The Devil and the Saints in the Conquest of Mexico
Fernando Cervantes explores the conversion process from polytheistic human sacrifice to devotion to the Mother Church.
A recurring problem in the study of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica is that most of what we know about it we owe to the efforts of the early friars who, naturally, studied the subject with very particular aims in mind. As the great Franciscan ethnographer, Bernardino de Sahagún, put it, native cultures were to be studied as a doctor studies an ailment in order better to diagnose it and pre- scribe a remedy.
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