Louise M. Burkart's new book is actually two, equally impressive works; a study and transcription of six Nahuatl versions of the Passion, and an accompanying NEH-funded website: https://passionplaysofeighteenthcenturymexico.omeka.net/about-us. The website contains full paleographic transcriptions of the original Nahuatl plays, full Spanish and English translations, and several Nahuatl audio files.
The six scripts are referred to as: “Amacuitlapilco, Axochiapan, Penn (University of Pennsylvania), Princeton, Tlalauhquitepec, and Tepalcingo/Tulane.” San Simón de Tlatlauhquitepec is held in the Archivo de la Fiscalía in Mexico, while the Penn manuscript was acquired by an American surgeon in the nineteenth century (10). The Princeton version contains margin notes from Inquisition censors, a choirmaster, and a late eighteenth-century priest and ethnographer (12–13). The Amacuitlapilco, Axochiapan, and Tepalcingo scripts were all collected by the eighteenth-century Church in an effort to suppress them. The Amacuitlapilco script bears a Nahuatl annotation from 1732 and was collected and reviewed by Father Miguel de Torres in 1757. The Axochiapan version is held in the Biblioteca Nacional de Antroplogía e Historia in Mexico City (14–15).
Chapter 1, “Controversial Passions,” offers the important Spanish background of Passion play performance, drawn from Maya ethnographers, Spanish literary scholars, and Burkhart's own research. The Indigenous College of Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco became “the epicenter of Nahua-Christian scholarship,” and the narratives crafted there would translate into public performances (24).
In chapter 2, we see the relationship between script and stage, where the Gospels are adapted to include things like local fauna and the Nahua vigesimal counting system (71). Chapter 3 describes how in the Nahua Passion, Mary is “more authoritative” (87), indigenous women protect the altepetl from the “violent enactment” (91), and in general the scripts “retain or add woman-centered scenes” (119). In chapter 4, Burkhart analyses the Nahua last supper where Jesus instructs his disciples to “see this tortilla. It is my precious body.” In this chapter, Burkhart adds that maize, “a sacred living entity” was a poor choice to represent Christ's body in the Nahua context (131). It is Nahua scriptwriters, not the priests, that must do the heavy lifting of explaining transubstantiation, “provid[ing] listeners with three Nahuatl linguistic formulas” that made much more sense to the eighteenth-century indigenous audience (133).
Chapter 5 informs us how scriptwriters prepared mestizo and Nahua actors to portray violent events from a different place and time, without disrupting the precarious huehuehtlahotolli (“models of proper speech and sociality”) understood in eighteenth-century Mexico (146). The last section of the book is Burkhart's composite English translation of the scripts, including stage direction and Nahuatl terms.
Burkhart has been a leader in the field of Nahua studies and colonial Mexican history for decades, and this text draws upon vast linguistic, paleographic, archival, and historiographical expertise. Burkhart gives us a clear and engaging picture of eighteen-century Mexican Christianity that is not composed of a syncretic version of post-Reformation European religious ideas, but one uniquely Nahua.
The most difficult task in evaluating this work might actually be for the publisher, as it is hard to pin down a specific audience for a multimedia work of this breadth and depth. At times the text is very dense, and the work is not apt for a casual reader. Burkhart, for example, includes details of how an Axochiapan scriptwriter crosses out and rewrites a specific line of a specific page in a specific manuscript (135). However, this text is so rich in its source material and scholarship that it presents opportunities for multiple audiences. Novice readers might appreciate Burkhart's fluency with the Passion and the Gospel, while a contemporary Nahuatl speaker will appreciate the contextualization of the etymology. Others will enjoy the depth at which Burkhart dialogues with the activities of cofradías. Ultimately, however, junior scholars and graduate students will see the most benefit in this publication. This project truly represents “a rich deposit of colonial Nahua treasure” for scores of future scholars and thousands of contemporary Nahua (184).
