden our understanding of these rare works. This volume is the first in a four-volume set entitled Nahuatl Theater, edited by Barry D. Sell and Louise M. Burkhart

Download or read book Performing Conquest written by Patricia A. Ybarra and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unprecedented reading of Mexican history through the lens of performance

Download or read book Theaters of Conversion written by Samuel Y. Edgerton and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mexico's churches and conventos display a unique blend of European and native styles. Missionary Mendicant friars arrived in New Spain shortly after Cortes's conquest of the Aztec empire in 1521 and immediately related their own European architectural and visual arts styles to the tastes and expectations of native Indians. Right from the beginning the friars conceived of conventos as a special architectural theater in which to carry out their proselytizing. Over four hundred conventos were established in Mexico between 1526 and 1600, and more still in New Mexico in the century following, all built and decorated by native Indian artisans who became masters of European techniques and styles even as they added their own influence. The author argues that these magnificent sixteenth and seventeenth-century structures are as much part of the artistic patrimony of American Indians as their pre-Conquest temples, pyramids, and kivas. Mexican Indians, in fact, adapted European motifs to their own pictorial traditions and thus made a unique contribution to the worldwide spread of the Italian Renaissance. The author brings a wealth of knowledge of medieval and Renaissance European history, philosophy, theology, art, and architecture to bear on colonial Mexico at the same time as he focuses on indigenous contributions to the colonial enterprise. This ground-breaking study enriches our understanding of the colonial process and the reciprocal relationship between European friars and native artisans.

Download or read book Nahuatl Theater Our Lady of Guadalupe written by Barry D. Sell and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2006-12-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The foundation legend of the Mexican devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe is one of the most appealing and beloved of all religious stories. In this volume, editors Barry D. Sell, Louise M. Burkhart, and Stafford Poole present the only known colonial Nahuatl-language dramas based on the Virgin of Guadalupe story: the Dialogue of the Apparition of the Virgin Saint Mary of Guadalupe, an anonymous work from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, and The Mexican Portent, authored by creole priest Joseph Pérez de la Fuente in the early eighteenth century. The plays, never before published in English translation, are vital works in the history of the Guadalupe devotion, for they show how her story was presented to native people at a time when it was not universally known. Faithful transcriptions and translations of the plays are accompanied here by introductory essays by Poole and Burkhart and by three additional previously unpublished Guadalupan texts in Nahuatl. This volume is the second in a four-volume series titled Nahuatl Theater, edited by Sell and Burkhart.

Download or read book Staging Christ s Passion in Eighteenth Century Nahua Mexico written by Louise M. Burkhart and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2023-06-15 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Staging Christ’s Passion in Eighteenth-Century Nahua Mexico explores the Passion plays performed in Nahuatl (Aztec) by Indigenous Mexicans living under Spanish colonial occupation. Though sourced from European writings and devotional practices that emphasized the suffering of Christ and his mother, this Nahuatl theatrical tradition grounded the Passion story in the Indigenous corporate community. Passion plays had courted controversy in Europe since their twelfth-century origin, but in New Spain they faced Catholic authorities who questioned the spiritual and intellectual capacity of Indigenous people and, in the eighteenth century, sought to suppress these performances. Six surviving eighteenth-century scripts, variants of an original play possibly composed early in the seventeenth century, reveal how Nahuas passed along this model text while modifying it with new dialogue, characters, and stage techniques. Louise M. Burkhart explores the way Nahuas merged the Passion story with their language, cultural constructs, social norms, and religious practices while also responding to surveillance by Catholic churchmen. Analytical chapters trace significant themes through the six plays and key these to a composite play in English included in the volume. A cast with over fifty distinct roles acted out events extending from Palm Sunday to Christ’s death on the cross. One actor became a localized embodiment of Jesus through a process of investiture and mimesis that carried aspects of pre-Columbian materialized divinity into the later colonial period. The play told afar richer version of the Passion story than what later colonial Nahuas typically learned from their priests or catechists. And by assimilating Jesus to an Indigenous, or macehualli, identity, the players enacted a protest against colonial rule. The situation in eighteenth-century New Spain presents both a unique confrontation between Indigenous communities and Enlightenment era religious reformers and a new chapter in an age-old power game between popular practice and religious orthodoxy. By focusing on how Nahuas localized the universalizing narrative of Christ’s Passion, Staging Christ’s Passion in Eighteenth-Century Nahua Mexico offers an unusually in-depth view of religious life under colonial rule. Burkhart’s accompanying website also makes available transcriptions and translations of the six Nahuatl-language plays, four Spanish-language plays composed in response to the suppression of the Nahuatl practice, and related documentation, providing a valuable resource for anyone interested in consulting the original material. Comments restricted to single page plays composed in response to the suppression of the Nahuatl practice, and related documentation, providing a valuable resource for anyone interested in consulting the original material

Download or read book The Conquest All Over Again written by Susan Schroeder and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-23 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Spaniards typically portrayed the conquest and fall of Mexico Tenochtitlan as Armageddon, while native people in colonial Mesoamerica continued to write and paint their histories and lives often without any mention of the foreigners in their midst. This title addresses key aspects of indigenous perspectives of the conquest.

Download or read book Holy Wednesday written by Louise M. Burkhart and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Identified only in 1986, the Nahuatl Holy Week play is the earliest known dramatic script in any Native American language. In Holy Wednesday, Louise Burkhart presents side-by-side English translations of the Nahuatl play and its Spanish source. An accompanying commentary analyzes the differences between the two versions to reveal how the native author altered the Spanish text to fit his own aesthetic sensibility and the broader discursive universe of the Nahua church. A richly detailed introduction places both works and their creators within the cultural and political contexts of late sixteenth-century Mexico and Spain.

Download or read book Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque written by Evonne Levy and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-01-06 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of some two centuries following the conquests and consolidations of Spanish rule in the Americas during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries—the period designated as the Baroque—new cultural forms sprang from the cross-fertilization of Spanish, Amerindian, and African traditions. This dynamism of motion, relocation, and mutation changed things not only in Spanish America, but also in Spain, creating a transatlantic Hispanic world with new understandings of personhood, place, foodstuffs, music, animals, ownership, money and objects of value, beauty, human nature, divinity and the sacred, cultural proclivities—a whole lexikon of things in motion, variation, and relation to one another. Featuring the most creative thinking by the foremost scholars across a number of disciplines, the Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque is a uniquely wide-ranging and sustained exploration of the profound cultural transfers and transformations that define the transatlantic Spanish world in the Baroque era. Pairs of authors—one treating the peninsular Spanish kingdoms, the other those of the Americas—provocatively investigate over forty key concepts, ranging from material objects to metaphysical notions. Illuminating difference as much as complementarity, departure as much as continuity, the book captures a dynamic universe of meanings in the various midst of its own re-creations. The Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque joins leading work in a number of intersecting fields and will fire new research—it is the indispensible starting point for all serious scholars of the early modern Spanish world.

Download or read book Insignia of Rank in the Nahua World written by Justyna Olko and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2014-06-15 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This significant work reconstructs the repertory of insignia of rank and the contexts and symbolic meanings of their use, along with their original terminology, among the Nahuatl-speaking communities of Mesoamerica from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Attributes of rank carried profound symbolic meaning, encoding subtle messages about political and social status, ethnic and gender identity, regional origin, individual and community history, and claims to privilege. Olko engages with and builds upon extensive worldwide scholarship and skillfully illuminates this complex topic, creating a vital contribution to the fields of pre-Columbian and colonial Mexican studies. It is the first book to integrate pre- and post-contact perspectives, uniting concepts and epochs usually studied separately. A wealth of illustrations accompanies the contextual analysis and provides essential depth to this critical work. Insignia of Rank in the Nahua World substantially expands and elaborates on the themes of Olko's Turquoise Diadems and Staffs of Office, originally published in Poland and never released in North America.

Download or read book Angels Demons and the New World written by Fernando Cervantes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-07 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume depicts the intricate cultural, religious and intellectual kaleidoscope of interactions between angels, demons and the heterogeneous populations of Spanish America including New Spain (Mexico), New Granada (Colombia) and Peru. Essential reading for students of religion, anthropology of religion, history of ideas, Latin American colonial history and church history.

Download or read book Indigenous Intellectuals written by Gabriela Ramos and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-30 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Via military conquest, Catholic evangelization, and intercultural engagement and struggle, a vast array of knowledge circulated through the Spanish viceroyalties in Mexico and the Andes. This collection highlights the critical role that indigenous intellectuals played in this cultural ferment. Scholars of history, anthropology, literature, and art history reveal new facets of the colonial experience by emphasizing the wide range of indigenous individuals who used knowledge to subvert, undermine, critique, and sometimes enhance colonial power. Seeking to understand the political, social, and cultural impact of indigenous intellectuals, the contributors examine both ideological and practical forms of knowledge. Their understanding of "intellectual" encompasses the creators of written texts and visual representations, functionaries and bureaucrats who interacted with colonial agents and institutions, and organic intellectuals. Contributors. Elizabeth Hill Boone, Kathryn Burns, John Charles, Alan Durston, María Elena Martínez, Tristan Platt, Gabriela Ramos, Susan Schroeder, John F. Schwaller, Camilla Townsend, Eleanor Wake, Yanna Yannakakis

Download or read book The autos sacramentales of Sor Juana In s de la Cruz written by Alice Brooke and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-30 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695) was the most significant literary figure of the colonial period in Spanish America.The autos sacramentales, or Eucharistic plays are some of her least studied, and most perplexing works. While one of them, El divino Narciso, has received substantial scholarly attention, the other two, El cetro de José and El mártir del Sacramento, San Hermenegildo, have been critically neglected in Sor Juana studies. This study presents a full-length analysis of all three plays, along with their loas, or the introductory pieces alongside which they were intended to be performed. Furthermore, the study seeks to place these works in their philosophical and cultural context by exploring their engagement both with orthodox Catholic sacramental theology, and the emergence of empiricism and the New Philosophy across the Hispanic world. The three sections of this book each present significant new readings of the three plays. The study of El divino Narciso employs a previously little-known source to illuminate its Christological readings, as well as Sor Juana's engagement with notions of wit and conceptism. The analysis of El cetro de José explores her presentation of different approaches to perception to emphasise the importance of both the material and the transcendent to a holistic understanding of the Sacraments. The final section, on San Hermenegildo, explores the influence on the play of the Christianised Stoicism of Justus Lipsius, and demonstrates how Sor Juana used the work to attempt her most ambitious reconciliation of an empirical approach to natural philosophy and the material world with a Neostoic approach to Christian morality and orthodox Catholic sacramental theology.

Download or read book Aztec and Maya Apocalypses written by Mark Z. Christensen and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2022-07-14 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Second Coming of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the Final Judgment: the Apocalypse is central to Christianity and has evolved throughout Christianity’s long history. Thus, when ecclesiastics brought the Apocalypse to native audiences in the Americas, both groups adapted it further, reflecting new political and social circumstances. The religious texts in Aztec and Maya Apocalypses, many translated for the first time, provide an intriguing picture of this process—revealing the influence of European, Aztec, and Maya worldviews on portrayals of Doomsday by Spanish priests and Indigenous authors alike. The Apocalypse and Christian eschatology played an important role in the conversion of the Indigenous population and often appeared in the texts and sermons composed for their consumption. Through these writings from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century—priests’ “official” texts and Indigenous authors’ rendering of them—Mark Z. Christensen traces Maya and Nahua influences, both stylistic and substantive, while documenting how extensively Old World content and meaning were absorbed into Indigenous texts. Visions of world endings and beginnings were not new to the Indigenous cultures of America. Christensen shows how and why certain formulations, such as the Fifteen Signs of Doomsday, found receptive audiences among the Maya and the Aztec, with religious ramifications extending to the present day. These translated texts provide the opportunity to see firsthand the negotiations that ecclesiastics and natives engaged in when composing their eschatological treatises. With their insights into how various ecclesiastics, Nahuas, and Mayas preached, and even understood, Catholicism, they offer a uniquely detailed, deeply informed perspective on the process of forming colonial religion.

Download or read book The Woman Who Turned Into a Jaguar and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico written by Lisa Sousa and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-11 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an ambitious and wide-ranging social and cultural history of gender relations among indigenous peoples of New Spain, from the Spanish conquest through the first half of the eighteenth century. In this expansive account, Lisa Sousa focuses on four native groups in highland Mexico—the Nahua, Mixtec, Zapotec, and Mixe—and traces cross-cultural similarities and differences in the roles and status attributed to women in prehispanic and colonial Mesoamerica. Sousa intricately renders the full complexity of women's life experiences in the household and community, from the significance of their names, age, and social standing, to their identities, ethnicities, family, dress, work, roles, sexuality, acts of resistance, and relationships with men and other women. Drawing on a rich collection of archival, textual, and pictorial sources, she traces the shifts in women's economic, political, and social standing to evaluate the influence of Spanish ideologies on native attitudes and practices around sex and gender in the first several generations after contact. Though catastrophic depopulation, economic pressures, and the imposition of Christianity slowly eroded indigenous women's status following the Spanish conquest, Sousa argues that gender relations nevertheless remained more complementary than patriarchal, with women maintaining a unique position across the first two centuries of colonial rule.

Download or read book Translated Christianities written by Mark Z. Christensen and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-06-10 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in the sixteenth century, ecclesiastics and others created religious texts written in the native languages of the Nahua and Yucatec Maya. These texts played an important role in the evangelization of central Mexico and Yucatan. Translated Christianities is the first book to provide readers with English translations of a variety of Nahuatl and Maya religious texts. It pulls Nahuatl and Maya sermons, catechisms, and confessional manuals out of relative obscurity and presents them to the reader in a way that illustrates similarities, differences, and trends in religious text production throughout the colonial period. The texts included in this work are diverse. Their authors range from Spanish ecclesiastics to native assistants, from Catholics to Methodists, and from sixteenth-century Nahuas to nineteenth-century Maya. Although translated from its native language into English, each text illustrates the impact of European and native cultures on its content. Medieval tales popular in Europe are transformed to accommodate a New World native audience, biblical figures assume native identities, and texts admonishing Christian behavior are tailored to meet the demands of a colonial native population. Moreover, the book provides the first translation and analysis of a Methodist catechism written in Yucatec Maya to convert the Maya of Belize and Yucatan. Ultimately, readers are offered an uncommon opportunity to read for themselves the translated Christianities that Nahuatl and Maya texts contained.

Download or read book Words and Worlds Turned Around written by David Tavárez and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2017-12-14 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sophisticated, state-of-the-art study of the remaking of Christianity by indigenous societies, Words and Worlds Turned Around reveals the manifold transformations of Christian discourses in the colonial Americas. The book surveys how Christian messages were rendered in indigenous languages; explores what was added, transformed, or glossed over; and ends with an epilogue about contemporary Nahuatl Christianities. In eleven case studies drawn from eight Amerindian languages—Nahuatl, Northern and Valley Zapotec, Quechua, Yucatec Maya, K'iche' Maya, Q'eqchi' Maya, and Tupi—the authors address Christian texts and traditions that were repeatedly changed through translation—a process of “turning around” as conveyed in Classical Nahuatl. Through an examination of how Christian terms and practices were made, remade, and negotiated by both missionaries and native authors and audiences, the volume shows the conversion of indigenous peoples as an ongoing process influenced by what native societies sought, understood, or accepted. The volume features a rapprochement of methodologies and assumptions employed in history, anthropology, and religion and combines the acuity of of methodologies drawn from philology and historical linguistics with the contextualizing force of the ethnohistory and social history of Spanish and Portuguese America. Contributors: Claudia Brosseder, Louise M. Burkhart, Mark Christensen, John F. Chuchiak IV, Abelardo de la Cruz, Gregory Haimovich, Kittiya Lee, Ben Leeming, Julia Madajczak, Justyna Olko, Frauke Sachse, Garry Sparks