In Aztec Goddesses and Christian Madonnas: Images of the Divine Feminine in Mexico, Joseph Kroger and Patrizia Granziera undertake an ambitious survey of sacred females in Mexican art and culture. The authors offer an encyclopedic compendium of Pre-Columbian Aztec goddess cults and the extraordinary range of Mexican Catholic dedications to the Virgin Mary that developed in the colonial period—“a Catholic devotion,” Kroger writes, “that privileged Mary in a way that even I was unprepared for” (xvii). Indigenous artistic traditions and religious institutions are treated not as ancillary material but rather as vigorous devotional traditions that continued to inform the development of Mexican Catholicism, with venerations of the Madonna at its heart.

The volume consists of five chapters that can be divided into three main parts: the introduction with the first two chapters, the third chapter, and the last two chapters. After an introduction that sets out the goals of the book and a brief discussion of ancient and modern mother-goddess archetypes, the first two chapters provide a comparative analysis of coeval devotions to sacred female entities on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapter 1 places the major Pre-Columbian cultures within a broad chronological framework, and gradually narrows its focus to the cultural, historical, and religious traditions of late Postclassic culture in central Mexico (which the authors generally call “Aztec”). This useful overview addresses fundamental Aztec creation stories, notions of the cosmos, and the workings of major Mesoamerican calendar systems, which were inextricable from ritual practices and formed the basis for ceremonies to the gods. The authors situate the Aztec goddess within this larger structure, particularly in relation to concepts of nature and manifestations of the sacred landscape.

Chapter 2 functions as a corollary to this Pre-Columbian material. It considers in detail the history of Marian devotions in the broader Christian tradition, surveying the development of cults and doctrine in Eastern and Western Christendom in order to provide a context for later discussions of the Mexican Madonnas. This chapter is organized both chronologically and thematically. The authors expertly guide the reader through late antique and medieval primary textual sources and doctrinal traditions, and consider the ways in which those intersected with popular piety. Their discussion forms the basis for the second half of the chapter, which establishes the major iconographic and symbolic elements of cult images in the Byzantine realm and in the medieval and early modern West, giving special attention to nature themes. The authors also examine the significant disjunctions between the primary texts—including the very few biblical passages that actually mention Mary—and the innumerable artistic traditions that developed in succeeding centuries. Medieval and Byzantine doctrines and images are especially well covered, including a detailed summary of numerous icon types. Renaissance-period Madonnas receive only a summary paragraph. The discussion of the Baroque attends at length to the Counter-Reformation Church, especially in Spain, and examines the important miraculous cults that would accompany the conquistadors and missionaries to New Spain. In this and the final chapters, Kroger and Granziera rightly emphasize the importance of historicizing and contextualizing Marian doctrinal beliefs and image cults. This chapter provides a wealth of information in a concise and clearly organized way, and could stand alone as a useful reading for a course on medieval art and religion.

With the stage thus set, the sixteenth-century collision of these different traditions in post-conquest Mexico forms the center point of the book in chapter 3. In this section Kroger and Granziera reflect on the ways in which indigenous Mexicans and European conquistadors and missionaries were forced to negotiate foreign venerations of powerful sacred female entities, topics that have been discussed in recent scholarly literature. The Christian missionaries who arrived in the aftermath of conquest attempted to understand Mexican ritual practices so as to more effectively extirpate them. To that end they collaborated with indigenous informants, scholars, and artists to create a corpus of ethnohistoric chronicles. These form the basis for much of what scholars currently understand about Pre-Hispanic and early colonial Mesoamerica. However, as many scholars have demonstrated, the colonial ethnohistories are also filled with misapprehensions and misrepresentations of the nature of Mesoamerican sacred practices and supernatural entities. The friars frequently recast female supernaturals in familiar, often negative categories derived from late medieval European Catholicism, wherein female sexuality was routinely associated with Satan and witchcraft. At the same time, the Aztecs encountered the Virgin Mary, who, in spite of her kindly, benevolent nature, had a long history of political involvement and choosing sides on the battlefield. Such hostilities were eventually tempered by the gentle image of Mary promoted by the friars. Here Kroger and Granziera engage with long-standing debates about the nature of Christianization among the indigenous communities of colonial Mexico. They argue for a syncretic view of early colonial culture, in which the missionaries functioned as active agents capitalizing on shared themes and traditions between Aztec religion and Catholicism, while indigenous peoples selectively accommodated images, ritual practices, and religious concepts that resonated with their own traditions. Thus Mary’s ambivalent nature was not problematic for a people whose Pre-Hispanic goddesses had been characterized as both nurturing and wildly destructive, while her deep-rooted links to nature and the sacred landscape facilitated conversion efforts and placed her at the center of a new Mexican tradition.

The last section of the book comprises chapters 4 and 5, each of which presents a series of encyclopedic entries. Although the scope is vast, the authors wisely limit their study to a manageable set of twenty-two Aztec female supernaturals and twenty-eight of the best-known Mexican images of the Virgin Mary. This allows for fairly detailed discussions of historical and ritual contexts and the contents of the images. The framework for both chapters is the same. Each entry summarizes the major myths, histories, and significant rituals associated with the subject, followed by descriptions of individual pictorial types and cult images. Every subject is illustrated by one or more images, which include Aztec sculpture, Pre-Hispanic and post-conquest manuscript images, and miraculous images of Mary, often photographed in situ. Chapter 4 functions as a deity catalogue that maps out the array of associated myths, histories, calendrical rituals, incantations, and poetic invocations described in pictorial manuscripts and ethnohistoric chronicles. The authors reference additional resources and images in the endnotes. More attention might have been given here and in preceding chapters to interrogating the notion of the “goddess,” a Mediterranean concept whose application to Mesoamerican sacred entities (dating back to the sixteenth-century Europeans) has been critiqued by a number of scholars (see especially the seminal analysis by Arild Hvidtfeldt, Teotl and Ixiptlatli: Some Central Conceptions in Ancient Mexican Religion. With a General Introduction on Cult and Myth, Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1958).

The fifth and final chapter is the culmination of the book, describing the most famous Mexican Madonnas. Kroger and Granziera describe the origins and local contexts for particular venerations of authoritative cult objects, such as the Virgin of the Remedies and the Virgin of Guadalupe. This chapter is filled with engaging stories of miraculous apparitions as the Virgin made known her affinities for particular locations, towns, and culture groups. The authors demonstrate that the Virgin Mary must always be understood, first, on the local level. Indeed, one of the major contributions of the book is Kroger and Granziera’s insistence on the centrality of specific, singular images to the development of popular piety.

The history of art in Mesoamerica has typically been divided between the Pre-Columbian period and the colonial and modern periods, with the arrival of Europeans and the 1521 conquest of the city of Tenochtitlan (modern-day Mexico City) offering a convenient temporal dividing line. While institutionalized period labels might be pedagogically useful, they can also create artificial and even misleading categories. Kroger and Granziera’s study avoids the pitfalls of such an approach by privileging the history of the sacred feminine in Mesoamerica alongside its examination of Marian image cults in Mexico. The organizational strategy that the authors chose for the final two chapters is perhaps less effective for the Aztec material than for the discussion of Mary, since it tends to elide major distinctions between Christian European art, which has links to textual sources, and image-making practices in Pre-Columbian central Mexico, wherein there was no clear separation between the (Western) categories of image and text. Nevertheless, this consistent structure facilitates the comparative approach they take throughout the book, allowing for an extended treatment of the ways Marian devotions developed in colonial Mexico, often in dialogue with autochthonous concepts of the sacred and nature. The authors succeed in demonstrating that “in both the Aztec and the Christian religious traditions, it is not just the Goddess or Mary that believers relate to, but the Goddess or Mary in a specific image. Images of goddesses and madonnas are highly specified and differentiated mediators of the divine” (4).

Aztec Goddesses and Christian Madonnas is accessible, clearly written, and well organized. It is also lavishly illustrated, containing close to three dozen color plates and more than a hundred black-and-white images. It is a useful reference source for studies of the sacred female in medieval and early modern Catholic art as much as in Mesoamerican art and ritual.