Although the Franciscans proudly boasted that in colonial Mexico's early decades they burned tens of thousands of native statues, religious bundles and books, perhaps the most dramatic bonfire of the period was the one that consumed don Carlos Ometochtli. Ometochtli was the native lord of Texcoco, the most important town in the Valley of Mexico after Tenochtitlán/Mexico City. On the orders of Fray Juan de Zumárraga, Mexico's first bishop, Ometochtli was tried and publicly executed in 1539 ‘for the crime of heretical dogmatism, or leading his subjects away from Christianity’ (p. 5). His burning has long been a well-known symbol of early colonial Spanish rule in Mexico, and of the darker side of the spiritual conquest. But it is not as widely studied as one might expect, and Patricia Lopes Don is here able to present the case in a new light.

Ometochtli's trial is the last of four Inquisition cases that are the core of Lopes Don's study. Although the time span of her book is 1524–40, and Zumárraga's term as bishop was from 1528 until his death 20 years later, Lopes Don's concern is overwhelmingly with 1536–40, the four peak years of Zumárraga's great Inquisition. She devotes a chapter each to four cases, all of which will be familiar to specialists in the field. The first two are the trials of Nahua priests, Martín Ocelotl and Andrés Mixcoatl, whose activities and ideas have been known to scholars since Serge Gruzinski's 1989 study, Man-Gods in the Mexican Highlands. The other two cases developed in parallel and were closely linked together, a relationship that Lopes Don identifies, although she does not emphasise it heavily. They are the trials of don Carlos Ometochtli and of Miguel Pochtecatl Tlaylotla, the latter accused of hiding from the Franciscans a set of sacred bundles (named Huitzilopochtlis, after the Mexica god).

The monograph is thus clearly and logically structured, and as Lopes Don writes in an uncluttered and engaging style, the result is a highly accessible work; it could be assigned, for example, in a graduate seminar of students who had little or no background in colonial Mexican history. A further aspect of the book that enhances its readability and suitability as the basis for seminar discussion is Lopes Don's decision to approach the trials from the perspective of the Nahua nobility, the indigenous leaders of the book's subtitle. She is able to evoke the complex dilemma faced by local leaders, the nuanced nature of their post-conquest identities, and the subtle, if sometimes unsuccessful, ways in which they sought to navigate their way through the Zumárraga era.

Some specialist readers might have expected Lopes Don to articulate further how her analysis of the Ocelotl and Mixcoatl cases differs from that of Gruzinski; how the 16 inquiries pursued against Nahuas in 1536–40 differed from the 154 pursued against Spaniards in roughly the same period; and how ‘the hostile environment’ (p. 179) created by Zumárraga's failed Inquisition led to the decades of Bernardino de Sahagún's Florentine Codex project. On the other hand, tackling such issues would have meant a far larger and rather different book, not the one Lopes Don set out to write, and it is arguably a tribute to Bonfires of Culture that it stimulates such questions. In the end, this is an enjoyable and welcome contribution to the field.