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This document was first published in Beyond the Codices, eds. Arthur J.O. Anderson, Frances Berdan, and James Lockhart (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center, 1976), Doc. 5, 68–73. It is from AGN Tierras 1735, exp. 2. However, the transcription, translation, and a new introduction presented here come from Lockhart's personal papers. [Introduction by James Lockhart:] In many ways the present testament, written in 1695, closely resembles testaments preceding it, even as early as the second half of the sixteenth century. But in some respects it bears the marks of a new age. Right at the beginning we see the heading Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, something lacking in the earlier wills. Generally speaking, use of the Holy Family in this way seems to become a convention around the last decade of the seventeenth century. A far more basic characteristic of the present text is that household saints are very prominent, indeed the most salient feature of the text. The earlier testaments fail to mention household saints even once. We tend to imagine the household saints cult as the hallmark of Nahua popular religion, and indeed it was by some time in the second half of the seventeenth century. The beginnings can be found already in the sixteenth, but even in a source like the Testaments of Culhuacan, the only comparable phenomena are a few home crosses and crucifixes, and they are not bequeathed to specific family members as they were later. In the early seventeenth century the home saints cult grew, and we have evidence of it in Doc. 19 here, dated 1621, where an individual had in his home not only representations of the Trinity, Christ, and Mary, but of three normal saints. Yet these images were donated to the church. In the present text the development has reached its culmination. Specific saint images held by the testator Angelina are carefully allocated to the descendants, along with assets meant to support both their cult and the heirs. The translation puts “image of” in brackets before the saints’ names where applicable. In most versions done today one would just speak of the saints, as the indigenous people themselves overwhelming did, and as is done in the present testament. But the word image is added to provide complete clarity for those not accustomed to the phenomenon of household saints, and because in the first edition of this collection the team, being very inexperienced, did not realize what was involved and wrongly thought that the children were being given or dedicated to ecclesiastical entities of some kind! The saints, by the way, could be represented by either paintings or statues. The Holy Family heading and the fully developed household saints cult can both be considered hallmarks of Stage 3, but that does not mean that they necessarily were full blown around mid-seventeenth century. In the first case, late in the century seems indicated as the time, and there are now reasons to believe that the same may be true with the saints as well, though here there are more hints of earlier anticipations. As we gather significant nuclei of documents from more regions of the Nahua world, it appears there may have been some chronological differences between them, and also that whereas 1640–50 can certainly be called the time of the onset of Stage 3, many aspects of the process may not have reached maturity or generality until around 1700. Much is still to be learned. Angelina has a very respectable amount of land. The two largest pieces, of 40 quahuitl, go to a grandson Tomás de los Santos and a granddaughter Teresa de Jesús along with a saint in each case, the Virgin of Candelaria to the grandson and Santa Catalina to the granddaughter. Thus a specific piece of land is associated with a specific saint and in some sense can be thought to belong to that saint (which is sometimes actually said, though not here). Some smaller assets go to two other grandchildren, also one male and one female. Another building, perhaps delapidated, goes to another granddaughter to serve the Virgin of the Rosary. In this case it is not entirely clear whether the asset is given to the grandchild or the saint, nor whether Angelina also possesses an image of this saint or is simply saying that the granddaughter is to serve her in the abstract or in a form existing in a church. A house in Angelina’s complex, though apparently not the main one, is given outright to Santa Catalina to be her home or residence (“ichantzinco”). This must be the same Santa Catalina given to the granddaughter, Teresa de Jesús, who can therefore be seen as the preferred heir. Possibly Teresa is intended to live in the building. But taking the words at their face value, we have here a santocalli, a “saint-house” (though that word is not used here), which by many indications was the predominant way of keeping saints in the earlier stages of the cult, whereas eventually keeping them at an altar or altars in the main residential building of the inhabitants seems to have become the usual way. Much is still to be learned about this matter as well. Thus two large pieces of land and two buildings, a majority of Angelina’s assets, are earmarked in some way for saints. We seem to be approaching the point that is seen in some documents from central Mexico of this time and later, where a particular saint appears to be identified with nearly every holding and also with a particular descendant as a symbol of the new family that he or she will establish. Yet as more and more testaments appear from more regions, we do not normally see this scheme carried out rigidly. There were more pieces of land than saints available. A certain sense of a female world emerges from this text. All three saints mentioned are female. Of the first pair of grandchildren, the female receives the primary saint and may get a building along with it, which her brother does not. With the second pair of grandchildren, again the girl gets a house and the boy does not. Notice that everything so far mentioned overtly or implicitly goes to grandchildren, though Angelina mentions her son-in-law and his wife, who receive as their inheritance what appears to be the main residential building. In speaking of her son-in-law’s spouse instead of calling her her own daughter, Angelina is apparently telling us that the son-in-law was first married to her daughter, who died, and that the son-in-law is now married for a second time. This explains the reserve shown toward the pair, with Angelina giving the majority of the estate directly to grandchildren. The son-in-law and his wife, however, are implicitly in charge of what is left to the grandchildren, at least those who are living in the home complex (which appears to have the usual arrangement of several buildings around a patio, though the information does not suffice to reconstruct it exactly). Nothing is more typical of Nahuatl testament structure than the inclusion at the end of each command or bequest a statement we call a “peroration,” an exhortation to carry it out or warning to those who violate it. The peroration is characteristic of the majority testaments in the entire Nahuatl corpus. Though based in precontact oral practice, it did not take over immediately in written wills. Notice that not a one of the testaments preceding this one, dated from 1566 to 1622 as mentioned earlier, shows any perorations at all. Yet this is not a Stage 3 phenomenon as such. Perorations come in gradually in the late sixteenth century and are at least common in the first half of the seventeenth before becoming dominant and consistent later. Just when they took over remains to be seen; consistent perorations are surely expected in texts as time progresses, though they never became universal. In the present text every single command has a peroration, the common neltiz mochihuaz, “it is to be carried out and performed,” or some abbreviation of or slight variation upon it. In substance and wording Angelina’s testament, as already asserted, has a great deal in common with the earlier comparable texts in the collection. The reader will see it without assistance. Most of these things were general survivals or continuities on into later times. Here we have one survival that is perhaps exceptional for the time of the text’s composition. Early Nahuatl alphabetic texts, through most if not all of Stage 2, often named more witnesses than was the Spanish practice, and they included both men and women, with a group of women listed second in order under the heading cihuatzitzintin (“the women”). Doc. 3 here, dated 1617, has that structure, though the witnesses are not very numerous. In Stage 3, witnesses gradually became typically fewer in number and all male, following the Spanish pattern. In the present text, the older pattern has been preserved until 1695; in the witness list the names of four ordinary men without office or the title don are followed by the traditional cihuatzitzintin and the names of two female witnesses. In line 18, the church mentioned is no doubt that of the neighboring tlaxilacalli of Santo Domingo Huexotitlan referred to in Doc. 17. In line 42 the original “juceph de la yncarnacion” is translated as Josefa de la Encarnación presuming an inadvertent omission, partly because of the logic of the situation and partly because the second name Encarnacíon was given mainly to women. In lines 45–46 “callatiltontli” is translated speculatively as “small ruined shack or the like” on the basis of Molina’s entry “callatelli,” “place where houses used to be.” In line 55, “tlalpatlalli” is probably for tlalpantlalli, with tlalpan being on the ground, low, thus “low land.” But possibly it is for tlal-patla-l-li, land that has been exchanged.