The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society: Essays on Mesoamerican Society and Culture

Inga Clendinnen

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511777967

How can men be brought to look steadily on the face of battle? Tenochtitlán, the great city of the Aztecs, was the creation of war, and war was its dynamic. In the title work of this compelling collection of essays, Inga Clendinnen reconstructs the sequence of experiences through which young Aztec warriors were brought to embrace their duty to their people, to their city, and to the forces that moved the world and the heavens. Subsequent essays explore the survival of Yucatec Maya culture in the face of Spanish conquest and colonisation, the insidious corruption of an austere ideology translated into dangerously novel circumstances, and the multiple paths to the sacred constructed by 'defeated' populations in sixteenth-century Mexico. The collection ends with Clendinnen's transition to the colonial history of her own country: a close and loving reading of the 1841 expedition journal of George Augustus Robinson, appointed 'Protector of Aborigines' in the Port Philip District of Australia.

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The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society

Essays on Mesoamerican Society and Culture

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Contents

Frontmatter
pp i-iv

Contents
pp v-vi

Introduction
pp 1-5

1 - The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society
pp 6-48

2 - “Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty”
pp 49-90

3 - Disciplining the Indians
pp 91-115

4 - Ways to the Sacred
pp 116-155

5 - Landscape and World View
pp 156-178

6 - Breaking the Mirror
pp 179-190

7 - Reading Mr. Robinson
pp 191-208

Index
pp 209-216

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The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society

Essays on Mesoamerican Society and Culture

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