From Proto-Theologia to K’iche’an Títulos: Dialogical Tracings of a Maya Catholicism

In 2004 the U.S. Library of Congress acquired its only set of manuscripts written in highland Mayan languages -- a small, sixteenth-century, leather bound volume catalogued as Kislak Manuscript 1015. Based on intertextual analysis with other early post-contact texts written in K’iche’an languages by both mendicants and Maya elites, this paper will argue that core folios date to 1552 in Kislak Ms 1015 and correspond to both volume one of the first original theology written in the Americas—the 1553-4 Theologia Indorum by Friar Domingo de Vico, O.P.—as well as later notarial texts written by highland Maya and, thus, pushes back the “start date” of a traceable reception ethnohistory of Christianity in the Americas.