From 1522 to 1700 the Mexican Inquisition heard 735 cases of blasphemy and related offences. Before the creation of this tribunal in 1571, the denunciations were handled by ecclesiastical authorities or designated members of the Mendicant Orders acting as judges. In Dangerous Speech Javier Villa Flores examines a representative sample of these cases to offer a glimpse of the lives that came under the scrutiny of the Inquisition as a result of denunciations for this particular crime of the tongue. The book is about the social life of a serious religious offence and how individuals across races, gender and class put it into ‘use’.

The cases tried by the Mexican Inquisition confirmed that blasphemy was a man's affair, a feature acknowledged in religious literature of the time. Men were prone to blaspheme and, according to the author, they found in blasphemous speech a way to assert their masculinity either in their households or in the company of other men be it at work or at gambling houses. In this sense, to blaspheme was an act of self-presentation, or as the author prefers, ‘self-fashioning’ or gender ‘performance’. As Villa-Flores also shows in the last chapter, slave men (and a few slave women) engaged in blasphemy as a way to bring to the attention of authorities the brutal treatment they were receiving at the hands of their masters with the not always fulfilled hope of being reassigned.

The gallery of Mexican men and foreigners who faced charges for blasphemy comprised sailors, gamblers, public officials and soldiers; in many cases as the author reminds us, the negative perception of their trade or favourite pastime by secular and religious authorities rendered them automatically suspicious. But asserting masculinity came with a price tag; these men, as the author poses, were risk-takers and not only because of the very nature of their professions or compulsive habits. A good number of cases analysed involved men denounced by their own wives for blaspheming at home. As it turns out, the testimonies gathered during these particular trials revealed histories of domestic violence and abuse. Oddly, the author quickly dismisses as fabrications the allegations of abuse brought by the wives without asking why women would resort to denouncing their husbands. One possible reason could be that they did so as a means to bring domestic abuse into the open. Whatever the ultimate reason may be, these women were also risk-takers. What were the stakes for women denouncing their husbands? What were the alternatives available to them? The testimonies seem to indicate that the assertion of masculinity and domestic authority on the part of the husbands found expression in a direct attack on their wives' religious devotion (and network outside the household?), an aspect entirely absent from the author's interpretation. Which brings me to a significant shortcoming of this otherwise valuable book rich in archival sources yet somewhat hurried when it comes to analysis.

As presented by the author, individuals in colonial Mexico did not blaspheme as much as they did previously. The basis for such a distinction has become widely accepted and is of a piece with the notion of agency that informs similar works that focus on the responses of individuals (denouncers to the Inquisition included) and social groups to the disciplinary forces of church or state. Such a distinction should not pass unexamined and not only because an unqualified statement of the kind ‘X used blasphemy’ (quite common in the book) comes dangerously close to a petitio principii. Villa-Flores examines the social uses of blasphemy almost without reference to the religious domain to which blasphemy belonged and within which it was intelligible. For instance, when dealing with the cases of the wives who denounced their husbands, the author has detached blasphemy from its particular religious milieu, losing sight of the social dimension of religion in the process. A more careful analysis may have led the author to consider whether female Catholic devotion could have had under certain circumstances a potentially destabilising effect on the everyday dynamics of colonial households.

A similar problem surfaces in the final chapter on slave blasphemers in which we learn very little about the kind of Catholicism that took shape among groups of enslaved individuals from different backgrounds and experiences. Irrespective of their gender, class or race, the majority of the blasphemers that populate the pages of Dangerous Speech look remarkably alike in their religious make-up. Because of a somewhat programmatic approach to the sources, religion stands as a rigid set of precepts seemingly unaltered through time against the ever-changing world of the social. This becomes apparent in Villa-Flores' treatment of church teachings on blasphemy through history. Yet, as O. Christin pointed out sometime ago, the conceptualisation of the so-called sins of the tongue that emerged during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries differed in significant ways from sixteenth-century discussions on blaspheme.

Because of the fascinating archival material that the author has gathered, Dangerous Speech has much to offer to those interested in the study of colonial social history. Yet it also raises a question about whether it is possible to write a social history of a religious notion without engaging into a serious inquiry about Catholicism as lived and practiced in Mexican colonial society.