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Jaime Lara. Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2008. 372 pp.
Lara's book presents a visually engaging cultural history of how sixteenthcentury Christian liturgical and ritual practices were transported, translated, and reinvented by early Catholic missionaries and native collaborators in New Spain. Religious missionaries actively sought similarities between Christian and Aztec religious practices, to introduce the Christian doctrine through a crafty re-working of Aztec "root metaphors" "sun, heart, and blood" to Christ crucified (18). Focusing on the deployment of the human body (Christ's body) and Blood (both central to Christian and Aztec body-centered religions)- Lara explores how the Seven holy Sacraments of the Christian Church and liturgical processions were presented to the post-Conquest natives and the potential multivalent meanings these may have contained. Lara achieves this successfully by employing a rich variety of primary "texts": Aztec and Christian architecture and sculpture; Aztec codices; mural and feather paintings; religious theatre and processions; and liturgical texts.
The chapters in the book are arranged thematically and not chronologically as "Neither the friars' memoirs nor the later writings of Nahua-Christian historians offer us a single consistent view of sacramental practice. Much of what was attempted appears localized, spontaneous, and reactive to the moment or to the circumstance, guided more by the creativity of a particular individual . . . or group . . . ." (12). The Introduction presents the importance of the centrality of the human body and how corporeal metaphors can act...