The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society

Inga Clendinnen is Emeritus Scholar in History at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Her publications include Aztecs (Cambridge, 1991), Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge, 1999), and Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1579 (second edition, Cambridge, 2003). Her memoir, Tiger's Eye, was published in 2001; her Boyer Lectures, True Stories, in 1999; and a collection of her literary essays, Agamemnon's Kiss, in 2006. Her book on the meeting between the First Fleet and Aboriginal Australians, Dancing with Strangers (Cambridge, 2003), won several awards, including the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize.

• Introduction; 1. 'Fierce and unnatural cruelty': Cortés and the conquest of Mexico; 2. Disciplining the Indians: Franciscan ideology and missionary violence in sixteenth-century Yucatán; 3. The cost of courage in Aztec society; 4. Ways to the sacred: reconstructing 'religion' in sixteenth century Mexico; 5. Landscape and world view: the survival of Yucatec Maya culture under Spanish conquest; 6. Breaking the mirror: from the Aztec spring festival to organ transplantation; 7. Reading Mr. Robinson.

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