Townsend shows that prehispanic history keeping always reflected the interests of ruling groups and altepetl, and scholars can interpret these texts...by examining how they reflect Nahua ideas about history, politics, religion, and kinship and also how they portray colonial events, people, and power relations. Townsend does a masterful job of both....Townsend is an elegant writer, her book a pleasure to read. It covers much ground geographically and chronologically.
Camilla Townsend is Professor of History at Rutgers University. A Guggenheim Fellow, she is the author of Malintzin's Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico and Here in This Year: Seventeenth-Century Nahuatl Annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla Valley, among other books.