Combining social history with literary criticism, James Krippner-Martinez shows how a historiographically sensitive rereading of contemporaneous documents concerning the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest and evangelization of Michoacan, and of later writings using them, can challenge traditional celebratory interpretations of missionary activity in early colonial Mexico.

The book offers a fresh look at religion, politics, and the writing of history by employing a poststructuralist method that engages the exclusions as well as the content of the historical record. The moments of...