Ever since Robert Ricard’s 1933 Conquête spirituelle du Mexique, the conversion of the natives of the Americas has captured the attention of scholars seeking to understand the evangelization process, its successes, failures, and limits. The use of native-language texts in this historiography has been around for a few decades now, but it continues to hold great promise in enlightening our understanding of how missionaries brought Catholicism to the natives in their own vernacular. The present edited volume seeks to further that understanding through a series of essays—most of them derived from papers delivered at a 2011 international symposium—dedicated to what is often termed “missionary linguistics,” which involves the transmission of Christianity into native languages. Each essay in the volume is dedicated to a linguistic analysis of this transmission into a wide variety of languages throughout the Americas. Indeed, the volume’s examination of Christian concepts translated into Yucatec and K’iche’...
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