Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. The existential uncertainty about the end of times, a vast preoccupation that stretches from medieval theology to the secular anxieties of the poem by Robert Frost cited above, is at the center of this book. This innovative volume surveys Christian apocalyptic discourse in a selection of catechistic works written by missionaries and clergy in Classical Nahuatl and colonial Yucatec Maya in New Spain. But this tome does not stop at mere apocalypse: It also attempts to plumb what early modern catechisms in Spain designated as postrimerías, the end-of-life rewards and punishments that awaited Christian souls—from the intermediate domains of limbo and purgatory to the final judgment and then onward to eternal bliss or condemnation.
The book is anchored by a discussion of apocalyptic predictions in chapter 1, which aptly addresses works by Joachim de Fiore, Thomas Aquinas, and other late medieval theologians and the premonitions of sixteenth-century Franciscans. The book then tracks these predictions as they made their way into the ears of Indigenous converts. After an introduction to apocalyptic themes, each subsequent chapter presents an English translation of excerpts from texts, without the inclusion of a separate transcription of the original works in Nahuatl and Yucatec Maya. Chapter 2 addresses the fate of Christian souls during a first judgment or their placement in limbo or purgatory. Starting with two Nahuatl works, the chapter traces the influence of Vicente Ferrer's predication in the Franciscan Juan Bautista Viseo's 1599 Confesionario, and then moves on to Ignacio de Paredes's 1759 Promptuario, finishing with Maya-language discussions of God's judgments in Juan Coronel's 1620 Discursos predicables and in an anonymous eighteenth-century sermon collection. Chapter 3 expands on the author's previous publications through the analysis of a canonical list of fifteen signs of the apocalypse, as rendered in Viseo's massive 1606 Sermonario and in a collection of Maya sermons now preserved at Princeton University, which provide lucid points of comparison with medieval German and French depictions of those signs. Chapter 4 surveys exegeses of the seventh article of the faith, which stresses the resurrection of the body before God's final judgment, as presented in the Dominican Martín de León's 1611 Camino del Cielo and in Coronel's Discursos. Chapter 5 scrutinizes vivid depictions of the torments of hell in two Yucatec Maya sources, Coronel's aforementioned Discursos and the Teabo Manuscript. In a well-executed move, Christensen documents the convergences between the elucidation of infernal punishments in Paredes's Promptuario and in Luis de Granada's Libro de la oración, an exceedingly popular sixteenth-century work that, as we now know, was adapted by Bautista Viseo into Nahuatl and by Spanish Jesuits into Japanese, and which is echoed in L'inferno aperto, a later work by an Italian Jesuit.
This work provides a sophisticated guide to representative catechetic discourses on postrimerías, the apocalypse, Christ's second coming, and the Final Judgment. But these topics were rather vast even in colonial Mexico, as they included, beyond this book, the end-of-times predictions by Juan Teton, who prophesized that Nahuas who ate the flesh of animals brought by Spaniards would turn into cows, pigs, or other foreign species. Although briefly addressed in the volume, a detailed analysis of the Nahua omens of conquest from Book XII of the Florentine Codex, which may bear the imprimatur of classical antiquity sources, might have provided a fascinating comparison with the fifteen signs of the apocalypse. In the end, this agile and learned volume, written in a style that carefully merges conversational appraisals of doctrines of catastrophe, will instruct and delight undergraduate and more specialized readers interested in learning how Christian apocalyptic thought was adapted and elucidated for Indigenous audiences in colonial Mexico.
