The Spanish Conquest and subsequent introduction of Roman Catholicism into the Maya region in the sixteenth century resulted in the abrupt confrontation of two major world cultures, each having no prior knowledge of the other’s existence. Their subsequent interaction was most often one of violence and mistrust. But this was not always the case, as Mark Z. Christensen’s new translation and commentary on the Teabo Manuscript elucidates. The text is a collection of Christian treatises written in the Yucatec Maya language and redacted by anonymous Maya scribes in the town of Teabo, Yucatán. Based on the paper used, the Teabo Manuscript was likely compiled in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, although most of its contents appear to have been copied and recopied from much earlier material. The document contains various thematic sections: a redaction of the creation of the world and the fall of Adam and Eve; the...

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