Nahuatl In The Middle Years

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

Barry D. Sell and Louise M. Burkhart have chosen plays that represent the types of dramas performed in late-colonial Aztec communities and underscore the differences between local religion and church doctrine. Included are a complex epiphany drama from Metepec, two morality plays, two Passion plays, and three history plays that show how Nahuas dramatized Christian legends to reinterpret the Spanish Conquest. Fruits of a performance tradition rooted in sixteenth-century collaborations between Franciscan friars and Nahua students, these plays demonstrate how vigorously Nahuas maintained their traditions of community theater, passing scripts from one town to another and preserving them over many generations. The editors provide new insights into Nahua conceptions of Christianity and of society, gender, and morality in the late colonial period. Their precise transcriptions and first-time English translations make this, along with the previous volumes, an indispensable resource for Mesoamerican scholars.

The dictionary expands on the original idea of Karttunen and Lockhart to map the usage of loans in Nahuatl, by using a much larger and diversified corpus of sources, and by including contextual use, missing in earlier studies. Most importantly, these sources enrich the colonial corpus with modern data – significantly expanding on our knowledge on language continuity and change.

This book, based on many years of teaching the natural language, is a set of lessons that can be understood by students working alone or used in organized classes and contains an abundance of examples that serve as exercises.

A Stanford University Press classic.

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