Author Description

The Theologia Indorum by Dominican friar Domingo de Vico was the first explicit Christian theology written in the Americas and remains the longest text in any indigenous American language. While its impact never left the region of the Guatemalan Highlands its immediate readers, namely the Highland Maya, engaged it as they began to write some of the first post-contact indigenous American literature. Rather than merely condemn the Maya religion, Vico appropriated local terms and images from Maya mythology and ritual that he thought could convey Christianity. Furthermore, his attempt at translating, if not reconfiguring, Christianity for a Maya readership entailed his mastery of not only numerous Mayan languages but also the highly poetic ceremonial rhetoric of many indigenous Mesoamerican peoples. This book also includes for the first time in English two other pastoral texts, parts of a songbook and a catechism, also originally written in Highland Mayan languages by fellow Dominicans, which show the wider influence of Vico's ethnographic approach shared by a particular school of Dominicans.