Bibliographic Essay

Although numerous case studies relevant to the topic of human sacrifice and ritual violence in the Americas exist, very few works provide overviews or comparisons. Therefore, two lengthy articles, though somewhat dated, remain essential.

Reuben Gold Thwaites (ed.), The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791, 73 vols. (Cleveland, OH: Burrow Bros., 1896-1901) is an indispensable collection of source material on Amerindian cultures and Indian-European relations which includes a wealth of information on ritual violence in eastern North America.

Anthony Pagden provides a thorough discussion of European perspectives on the American Indian from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries in The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and The Burdens of Empire: 1539 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). See also Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). John Chuchiak's PhD thesis, ‘The Indian Inquisition and the Extirpation of Idolatry: The Process of Punishment in the Provisorato de Indios of the Diocese of Yucatan, 1563-1812', Tulane University, 2000, offers a painstaking discussion of the repression of Amerindian ritual practices in the south-east of colonial Mexico. A concise long­term assessment of colonial violence in Latin America from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries can be found in Wolfgang Gabbert, ‘The Longue Duree of Colonial Violence in Latin America', Historical Social Research 37.3 (2012), 254-75. The contributions of Bruce Trigger and William Swagerty, ‘Entertaining Strangers: North America in the Sixteenth Century', and Neal Salisbury, ‘Native People and European Settlers in Eastern North America, 1600-1783', both in Bruce Trigger and Wilcomb Washburn (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol.

For the debate on anthropophagy see W. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology & Anthropophagy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) and ‘Rethinking Anthropophagy', in F. Barker, P. Hulme and M. Iversen (eds.), Cannibalism and the Colonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 39-62, as well as Shirley Lindenbaum, ‘Thinking about Cannibalism', Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004), 475-98 and Laurence R. Goldman (ed.), The Anthropology of Cannibalism (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1999). The latter includes Michael Pickering's succinct discussion of the difficulties in interpreting evidence for cannibalism (‘Consuming Doubts: What Some People Ate? Or What Some People Swallowed?', pp. 55-67). For overviews and case studies of human sacrifice see the classic study of Nigel Davies, Human Sacrifice (New York: William Morrow, 1981) and Jan N. Bremmer (ed.), The Strange World of Human Sacrifice (Leuven: Peeters, 2007). Thomas S. Abler, ‘Iroquois Cannibalism: Fact not Fiction', Ethnohistory 27.4 (1980), 309-16 makes a strong argument for the existence of ritual cannibalism among the Iroquois. Richard Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires. The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2016) provides a comprehensive history of corpse medicine in Europe up to the eighteenth century.

Further references concerning ritual violence, particularly in the stratified indigenous societies of Latin America, are to be found in the Bibliographic Essay accompanying Chapter 19 of Volume ii of this series.