As is nicely put in the introduction to this book, “The pictorial catechisms of Mexico are, in a way, like comets in the sky. Although their sightings are few and far between, each of them has left behind a long trail of descriptions, interpretations, and decipherment attempts” (p. 1). However, even though this description suits well certain items of the corpus—a corpus containing 36 manuscripts, among which only 25 have actually been used in the teaching of the Christian doctrine—it can hardly be said to do so when applied to the manuscript to which this collective book is devoted.

The Catechism of Atzaqualco has interested the scientific community on both sides of the Atlantic only for the past ten years (Gaillemin, in Los códices Mesoamericanos. Registros de religión, política y sociedad). Such a centuries-long oversight is astonishing because this is an original manuscript, preserved at the National Library of France, Paris, and because of the captivating nature of its history. It is representative of the corpus, its semiotics possess great originality (“The Atzaqualco manuscript is the only extant pictorial manuscript that has this degree of graphic detail,” p. 65), and the relative indications about its use (or uses) favor the most unprecedented hypotheses and historical proposals.

In order to tackle this enigmatic manuscript, it was necessary for specialists in different disciplines (history, art history, paleography, and linguistics in particular) to come together and set forth an account that simultaneously displays the document in an objective manner and in a way that leaves some room to suggest reasonable arguments accessible to nonspecialist readers. Fait accompli. This beautiful book introduces the reader in a step-by-step manner to the world of Mexican pictorial catechisms — small notebooks that transcribe pictorially the prayers and the main Catholic texts whose knowledge by heart was imposed on catechumens throughout the colonial period.

The book is divided into seven chapters. The first four deal with the manuscript's presentation, its place in the corpus, its iconography, and its semiotics. This presentation is undoubtedly the most complete carried out to this day, and the precious table on pp. 22–29 updates the census previously carried out by J. Glass in 1975 (Handbook of Middle American Indians, vol. 14), supplements it with the findings of A. Whited Normann's 1985 doctoral study (Testerian Codices: Hieroglyphic Catechisms for Native Conversion in New Spain), and enriches it with more recent information. Several proposals, based on iconographic and historical clues correlated with an accurate analysis of the content (see Burkhart, Hispanic American Historical Review, 2014), suggest that the manuscript was produced in the first half of the seventeenth century. This date calls into question many presuppositions that remain somewhat popular to this day about a corpus that is often erroneously dated (archaized) and described as “Testérien,” a portrayal that most researchers nevertheless agree to reject.

The next two chapters, chapters 5 and 6, deal in some detail with the singularity of this copy, whose pages have been annotated and completed, but also address fragments of documents relating to other themes, subsequent to the time of its original elaboration. These proposals, which have benefited from the study of other documents (such as Xóchitl Medina González's study of Ms. 40, also preserved in Paris), make it possible to relate several sources and elicit an original contextualization. It is likely that many of these additions were made by different authors and that they “were added in order to highlight an elevated political status of the descendants of the Aztec kings, and notably don Pedro Moteuczoma” (p. 93). As explained by Boone and Tavárez, these annotations were purported to support claims of descent and to expand the scope of the catechism after its creation. They were probably made by Moctezuma's grandson Don Diego Luis, who is apparently depicted on a piece of paper associated with the catechism, and who was ‘alcalde’ of Atzaqualco, a neighborhood mentioned in a Latin script at the heart of the manuscript.

These innovative proposals are supplemented in chapter 7, which includes a scrupulous and pictogram-to-pictogram deciphering performed by Burkhart. The book also provides an unprecedented facsimile reproduction of the document (p. 255–323).

The general approach is also different from the usual one, because the propounded readings of the pictograms correspond to those found in Latin characters in the Doctrinas that circulated around this time: “The key to the catechism's content lays not in its ideography but in its relation to Nahuatl.” As far as I can see, this method, which draws from a similar monograph devoted to the pictorial catechism attributed to Pedro de Gante written in 1987 by J. Cortés Castellanos (El catecismo en pictogramas de fr. Pedro de Gante), is presently the most commendable one.

It is also important to highlight the great value of the hypotheses concerning the meaning of different signs that have the value of affixes, as well as the interesting proposal of considering possibly multivalent signs, rather than having them locked in tight categories: “In many cases, it is difficult to differentiate between signs functioning ideographically and those functioning glottographically, as they can do both or include elements functioning in the two ways” (p. 19). In a similar way, the authors brilliantly illustrate the recurring difficulty of having to choose between continuity and archaic revivals as regards the iconography and the form and the structure of the manuscript.

Even more remarkable is the fact that the authors emphasize the novelty of such a way of learning. As Burkhart explains, it is undeniable that the Nahuas had mnemonic arts and that they performed various oral performances of a ritual character but catechisms, which the author compares to “verbal tributes,” were indeed something completely new, because of their form, their enumerations in the form of counted lists, and their mode of oral restitution that allowed no possible modifications (“by heart”): “The idea that one could fulfill one's obligations to the sacred by an intriguing ritual round by memorizing and reciting a small set of texts was a colonial intrusion - and, from an indigenous perspective, quite an odd idea” (p. 67). This explains why the semiotics of these writings is without any precedent and why it differs in many ways from the semiotics used in the precolumbian era.

In the future, nevertheless, I think the scientific community would greatly benefit from a multimedia edition of pictorial catechisms, and so would the readers, who could thereby alleviate the trouble of going back and forth between references to pictographs and a facsimile. To the extent that it focuses on a single manuscript and places it at the heart of a whole corpus, this book is now an indispensable reference, and despite all the difficulties raised by the complexity of an enigma which has not yet revealed all its secrets and by the variety of the “pictographers,” “annotators,” and “writers” who worked on the document, I am sure this book will satisfy the curiosity of specialists in many areas.

The history of this booklet, which revolves around the demands for a new jurisdiction in the colonial era, will indeed be a source of great interest for the scholars of evangelization, as well as for historians of writing and of catechisms (manuscripts and printed material, in Europe or in the New World), and for the experts in the history of the Moctezuma family and its heirs.