Description
Book SynopsisInvestigates the origins of Maya veneration of the Virgin Mary and the processes of religious transformation during the first two hundred years of Spanish colonization in Yucatán.
Trade Review“A fascinating analysis of the Virgen de Itzmal that uses skills and methodologies from a wide variety of disciplines. Solari’s art-historical methodology is sound and augmented through the use of ethnohistorical analysis, religious studies, and other complementary approaches. Her use of native-language sources places this study among a limited number of others grounded in ethnohistorical principles. This book demonstrates that the image of the Virgin of Itzmal is not a Pre-Columbian goddess in new clothes with a new name but rather represents a new deity that manifests all of the complexity of the colonial environment, as native peoples grappled with the cultural onslaught of Spanish missionary activity.”
—John F. Schwaller,author of The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America
“In this highly readable book, Solari sets the Virgin Mary within the firmament of the Maya sacred cosmos. As epidemics ravaged the peoples of colonial Yucatan, statues of Mary came forward to absorb evil afflictions. Mary borrowed this capacity, as Solari makes clear, from the very Maya deity images that were dismissed as ‘idols’ by Catholic evangelizers. Offering a Maya ideology of images, Solari’s book adds to the growing decolonizing project of current art histories.”
—Barbara E. Mundy,author of The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City
“Solari’s interdisciplinary approach and broad base of source material—from camarín artwork to Maya historical records and court cases—is commendable in balancing the dominant Spanish perspective of the period.”
—Alaina Keller Religious Studies Review
