JAIME LARA. Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. 2008. Pp. x, 372. $75.00
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This book is a rich portrait of the early Christian liturgy in Central Mexico. It forms a pair with Jaime Lara's City, Temple, Stage: Eschatological Architecture and Liturgical Theatrics in New Spain (2004), which is concerned with the architectural and urban environments produced by the early colonization and conversion process, and with religious theater. Lara's new work reconstructs the symbols and rites of the “inculturated” Christian worship developed during the pre-Tridentine, mendicant-dominated phase of evangelization. Much of the book is taken up by iconographic analysis and, appropriately, it is a highly visual work, printed in large format with one or more color illustrations on most pages. Lara's argument is that the early mendicant conversion efforts were successful at capturing the Nahua imagination, and were also captured by it, because they did not avoid the points of messy overlap and ambiguous similarity between Christianity and pre-conquest Nahua religion, but rather built upon them. Lara attributes this to Christian traditions of missionary accommodation, planned syncretism, or, in the language of post-Vatican II theologians, “inculturation” (pp. 16–19). At the same time, he stresses that “Nahua Christianity” was also the creation of the Nahuas themselves, who were responsible for much of the matching, bridging, and intertwining of key tropes and concepts. Lara even argues that, through a collaborative partnership between friars and Nahuas, pre-Hispanic religion was recycled into a new form of Christianity more than it was destroyed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.032 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".