Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2022
Our field [the social history of colonial Latin America] seems to have arrived at a stage where the most important tasks all demand neither detail-shy theoreticians nor purely document-oriented investigators, but flexible minds who can see the general within the particular.
(Lockhart 1972, 36)Of all the rich fields of study that the history of Mexico offers, none have superseded colonial ethnohistory over the long term in the steady distinction of its scholarship.
(Kicza 1995, 240)The [New Philology] has opened the interior of colonial indigenous society in ways fundamental to any understanding of culture, while it lays reasonable claim to being the most innovative and recognizable school of colonial history to yet emerge.
(Van Young 1999, 234)It has often been suggested that there are two reasons for the particular vitality of the ethnohistory of colonial Mesoamerica. John Kicza eloquently articulated these reasons not long ago (1995, 240) as first, the integrity and vigor of native civilizations from pre-Conquest to modern times, and secondly, the richness and variety of relevant colonial documentation. Without taking issue with this rationale at allindeed, working from the assumption that we may take for granted these two factorsI would like to suggest that a third factor is equally pertinent; to wit, the concatenation of activity by a wide variety of scholars in such a way as to create a collective vision of method and interpretation and a constructive momentum that realizes and further develops that vision.
This bibliography lists essays cited above. Also see the discussion of New Philology publications in a broader historiographical context in the bibliographical essays included within articles by Sarah Cline (on the Nahuas), Grant D. Jones (on the Yucatec Mayas), and W. George Lovell (on the Guatemalan Mayas) in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas: Volume II, Mesoamerica, Part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).