Testaments of Toluca is the first of its kind. The book is a critical edition of 98 Nahuatl-language wills in English translation from the Valley of Toluca, a region due west of Mexico City. The exegesis of the content of the testaments reveals surely as much as can be known about the individual testators and their lives. But just as important, Testaments of Toluca furnishes a meticulous analysis of the Nahuatl spoken by the dying that local notaries set down for posterity. The wills are from two principal zones in the valley, Toluca and Calimaya/Tepemaxalco, and span the years 1650 to 1789, although most are from the 1730s and the 1750s/1760s.

In terms of genre, there are more wills in Nahuatl than in any other native language. A collection of some 60 wills from sixteenth-century Culhuacán has already been studied. And still to be examined are three additional, yet quite distinct, caches from Huexotzinco, San Juan Tenochtitlán/Santiago Tlatelolco, and Tlaxcala. But no corpus is as abundant and promising as that from Toluca, for Pizzigoni has another hundred or so from adjacent areas that remain to be translated and analysed. Furthermore, another group of wills has recently been identified that, remarkably, take us a generation or two past independence, the point when it was believed that all Nahuatl writing stopped.

For social historians the Toluca testaments are telling of personal spirituality and commitment to the Catholic Church, of concern for providing for one's loved ones, of information about the socio-political structures of the Toluca Valley region, of individual economic circumstances, and of patterns of class differentiation in each Nahua community. Toluca was known for its maize and pulque production. Hence, testators concerned themselves with bequests of their homes, farm plots, and oxen or an occasional cow, and there is abundant Nahuatl terminology specific to the types of land and houses. Magueys too were valued, surely for their pulque yields and probably also as a source of fibre for certain textiles. Each individual's properties were seldom contiguous, but rather widely scattered and of various numbers and sizes.

The other major preoccupation of testators was the bequeathing of favourite saints to preferred heirs. The images came in a variety of forms, and not infrequently land might accompany the saint so that the heirs could service it properly. Indeed, in most instances, the number and size of the saints possessed by the testator had a direct correlation with the individual's wealth and status. Many such bequests were idiosyncratic of the locale or the time, but all furnish new insights into Nahua spiritual life.

Cash, when there was any, paid for candles, cantors, donations to cofradías and Holy Jerusalem, food and drink, graves, masses, the repayment of debts, responsory prayers, the ringing of church bells, and vigils. Cofradías, on occasion, were expected to make the arrangements for and cover the cost of the funeral, but there is little other information about their activities.

Both men and women made wills in Toluca, although the latter were somewhat less represented. Pizzigoni finds evidence of female networking and solidarity, but on the same criteria the same could certainly be said for the men. In most cases, but not always, the eldest son seems to have been the preferred heir. Wives inherited from husbands too, and most were expected to take care of the couple's children. The age of the testators is not easily determined, but in general the number of very young children left behind is significant and in many instances speaks to truncated longevity. Or perhaps this tendency can be attributed to two periods of epidemics that were coincidental with the two major clusters of Toluca deaths and wills in this collection.

Naming patterns were revealing of social standing, although none was exceptional. In general, lower-ranking testators, typically those with the fewest assets, had two Spanish first names, while the wealthy and influential Nahua Tolucans used the don and had an impressive-sounding Spanish surname. Individuals in the latter group often held a government- or church-related office as well. Very few women used doña, and they were related to high officials. One family, the de la Cruzes, seemed to be particularly powerful, wealthy and widespread. One scion, Don Juan de la Cruz of San Pablo Tepemaxalco, who married Doña Josefa Francisca, the daughter of the governor of the same town, amassed a fortune and provided abundantly for their many children, even arranging their marriages and making certain that each continued to be identified as a de la Cruz. Don Juan's testament is one of the earliest (1691) in the corpus, and there were subsequently many other prominent de la Cruzes in and around Toluca who may have been related.

Another treasure gleaned from this collection is the information about the Toluca notaries themselves. Typically a rather obscure group of professionals in Nahua society, we seldom know more about them than their names and signatures at the end of the will. In Toluca, however, some notaries have influence and flair. Sixty one notaries are represented in this corpus, and, not surprisingly, a quarter of them have de la Cruz as a surname. Notaries were of course literate, and this seemed to furnish great opportunity for social mobility. They may have followed a template of sorts, perhaps dating back to the standard testament formulated by Fray Alonso de Molina (1569). But their wills also reflect local conventions and personal characteristics. While most notaries were often located near the bottom of Toluca's socio-political bureaucracy, some nevertheless did use don, or acquired it as they moved on and up to positions of alcalde or governor. Several are noteworthy, not only for their peculiar Nahuatl style but also for the number of high-ranking witnesses they were able to rally to sign off on a dying person's last words. Sebastián Fabián of San Lucas Evangelista Tepemaxalco, for one, usually brought along eight to ten of the town's top officials, of which two or three were de la Cruzes.

Pizzigoni furnishes an erudite introduction to the study of Toluca and the wills that informs us of the particularities of Nahuatl and the people who spoke and wrote it. One does wish for a map, however. She also includes an important introduction to each testament, elaborating on unique aspects of the contents of the will, the testator, the Nahuatl, and the notary, allowing abundant opportunities for comparison by region and across time. It can be concluded that there was a certain practicality to all of this testamentary activity, which thus affords the best of all possible information about Nahua life. We can only be grateful that Pizzigoni has taken on the task of translating and commenting on these hundreds of wills, which guarantees one of the most intensive and complete studies of Nahua life anywhere in colonial Mesoamerica.