Like Lara's City, temple, stage: eschatological and liturgical theatrics in New Spain (2004), this book does much to illuminate the character and consequences of Spain's Christian evangelisation in sixteenth-century Mexico. In his first book, Lara argued that evangelisation was achieved primarily by changes at the level of Mexican and Christian metaphors and symbols and that ‘enacted worship had a more profound impact on the emerging societies than political hegemony’ (p. 8). Here, in this second, complementary work, Lara pursues his thesis by exploring in greater depth the practice and performance of worship among Nahua peoples, and its interactions with late medieval Christianity. Mexican syncretism, he argues, was not new: in Europe Christianity was always a flexible, ‘translatable’ religion that readily adapted to recipient cultures and ‘Christianised’ their religious spaces, objects and rituals. Early sixteenth-century Franciscans were, moreover, already adepts in delivering their spiritual message via the visual and the theatrical, so that on arriving in Mexico they quickly responded to the need for pageantry among peoples for whom religious beliefs were performed rather than conceptualised. Catechetical theatre, liturgical processions, song and dance were all crucial to penetrating Nahua culture, while also allowing Mexicans to re-form their own beliefs within the new framework. Here, then, is a story familiar from recent histories which prefer to see osmosis rather than opposition between evangelising Christianity and paganism. Lara, like Gruzinski, Lockhart, Wood and others, underlines conversion as a two-way traffic, an interplay between Christianisation of the indigenous and indigenisation of the Christian. However, he adds a wealth of visual and textual details into the ways in which the friars engaged with native converts. Successive chapters provide fascinating discussions of the priests' presentation of, and natives' engagement with, Christian doctrine and practice. They focus on the delivery and reception of the sacraments, the translation from Spain of the feast of Corpus Christi, and the particular problem of explaining the Christian eucharist to peoples who saw flesh and blood as foods for the gods. The latter is of course familiar to students of Mexican evangelisation, but Lara brings fresh insights by reflecting on the complexities of the Christian ‘eating of god’, and the ways in which cults of holy blood and the crucified Christ in Counter-Reformation Europe could be imbricated with Nahua beliefs. The possibility that the cult of the Sacred Heart drew on Nahua beliefs about the centrality of the heart is a particularly sharp reminder of mutual exchange and the tendency for native ideas to be recycled rather than destroyed. This book is an important contribution to the study of Christian evangelisations, particularly in sixteenth-century Spanish America, and is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the formation of Mexican religious culture. Throughout the book, discussions are vastly enriched by many excellent, relevant reproductions of contemporary texts, buildings, liturgical artefacts and religious art.