The Aztec Kings The Construction of Rulership in Mexican History

Winner of the American Society for Ethnohistory's Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize

"Gillespie has put the myth back into Mexica history and shown that the often tedious accounts of royal marriages and accessions are really mirrors of the Nahua mentality, which continued to shape the past in its own terms even after an invasion that challenged all definitions of past, present, and future."-Ethnohistory

"A readable book for the general reader and for the expert."-Choice

"A brilliant new synthesis of the many confusing and contradictory Aztec documents. . . . The Aztec Kings is a study of the nature of rulership, and as such it is a major contribution to the cross-cultural literature of symbolic-structuralist analysis of historical traditions."-Prudence M. Rice, American Anthropologist