ABSTRACT
Nancy M.Farriss, in her prize-winning book Maya Society Under Colonial Rule (1984), describes the ways in which the Yucatec Maya and Spanish learned to interact with and accommodate each other. In this selection, Farriss describes both the ways in which Catholic missionaries attempted to bring Christianity to the local population and the ways in which this population received the Europeans’ religion. She argues that the Maya did not accept Christian doctrine as a representation of a single truth; nor did they completely reject it as implausible. Rather, the Maya incorporated many of Christianity’s ideas into their own cosmological order.
