Painted Words presents a facsimile, decipherment, and analysis of a seventeenth-century pictographic catechism from colonial Mexico, preserved as Fonds Mexicain 399 at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Works in this genre present the Catholic catechism in pictures that were read sign by sign as aids to memorization and oral performance. They have long been understood as a product of the experimental techniques of early evangelization, but this study shows that they are better understood as indigenous expressions of devotional knowledge.

In addition to inventive pictography to recount the catechism, this manuscript features Nahuatl texts that focus on don Pedro Moteuczoma, son of the Mexica ruler Moteuczoma the Younger, and his home, San Sebastián Atzaqualco. Other glosses identify figures drawn within the manuscript as Nahua and Spanish historical personages, as if the catechism had been repurposed as a dynastic record. The end of the document displays a series of Nahua and Spanish heraldic devices.

These combined pictorial and alphabetic expressions form a spectacular example of how colonial pictographers created innovative text genres, through which they reimagined pre-Columbian writing and early evangelization—and ultimately articulated newly emerging assertions of indigenous identity and memorialized native history.

Before there was Che Guevara, there was Emiliano Zapata, the charismatic revolutionary who left indelible marks on Mexican politics and society. The sequel to Samuel Brunk's 1995 biography of Zapata, The Posthumous Career of Emiliano Zapata traces the power and impact of this ubiquitous, immortalized figure.

Mining the massive extant literature on Zapata, supplemented by archival documents and historical newspaper accounts, Brunk explores frameworks of myth and commemoration while responding to key questions regarding the regime that emerged from the Zapatista movement, including whether it was spawned by a genuinely "popular" revolution.

Blending a sophisticated analysis of hegemonic systems and nationalism with lively, accessible accounts of ways in which the rebel is continually resurrected decades after his death in a 1919 ambush, Brunk delves into a rich realm of artistic, geographical, militaristic, and ultimately all-encompassing applications of this charismatic icon.

Examining all perspectives, from politicized commemorations of Zapata's death to popular stories and corridos, The Posthumous Career of Emiliano Zapata is an eloquent, engaging portrait of a legend incarnate.

A city of immense literary mystique, Prague has inspired writers across the centuries with its beauty, cosmopolitanism, and tragic history. Envisioning the ancient city in central Europe as a multilayered text, or palimpsest, that has been constantly revised and rewritten—from the medieval and Renaissance chroniclers who legitimized the city’s foundational origins to the modernists of the early twentieth century who established its reputation as the new capital of the avant-garde—Alfred Thomas argues that Prague has become a paradoxical site of inscription and effacement, of memory and forgetting, a utopian link to the prewar and pre-Holocaust European past and a dystopia of totalitarian amnesia.

Considering a wide range of writers, including the city’s most famous son, Franz Kafka, Prague Palimpsest reassesses the work of poets and novelists such as Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Gustav Meyrink, Jan Neruda, Vítĕzslav Nezval, and Rainer Maria Rilke and engages with other famous authors who “wrote” Prague, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Ingeborg Bachmann, Albert Camus, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald. The result is a comparative, interdisciplinary study that helps to explain why Prague—more than any other major European city—has haunted the cultural and political imagination of the West.

Psychology is the dogma of our age; psychotherapy is our means of self-understanding; and "repressed memory" is now a universally familiar form of trauma. Jeffrey Prager, who is both a sociologist and a psychoanalyst, explores the degree to which we manifest the clichés of our culture in our most private recollections.

At the core of Presenting the Past is the dramatic and troubling case of a woman who during the course of her analysis began to recall scenes of her own childhood sexual abuse. Later the patient came to believe that the trauma she remembered as a physical violation might have been an emotional violation and that she had composed a memory out of present and past relationships. But what was accurate and true? And what evidence could be persuasive and valuable? Could the analyst trust either her convictions or his own? Using this case and others, Prager explores the nature of memory and its relation to the interpersonal, therapeutic, and cultural worlds in which remembering occurs.

Synthesizing research from social science, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology, Prager uses clinical examples to argue more generally that our memories are never simple records of events, but constantly evolving constructions, affected by contemporary culture as well as by our own private lives. He demonstrates the need that sociology has for the insights of psychoanalysis, and the need that psychoanalysis has for the insights of sociology.

Readers once believed in Proust’s madeleine and in Wordsworth’s recollections of his boyhood—but that was before literary culture began to defer to Freud’s questioning of adult memories of childhood. In this first sustained look at childhood memories as depicted in literature, Lorna Martens reveals how much we may have lost by turning our attention the other way. Her work opens a new perspective on early recollection—how it works, why it is valuable, and how shifts in our understanding are reflected in both scientific and literary writings.

Science plays an important role in The Promise of Memory, which is squarely situated at the intersection of literature and psychology. Psychologists have made important discoveries about when childhood memories most often form, and what form they most often take. These findings resonate throughout the literary works of the three writers who are the focus of Martens’ book. Proust and Rilke, writing in the modernist period before Freudian theory penetrated literary culture, offer original answers to questions such as “Why do writers consider it important to remember childhood? What kinds of things do they remember? What do their memories tell us?” In Walter Benjamin, Martens finds a writer willing to grapple with Freud, and one whose writings on childhood capture that struggle.

For all three authors, places and things figure prominently in the workings of memory. Connections between memory and materiality suggest new ways of understanding not just childhood recollection but also the artistic inclination, which draws on a childlike way of seeing: object-focused, imaginative, and emotionally intense.