Volume 38 of Relaciones closes with a miscellaneous issue. In “Among Ambassadors, Letters and Popes: Spanish correspondence from Italy and the Tridentine information, 16 ^th century”, Carolina Abadía Quintero evaluates the influence exerted by two monarchs –Charles V and Philip II– on the organization of the Council of Trent through a detailed study of the correspondence they maintained with their ambassadors in Italy in the 16 ^th century. The author’s interest centers on analyzing the posterior effects of that Council on the process of constructing a confessional monarchy. “The agricultural terraces of Sauz Sabino, Hidalgo: 1850-2015”, by Ignacio Gutiérrez Ruvalcaba, examines the recovery of traditional agrarian production strategies –terraces in ravines and along ridges– as the only possible means for peasants to carry out subsistence cultivation in this inhospitable region of the state of Hidalgo. In “An invisible epidemic: smallpox in Sonora, 1869-1871”, José Marcos Medina Bustos and Hiram Félix Rosas probe the endemic and epidemic nature of this case by setting it in the broader context of the epidemics that ravaged Mexico throughout the 19 ^th century. Finally, “Discourses of impulse and rupture of modernity in mining. The case of El Magistral, 1900-1930”, by Eduardo Plazola Meza, focuses on paradoxical mining discourses in the first three decades of the 20^th century.

The article by Juan González Morfín, “The Commission of Bishops in Rome and its support of armed conflict”, presents an account of the combative attitude of the group of three Mexican bishops who traveled to Rome in the context of the conflict of 1926. “From the ephemeral to the enduring, Christian religion’s stamp on the land-scape: the construction system of early religious edifices in the Acámbaro region”, by Karine Lefebvre, proposes an explanation of the diversity of building morphologies, materials and techniques visible in 16^th -century missionary installations. In “Cosmopolitics versus ethnonationalism. Conflicts over ritual uses of space in Wirikuta”, Mauricio Guzmán Chávez and Olivia Kindl analyze the social conflict caused by mineral exploitation in the highlands of Potosí, which affect the sacred and ritual sites of diverse actors. In their article, “Debates on the concept of the ‘historical novel’. Proposals from the dialogue between historiography and literary criticism”, Gerardo Morales Jasso and Víctor Manuel Bañuelos Aquino revisit this long implicit dilemma in the relation between history and literature, but shift the analytical framework from the Humanities to the Social Sciences. In the Documents section, Martín Escobedo Delgado offers a compendium of the diverse criminal suits brought against Teodosio Lares, one of Santa Anna’s ex-ministers.

This issue of Relaciones includes an ample Notes and Debates section devoted to relations among anthropology, memory and history. Stimulated by the publication of the Spanish translation of Alba Bensa’s book, El fin del exotismo (The End of Exoticism), a meeting was held in which the author presented reflections on the theoretical-methodological proposals developed in that work, while Andrew Roth (“Historical particularism in a relational-methodological orientation”) and Luis Arrioja (“The end of exoticism and its disciplinary schemes”), present profound commentaries on the book. Parallel to this, Esteban Salmon Perrillat submitted his thoughts on Bensa’s book in an article entitled, “Empathy as methodology: a recipe against exoticism”, which we decided to integrate into this dialogue between anthropologists and historians.

This December 13^th marks the 14^th anniversary of the passing of Don Luis González y González, founder of El Colegio de Michoacán. As a tribute to Don Luis –and to the recently-deceased historian Álvaro Matute– this issue ends with reflections on González’ works and French historiography presented by Thomas Calvo.