"The Life Within" provides a social and cultural history of the indigenous people of a region of central Mexico in the later colonial period--as told through documents in Nahuatl and Spanish. It views the indigenous world from the inside out, focusing first on the household--buildings, lots, household saints--and expanding outward toward the householders and the greater community. The internal focus of this book provides a comprehensive picture of indigenous society, exploring the categories by which people are identified, their interactions, their activities, and the aspects of the local corporations that manifest themselves in household life.
Pizzigoni brings indigenous-language social history into the later colonial period, whereas the emphasis until now has fallen heavily on the earlier phase. The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries emerge as a dynamic time that saw, along with cultural persistence, many new adaptations and creations. Covering a period of over a century and a half, this study goes beyond a monolithic treatment of the region to introduce for the first time a systematic analysis of subregional variation in vocabulary and real-life phenomena, showing how, within larger regional trends, each tiniest community of the Toluca Valley retained markers of its individuality.

For decades, scholars and public intellectuals have been predicting the demise of religion in the face of secularization. Yet religion is undergoing an unprecedented resurgence in modern life-and secularization no longer appears so inevitable. Formations of Belief brings together many of today's leading historians to shed critical light on secularism's origins, its present crisis, and whether it is as antithetical to religion as it is so often made out to be. Formations of Belief offers a more nuanced understanding of the origins of secularist thought, demonstrating how Reformed Christianity and the Enlightenment were not the sole vessels of a worldview based on rationalism and individual autonomy. Taking readers from late antiquity to the contemporary era, the contributors show how secularism itself can be a form of belief and yet how its crisis today has been brought on by its apparent incapacity to satisfy people's spiritual needs. They explore the rise of the humanistic study of religion in Europe, Jewish messianism, atheism and last rites in the Soviet Union, the cult of the saints in colonial Mexico, religious minorities and Islamic identity in Pakistan, the neuroscience of religion, and more. Based on the Shelby Cullom Davis Center Seminars at Princeton University, this incisive book features illuminating essays by Peter Brown, Yaacob Dweck, Peter E. Gordon, Anthony Grafton, Brad S. Gregory, Stefania Pastore, Caterina Pizzigoni, Victoria Smolkin, Max Weiss, and Muhammad Qasim Zaman.

Testaments written in their own language, Nahuatl, have been crucial for reconstructing the everyday life of the indigenous people of central Mexico after Spanish contact. Those published to date have largely been from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Testaments of Toluca presents a large body of Nahuatl wills (98) from 1652 to 1783 from an important valley not much studied, thus greatly enlarging our perspective on the evolution of indigenous society and culture in central Mexico. Each testament is transcribed, translated, and accompanied by a commentary on the testator's situation and on interesting terminology. A substantial introductory study fully analyzes the testamentary genre as seen in this corpus (a first) and summarizes the content of the documents in realms such as gender, kinship, household, and land. Wills are very human documents, and the apparatus draws out this aspect, telling us much of local indigenous life in central Mexico in the third century after Spanish contact, so that the book is of potential interest to a broad spectrum of readers.

This book presents a unique set of written records belonging to the De la Cruz family, caciques of Tepemaxalco in the Toluca Valley. Composed in Nahuatl and Spanish and available here both in the original languages and in English translation, this collection of documents opens a window onto the life of a family from colonial Mexico’s indigenous elite and sheds light on the broader indigenous world within the Spanish colonial system. The main text is a record created in 1647 by long-serving governor don Pedro de la Cruz and continued by his heirs through the nineteenth century, along with two wills and several other notable documents. These sources document a community history, illuminating broader issues centering on politics, religion, and economics as well as providing unusual insight into the concerns and values of indigenous leaders. These texts detail the projects financed by the De la Cruz family, how they talked about them, and which belongings they deemed important enough to pass along after their death. Designed for classroom use, this clear and concise primary source includes a wealth of details about indigenous everyday life and preserves and makes accessible a rich and precious heritage. The engaging introduction highlights issues of class relations and the public and performative character of Nahua Christianity. The authors provide the necessary tools to help students understand the colonial context in which these documents were produced.