Reading the Inquisitorial Record in Yucatán: Fact or Fantasy?

Abstract

Richard Greenleaf, in urging ethnohistorians of Indian response to Spanish Catholic culture to be attentive to the inquisitorial record, pointed especially to two unusually rich bodies of documentation, one generated by the Oaxacan enquiry of the 1540's and 1550's; the other by the “idolatry trials” of Yucatán in 1562. Most of the material relating to the Yucatecan episode has long been easily accessible to scholars through France Scholes' and Eleanor Adams' magnificent publication of 1938. Scholes, in his introduction to that work, and then in an article he wrote in conjunction with the great ethnographer of the Maya, Ralph Roys, judged the Indian confessions elicited in the course of the inquisition to be largely based on fact, and therefore concluded that the Maya Indians of Yucatán, after their apparent conversion, had not only continued to worship their old idols, but had returned to an intensified practice of human sacrifice in which some victims had been subjected to preliminary crucifixion.

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