Theater of a Thousand Wonders

To the historian of spirituality and religious culture, peculiar challenges and opportunities are presented by the Hispanic New World of Central America between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Is the subject to be understood best as a chapter in the global exportation of the Catholic values of ancien régime Europe, or, the imperial presence notwithstanding, as a phase in the longue durée of a rich and ancient indigenous spiritual culture? William B. Taylor, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Berkeley, California, has undertaken of decades of study in this field, and this present book represents the culmination of extensive research. Neither a chronicler of imperial politics nor an ethnographer of indigenous cosmology, nor yet a historian of visuality, Taylor positions himself as a cultural historian deliberately situated somewhere between the approaches and the conclusions of others. As he announces on page 3: ‘I have no grand synthesis of competing views to propose’. At various points in this long book, the author pauses to reflect on the methodological and theoretical difficulties of its subject; but he remains wary of ideological interpretations and inclines towards an empirical approach to his material. As he acknowledges, the subject of early modern Mexican religion has appeared quite differently in the light of diverse methodologies, and much hangs on the initial premisses of the researcher. Taylor’s sensitivity to the dangers of imposing anachronistic preconceptions is the principal reason why this book, so rich in primary research, is so cautious in what it offers by way of interpretation or theoretical conclusions

Anachronism · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Historiography · Ideology · Indigenous · Literature · Political science · Politics · Premise · Subject (documents · Classics · History · Latin American history and culture · Law · Philosophy