Includes bibliographical references and index.

Rethinking Indigenous devotions in central Mexico -- Before 1571 : disciplinary humanism and exemplary punishment -- Local cosmologies and secular extirpators in Nahua communities, 1571-1662 -- Secular and civil campaigns against native devotions in Oaxaca, 1571-1660 -- Literate idolatries : clandestine Nahua and Zapotec ritual texts in the seventeenth century -- After 1660 : punitive experiments against idolatry -- In the care of God the father : northern Zapotec ancestral observances, 1691-1706 -- From idolatry to maleficio : reform, factionalism, and institutional conflicts in the eighteenth century -- A colonial archipelago of faith.

After the conquest of Mexico, colonial authorities attempted to enforce Christian beliefs among Indigenous peoples--a project they envisioned as spiritual warfare. The Invisible War assesses this immense but dislocated project by examining all known efforts to obliterate native devotions of Mesoamerican origin between the 1530s and the late eighteenth century in Central Mexico.

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