Revolution in the Andes: The Age of Túpac Amaru

Growing influence of Augustinian thought also pushed sixteenth-century clergy toward a dimmer view of their Indian charges (but also, significantly, all Christians). Similarly, Jackson’s thesis that missionary attitudes, as reflected through visual evidence, experienced a distinct ebb and flow might have been more fully and profitably compared to recent historians’ analyses of traditional textual evidence that favour the view that Spanish attitudes toward indigenous spirituality were more consistently pessimistic, informed as they were by the demonic tropes of the era. Finally, given the importance of the Last Judgment to his argument, it is regrettable that Jackson does not address literary scholar Michael Schuessler’s recent book (originally published in Mexico in 2009) which links the murals of Actopan and Ixmiquilpan to Franciscan missionary theatre, another important evangelical medium that began decades earlier, at the apex of missionary optimism, with elaborate and harrowing re-enactments of Christ’s ultimate judgment of sinners.