Camilla Townsend's books tend to reconnect me with the joy of reading, and this latest proves no exception. The annals of the book's title are community histories written by Nahuas in their own language. As Townsend explains, this genre descended from a pre-Hispanic tradition called xiuhpohualli, or yearly accounts, of which no examples survive. The annals were written by Nahuas in their homes, for Nahua audiences—not in Spanish-run seminaries, as were many other works in the corpus of colonial-era Nahua literature.

Nahuatl annals are particularly challenging to understand, and this book is the first to analyze so many examples of the genre. Townsend's profound linguistic expertise has enabled her to make new translations and interpretations. Passages of her translations are included in each chapter. In her hands, the annals become rich sources for Nahua history and more generally for the history of culture, memory, and intellectual politics in colonized societies.

An underlying innovation is Townsend's recognition that most of the surviving annals were not only multiply authored, but were also composite texts from multiple communities or lineages within a given altepetl. Yet, just as central to the book is her work in identifying who the authors were as individuals. By studying the annals themselves, along with other contemporaneous records, Townsend has assembled biographies of various annalists. More broadly, the book develops a picture of these men's intellectual, social, and political contexts. Thus, it provides silhouettes of several altepetls in several time periods, as well as an original intellectual history of Nahua writers under colonial rule.

The chapters appear chronologically, each focusing on a particular text or set of texts. Chapter 1 tells of the Historia Tolteca Chichimeca, written in the 1540s and 1550s by members of the lineage of the nobleman Chimalpopoca, who was later called don Alonso de Castañeda of Cuauhtinchan (in the Valley of Puebla). Chapter 2 studies the Anales de Juan Bautista, produced in the 1560s by writers mainly from the barrio San Juan Moyotlan in Mexico City. Chapter 3 treats two works: the Annals of Tecamachalco (1560s through 1580s), and the Annals of Cuahtitlan (late 1560s and early 1570s). Chapter 4 turns to Chimalpahin, perhaps the best-known Nahua annalist, who wrote in Mexico City in the early seventeenth century. Chapter 5 profiles mid seventeenth-century Tlaxcalan annalist don Juan Zapata y Mendoza, and the Zapata family friend who continued the recording in the next generation. In the epilogue, Townsend describes the origins of the Annals of Puebla in a sixteenth-century xiuhpohualli. But she argues that by the 1670s the text had taken on a distinctly postconquest form, maintained by a writer who was both Nahua and remarkably hispanized.

The book demonstrates transformations not only of linguistic and literary forms, but also of intellectual politics. For example, Chapter 3 shows that by the late sixteenth century, even as annalists were writing to exalt their communities' histories, they nevertheless engaged concerns of the Spanish friars who had taught them. In Chapter 5, Townsend notes that don Juan de Zapata y Mendoza wrote in the mid seventeenth century “to communicate with his own posterity, not with the wider European world.” But the man who would continue Zapata's annals into the eighteenth century “desired that the two traditions [Nahua and European] be brought together in a mutually intelligible way” (209).

Townsend is an exceptionally gifted narrator of history—she writes beautifully—and it seems fitting that she should be the one to share with us the beauty of these writings by Nahua historians. The book speaks to me partly on an emotional, even visceral level, particularly in its suggestions about the importance to colonial-era Nahuas of their recorded community histories and of writing itself. The pioneering Nahuatlist historian James Lockhart often insisted that people in the past were not so different from us moderns. Indeed, in revealing colonial-era Nahua writers as historians, and in identifying their concerns, Camilla Townsend has shown us how much her subjects were like ourselves.