The Teabo Manuscript: Maya Christian Copybooks, Chilam Balams, and Native Text Production by Mark Z. Christensen (review)

The Teabo Manuscript is a Mayan document of the colonial period, dating from the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, although it also contains a few aggregates from the early twentieth century. For the most part, it is written in Yucatec Maya and contains materials relating to the Catholic religion. Christensen's book brings to light a colonial Mayan manuscript that had not been studied until now, providing a transcription of the Mayan text, an English translation, facsimile images of the manuscript, and the author's own analysis of each section into which he has divided his study.

The book offers five chapters, an introduction, a few conclusions, and an appendix with the facsimile of the manuscript. Each chapter presents a section of the document, preceded by a scholarly study in which the author analyzes the information offered about the colonial Mayas, how the text was produced and preserved, which topics they chose and why, and the relationship of the Maya text at hand to other religious texts, both European and Maya. The decision to use this approach, instead of the traditional extensive introduction followed by the complete transcription and translation, is beneficial, because it converts each chapter into an erudite essay on different problematic aspects of the texts.

Chapter 1 offers the Teabo section relating to Genesis and the creation of the world, which is used to analyze the production of colonial texts and the manner in which they are disseminated. Christensen addresses the selection of topics, concluding that they were selected from among those which aroused great interest in the preexisting Mayan tradition. Chapter 2 presents the genealogy of Christ and an apocalyptic speech inspired by the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25. Examining the orthography of the biblical names in this genealogy, written phonetically, the author returns to a topic which is carried throughout the whole book: the production process of this type of manuscript. In addition, he analyzes the importance that these topics, genealogy and destruction, had in pre-Hispanic times to show why they were chosen.

Chapter 3 presents a version of the medieval text called "The Fifteen Signs before Doomsday," which is compared with other versions from both the New and Old Worlds. In his analysis, Christensen offers a new approach on the adaptation of the Christian eschatology to the native cultures and on the manner in which this type of texts circulated among the Maya. In Chapter 4, we find a prayer to Mary and Christ and a text on indulgences. Christensen focuses on the roles of Mary and the place of indulgences among the Maya population, and it establishes a comparison with similar texts in Nahuatl and Maya.

In Chapter 5, the author presents several notes and entries that were added to the manuscript during the twentieth century, are presented. These consist mainly of death records and texts dealing with medicinal remedies. In this chapter, the focus is on how these notes give evidence of the dual nature of these manuscripts and their place between the individual and the community of the cah or municipality.

This edition offers a good translation with the necessary critical support to make it sufficiently transparent. Particularly effective is the manner in which the notes are used to refer to the cognate passages, a tool that has shown to be extremely useful for researchers. Christensen's book is undoubtedly an indispensable tool for those who study colonial Yucatan and others who are interested in the re-elaboration and adaptation of European texts by the Maya. The transcription and translation offered in this book constitute an important contribution as a source, and the analysis presented is a valuable addition to the studies relating to colonial Maya literature and its genre.