Motolinía’s Historia de los Indios de la Nueva España

Record summary

Motolinía’s account of New Spain combines missionary ethnography, Indigenous religious material, natural history and narratives of Conquest. It is a possible source for tracing reports of signs, lights, atmospheric events or sacred manifestations as they were translated into Christian historical writing. The work matters because it shows how accounts of Indigenous cosmology can be recast as either superstition or divine providence, categories that resemble later disputes over anomalous experiences. Manuscript history, variant versions and authorial selection make individual claims difficult to date or contextualize.