The first study of Christian murals created by indigenous artists in sixteenth and seventeenth century Yucatán. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Maya artists painted murals in churches and conventos of Yucatán using traditional techniques to depict iconography brought from Europe by Franciscan friars. The fragmentary visual remains and their placement within religious structures embed Maya conceptions of sacredness beyond the didactic imagery. Mobilizing both cutting-edge technology and tried-and-true analytical methods, art historians Amara Solari and Linda K. Williams reexamine the Maya Christian murals, centering the agency of the people who created them. The first volume to comprehensively document the paintings, Maya Christian Murals of Early Modern Yucatán collects new research on the material composition of the works, made possible by cutting-edge imaging methods. Solari and Williams investigate pigments and other material resources, as well as the artists and historical contexts of the murals. The authors uncover numerous local innovations in form and content, including images celebrating New World saints, celestial timekeeping, and ritual processions. Solari and Williams argue that these murals were not simply vehicles of coercion, but of cultural “grafting,” that allowed Maya artists to shape a distinctive and polyvocal legacy in their communities.

"This multidisciplinary project studies religious murals that were painted by Christianized Maya artists in the first centuries after the conquest of Mexico. Solari and Williams study the paintings, all of which are based in the Yucatán Peninsula, from an art history perspective, along with the printed sources referencing the murals. At the same time, they examine the chemical signatures left by the murals' pigments and the techniques used in their production through state-of-the-art imaging technologies. By using these methodologies, the authors seek to explain the many ways in which cultural and material exchange took place between the Spanish and Maya peoples. At first glance, murals depicting Spanish ideals of Western Christianity would appear to be an obvious and frequent tool of oppression in the Yucatán, as they were elsewhere in the Americas, but they were also a form of agency for Indigenous people as a means to shape these narratives with their own subtle imagery and ideas drawn from Mayan cosmologies and cultural traditions. These painters used European pictorial techniques, such as perspective, while also using local materials to create vivid pigments and colors never before seen in murals in Europe. The authors seek to trace how the initial and continued use of these material sources to create these images led to a much more localized form of Catholicism that continues to be practiced by Mayan speakers today"--

This important and overdue book examines illuminated manuscripts and other book arts of the Global Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books—like today’s museums—preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures, and everyone’s place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity. Toward a Global Middle Ages is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume’s multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives, and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas—an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages. Featuring more than 160 color illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.

Transforming Saints explores the transformation and function of the images of holy women within wider religious, social, and political contexts of Old Spain and New Spain from the Spanish conquest to Mexican independence. The chapters here examine the rise of the cults of the lactating Madonna, St. Anne, St. Librada, St. Mary Magdalene, and the Suffering Virgin. Concerned with holy figures presented as feminine archetypes—images that came under Inquisition scrutiny—as well as with cults suspected of concealing Indigenous influences, Charlene Villaseñor Black argues that these images would come to reflect the empowerment and agency of women in viceregal Mexico. Her close analysis of the imagery additionally demonstrates artists' innovative responses to Inquisition censorship and the new artistic demands occasioned by conversion. The concerns that motivated the twenty-first century protests against Chicana artists Yolanda López in 2001 and Alma López in 2003 have a long history in the Hispanic world, in the form of anxieties about the humanization of sacred female bodies and fears of Indigenous influences infiltrating Catholicism. In this context Black also examines a number of important artists in depth, including El Greco, Murillo, Jusepe de Ribera, Pedro de Mena, Baltasar de Echave Ibía, Juan Correa, Cristóbal de Villalpando, and Miguel Cabrera.

Describes geography and natural history of the peninsula, gives brief history of Mayan life, discusses Spanish conquest, and provides a long summary of Maya civilization. 4 maps, and over 120 illustrations.

Based on her analysis of archaeological evidence from the excavations of Maya churches at Tipu and Lamanai, Elizabeth Graham seeks to understand why the Maya sometimes actively embraced Catholicism during the period of European conquest and continued to worship in this way even after the end of Spanish occupation. The Maya in Belize appear to have continued to bury their dead in Christian churchyards long after the churches themselves had fallen into disuse. They also seem to have hidden pre-Hispanic objects of worship in Christian sacred spaces during times of persecution, and excavations reveal the style of the early churches to be unmistakably Franciscan. The evidence suggests that the Maya remained Christian after 1700, when Spaniards were no longer in control, which challenges the widespread assumption that because Christianity was imposed by force it was never properly assimilated by indigenous peoples. Combining historical and archaeological data with her experience of having been raised as a Roman Catholic, Graham proposes a way of assessing the concept of religious experience and processes of conversion that takes into account the material, visual, sensual, and even olfactory manifestations of the sacred.