Pastoral Quechua narrates the process by which the Catholic Church in colonial Peru ‘incarnated’ Christianity in the Andean language, Quechua. Building upon the important insights of linguistic anthropologist Bruce Mannheim, Durston demonstrates how bishops codified and spread an official, standardised form of Quechua through their pastoral catechetical and devotional literature. The first half of the book examines the history of how Quechua ecclesiastical literature developed. Although in many ways admirable, this portion of the work would have been strengthened by a closer attention to the juridical and legal underpinnings of the debates about the most appropriate language for evangelisation. The seventeenth-century jurist Juan de Solorzano Pereyra, for example, analysed the varying legal decrees concerning language and evangelisation in the Andes in the light of classical and patristic sources, as well as comparisons to the situation of the Moors in Spain; a consideration of his thought and of the legal decrees on this issue would have been helpful. The second half of Pastoral Quechua focuses on the Quechua evangelical texts themselves; it is here that Durston's work is at its most persuasive. This section includes a survey of the extant pastoral Quechua literature; an analysis of the grammar, dialectology and Christian terminology employed in these texts; a study of the use of Andean religious categories and symbols to create a Christian-Andean iconography; and finally a summary of how catechesis and liturgy were organised in Indian parishes throughout the Andes. The author meticulously traces the colonial practices behind the translation of works like the catechism of the Third Lima Council or the Quechua hymns of Pérez Bocanegra, revealing how Spanish missionaries frequently employed Quechua poetical devices such as parallelism in their Christian texts, while hegemonically establishing the form of Quechua that would be spoken in the Andes. In this careful study of Quechua pastoral texts Durston's research is fundamental, opening up new ways of understanding how decisions about translation affected the growth and development of Christianity in South America. Pastoral Quechua is a ‘must-read’ for all scholars of the colonial Andes.