Cost of Courage in Aztec Society: Essays on Mesoamerican Society and Culture
by: Inga Clendinnen

Softcover. NY, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 216 pages. A collection of pathbreaking essays on Aztec and Maya culture in the sixteenth century. In the title work Inga Clendinnen reconstructs the sequence of experiences through which young Aztec warriors were brought to embrace their duty to their people, to their city, and to the forces that moved the world and the heavens. Subsequent essays explore the survival of Yucatec Maya culture in the face of Spanish conquest and colonisation, the insidious corruption of an austere ideology translated into dangerously novel circumstances, and the multiple paths to the sacred constructed by 'defeated' populations in sixteenth-century Mexico. The collection ends with Clendinnen's transition to the colonial history of her own country: a close and loving reading of the 1841 expedition journal of George Augustus Robinson. Clean copy.