ABSTRACT
The sixteenth century was an age of iconoclasm, and newly ruined buildings play an important role in the investigations from both Oaxaca and Valencia: a ruined temple-pyramid in the former, a ruined and rebuilt mosque in the latter. This chapter begins by considering Catholic assumptions about iconoclasm and ruination, and then considers the same themes from Muslim and Native American perspectives. Ruins were important in all three traditions, but they had different meanings, and so Catholic iconoclasm often had unintended effects. Catholic practices of ruination were imagined, by some, to have the potential to bring about the instant conversion of non-believers. But other Catholics (such as university professor Francisco de Vitoria) were skeptical about such claims, and so the second part of the chapter explores the relations between external sign and internal self in early modern social theory.
