Testaments of Toluca (review)

This handsome publication is a selection of 98 seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Nahuatl wills from the Toluca region of central Mexico, approximately half of the extant wills for that period and place. Currently this volume is the largest published set of indigenous wills from the same general region for this period, a welcome edition to the growing corpus of native-language documents available to scholars. An excellent introductory essay precedes the individual wills with the Nahuatl transcription and the English translation in parallel columns. Further explanatory material is found in the commentary preceding each will, discussing the testament at hand and pointing to linkages to other wills in the publication. In form this publication is comparable to the sixteenth-century Nahuatl wills from Culhuacan and the Yucatec Maya wills from Ixil. Since many of the Toluca wills were part of legal dossiers, their separation from their original sources means a loss of the larger context, but translator and editor Pizzigoni's compilation and translation of such a large set from such scattered repositories is a major achievement, and her detective work identifying clusters of wills of people related to one another is particularly noteworthy.

The introductory study covers a variety of topics that emerge from the wills themselves. She follows the structure of the testaments to make general statements about the testators, the formal language of wills in the opening formulas, religious aspects peculiar to a given place or particular testators, types of property and bequests, naming patterns, kin relations, and aspects of Nahuatl language change of interest to colonial Mexicanists, as well as specific aspects of philology that will likely be of greatest interest to linguists.

She has chosen for publication wills from different political divisions within the region, allowing her to identify as clearly as possible the cultural differences between the locations, some of which she discusses in the Introduction. It is not surprising that the selection is skewed toward elites, with seven men having the title don, and three of them being part of identifiable testament clusters of other kin. The thirteen testament-clusters of two, three, and occasionally four related testators provide some of the most interesting examples in the corpus. Pizzigoni has helpfully listed the clusters in the front matter and pointed the reader to their importance in the introductory essay. While the testators who are part of clusters account for about a third of the 98 wills, most wills are by seemingly poor testators who are not apparently related to anyone else in this collection.

For scholars familiar with late sixteenth-century Nahuatl wills, the later Toluca wills do show considerable cultural change to which Pizzigoni points. These Toluca region testators have thoroughly Spanish names, unlike mixed Spanish and Nahuatl names from the sixteenth century. Absent are any Toluca testators' bequests of property to be sold for masses for their kin who predecease them, found in sixteenth-century Culhuacan wills. In eighteenth-century Toluca testators appear to focus solely on their own salvation rather a more collective one. Whether this shift was consciously pushed by clerics is unclear. Innovations since the sixteenth century are donations to the Jerusalem fund, confraternity participation, ownership of large numbers of saints' images and land to support them, as well as references to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Given the scholarly interest in the growth and spread of the cult of Guadalupe, Pizzigoni might have highlighted these Toluca region references to Mexico's dark virgin. Many testaments are entirely taken up with funeral arrangements thereby giving us insight into cultural shifts in this later period. In general, without Pizzigoni's lengthy and insightful introductory discussions of particular wills, the subtle differences between one testament and another and one regional cluster and another would escape readers not immersed in the corpus. In the closing sentences of the introductory essay, Pizzigoni notes that she "has not commented on the extent to which patterns seen in the corpus here are of indigenous versus Hispanic origin, or represent a...