RESEÑAS © 2022 unam. Esta obra es de acceso abierto y se distribuye bajo la licencia Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial 4.0 Internacional https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/deed.es Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl vol. 64 (julio-diciembre 2022): 328-336 issn 0071-1675 Michael D. Mathiowetz and Andrew D. Turner, eds. 2021. Flower Worlds: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Claudia BRITTENHAM https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6753-905X University of Chicago (Estados Unidos) brittenham@uchicago.edu What is a flower world? The essays in this volume respond to and expand upon Jane Hill’s influential 1992 article “The Flower World of Old Uto- Aztecan,” in which Hill identified “a complex system of spirituality cen- tered on metaphors of flowers” as a key component of “the cultural rep- ertoire of many of the prehistoric and historic peoples of the [United States] Southwest and Mesoamerica” (Hill 1992, 117). Relying primarily on songs and other kinds of texts, Hill emphasized shared themes of shift- ing chromatic brilliance, birds, butterflies, flowers, and flames, often as- sociated with spirit lands and “timeless worlds parallel to our own” (Hill 1992, 127). This essay has proved generative for a whole range of subse- quent studies of archaeological, colonial, and modern cultures (Burkhart 1992; Hays-Gilpin and Hill 1999; 2000; Taube 2004), and this volume continues in this productive vein, with a range of studies of ancient and contemporary flower worlds. This volume emphasizes two key refinements of Hill’s framework. First, in contrast to the unitary Flower World that Hill described, from the title onwards, this book affirms that there were multiple flower worlds, locally- specific and culturally-dependent manifestations of a shared set of ideas (Oswaldo Chinchilla-Mazariegos is credited by several authors for stressing this distinction in the seminar that preceded the volume). From this emerg- es the realization that, appropriately enough, there are no stable character- istics that are shared by all the elusive and ever-shifting flower words; in- stead, Hill and Hays-Gilpin’s work serves to identify a polythetic list of traits that may signify the presence of a flower world complex. Second, multiple authors stress the importance of treating flower worlds as real