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260 BENEDICT VADAKKEKARA sixteenth century confraternities were devoted to figures or beliefs under attack such as the Eucharist, the Holy Family, or the Immaculate Conception" (12). J.F. Schwaller aptly situates the confraternities in their perspective, when he writes in the Introduction: "The fact that the native peoples adopted European institutions such as the cofradia, and that they maintained the internal records in their native languages, stands as a memorial to the skill and talents of those people, coping with the presence of the Europeans among them" (XIII). As clearly indicated by the title the volume's main focus is on the 1552 or– dinances of Fr Alonso de Molina. The ordinances have several variants, the three principal ones being the texts preserved in the "Bancroft Library" (Uni– versity of California, Berkeley), the "Latin American Library" (Tulane Univer– sity" and the "Biblioteca del Museo Nacional de Antropologia" (Mexico) re– spectively. All the three are of the year 1552 and are versions of the same document and carry the date 18 September 1552 while the 1570 Ordinances from Tula and the 1619 Ordinances from San Miguel Coyotlan have a diverse origin (1). In the light of the existence of these variants, the reasons for the book's internal divisions become clear. The contents are grouped together in two neat sections: Essqys and Texts. The essays are: Barry D. Sell, Molina 1552: The Manuscript (1-1 O); Larissa Taylor, Molina 1552: A European perspective (11-21); Asuncion Lavrin, Confraternities in Colonial Spanish America (23-40); Barry D. Sell, The Molina Confraternity &ties of 1552 (41-68). The following are the texts: Tran– scription and translation guidelines (75£); Outline summary ofthe Ordinances of 1552 (77- 79); UCB Molina 1552: Nahuatl and English (81-141); Tulane Molina 1552 (143- 162); MNA Molina 1552 (163-183). If in Europe towns and cities had become the nursery for the mush– rooming of confraternities and guilds, in the New World it was predomi– nantly in the countryside that the phenomenon manifested itself. Going back to the origin of the confraternities in Mexico and Peru in the third and fourth decades of the sixteenth century, A. Lavrin calculates that by 1585 among the American natives there had sprung up over 300 cofradias. But in the latter half of the sixteenth century in the wake of the promulgation of the Tridentine ecclesiastical policies, the phenomenon often came under close scrutiny, as "colonial synods and conciliar meetings were recommending the control of foundations and a greater supervision of the internal affairs of confraternities, especially those founded for and by indigenous groups and blacks" (24). Lavrin's discussion of the built-in spiritual, social and economic factors in– volved in the origin, spread and flourishing of the confraternities (26-35) casts much light also on the inner dynamics of the social reality of the cofradia in the