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In Rewriting Maya Religion Garry Sparks examines the earliest religious documents composed by missionaries and native authors in the Americas, including a reconstruction of the first original, explicit Christian theology written in the Americas—the nearly 900-page Theologia Indorum (Theology for [or of] the Indians), initially written in Mayan languages by Friar Domingo de Vico by 1554. Sparks traces how the first Dominican missionaries to the Maya repurposed native religious ideas, myths, and rhetoric in their efforts to translate a Christianity and how, in this wake, K’iche’ Maya elites began to write their own religious texts, like the Popol Vuh. This ethnohistory of religion critically reexamines the role and value of indigenous authority during the early decades of first contact between a Native American people and Christian missionaries.
 
Centered on the specific work of Dominicans among the Highland Maya of Guatemala in the decades prior to the arrival of the Catholic Reformation in the late sixteenth century, the book focuses on the various understandings of religious analyses—Hispano-Catholic and Maya—and their strategic exchanges, reconfigurations, and resistance through competing efforts of religious translation. Sparks historically contextualizes Vico’s theological treatise within both the wider set of early literature in K’iche’an languages and the intellectual shifts between late medieval thought and early modernity, especially the competing theories of language, ethnography, and semiotics in the humanism of Spain and Mesoamerica at the time.
 
Thorough and original, Rewriting Maya Religion serves as an ethnohistorical frame for continued studies on Highland Maya religious symbols, discourse, practices, and logic dating back to the earliest documented evidence. It will be of great significance to scholars of religion, ethnohistory, linguistics, anthropology, and Latin American history.
 

“Like all writers, intellectuals need to say something new and say it well. But for intellectuals, unlike many other writers, what we have to say is bound up with the books we are reading . . . and the ideas of the people we are talking with.”

What are the moves that an academic writer makes? How does writing as an intellectual change the way we work from sources? In Rewriting, Joseph Harris draws the college writing student away from static ideas of thesis, support, and structure, and toward a more mature and dynamic understanding. Harris wants college writers to think of intellectual writing as an adaptive and social activity, and he offers them a clear set of strategies—a set of moves—for participating in it. Introducing remixing as an additional signature move and updated with new attention to digital writing, the second edition both extends and rethinks the ideas of the original.

Collected in the field from 1915 through 1955, these tales and songs were considered by the publisher at the time to be too salacious for inclusion in Vance Randolph’s Ozark Folksongs. Randolph came to doubt that they would ever appear in print, and they did not in his lifetime.

Roll Me in Your Arms, Volume I of “Unprintable” Ozark Folksongs and Folklore, includes 180 unexpurgated songs collected by Randolph with tunes transcribed from the original singers. Volume II, Blow the Candle Out, contains rhymes and songs without music as well as other unexpurgated Ozark folk materials, including children’s lore, elements in speech, graffiti, riddles, dance calls, and beliefs.

G. Legman’s painstaking and patient editing, annotating, and crossreferencing richly complement the Randolph collection. The result is a look into a previously neglected area in the study of folksong and folklore in the Ozarks and further evidence of Randolph’s preeminence in the field.

The late Vance Randolph lived in the Ozark Mountains from 1920 until his death in 1980. Although he taught folklore at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, he is best remembered for his many years of field research resulting in the national bestseller Pissing in the Snow & Other Ozark Folktales and more than a dozen other books on American folklore.