Camilla Townsend

“The interesting thing about Malintzin’s life, and what Townsend’s book is about, is how this woman of – from a political point of view – very obscure origins, from a powerless, subordinate social position becomes one of the most important players in what we have come to call the Conquest of Mexico.” Read more...

The best books on Mexican history

Timo Schaefer, Historian

“It’s a ground-breaking book in many ways. Camilla Townsend has been doing work on this for a while at what you might call a high scholarly level, and this is an attempt to take that learning to a slightly wider audience…She has access to these documents called xiuhpohualli, which she translates as ‘yearly accounts’, but they are the Nahuatl people’s annals and, using these, she concentrates on a period of roughly about a hundred years either side of Hernan Cortes’s arrival. She is very concerned not to portray the Mexica, the Aztecs, as these people who indulge in human sacrifice and all the other things we know from Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. But it does go on and the human sacrifice actually increases with time.” Read more...

The Best History Books of 2020

Paul Lay, Historian