My friend and colleague Eleanor Wake, who has died of cancer aged 64, was one of the world's leading scholars of early colonial Mexico. Ele was 40 when she embarked on a PhD on this topic, which formed the basis of her book Framing the Sacred: The Indian Churches of Early Colonial Mexico in 2010.
The idea that the many imposing stone churches built by the Christianised Indians of 16th-century Mexico incorporated aspects of Aztec imagery was not new, but Ele demonstrated, with boundless energy and passion, that this is to approach the subject from the wrong direction: rather than manifestations of Christianised Mexico, these churches represent how Christianity was Mexicanised.
At one level it is true that the new churches reflected the expectations of the missionary friars but, much more significantly, they also conformed to entirely Indian religious beliefs, each deliberately embedded within the traditional sacred geography of its locality.
Ele proved this with scrupulous field and archival work. She travelled extensively in central and southern Mexico, studying around 300 early colonial churches, photographing them and calculating their orientation. She found that they were often precisely aligned with significant features in the landscape, and that their richly carved and painted surfaces included innumerable examples of previously overlooked glyphs and motifs referring to Aztec religion – maize, rabbits, the sun, moon and stars, flowers associated with ritual singing, ritual foods – and to hallucinogenic substances.
Her earlier life does not easily explain this passion for colonial Mexico. As a child Ele lived in Hong Kong and Singapore, where her father was pilot in the RAF. She did well at school but turned down a place at university in favour of a bilingual English/Spanish secretarial course. In the early 1970s, she lived in Madrid (there are unconfirmed rumours that she was involved in a pop group) after which she worked in the purser's office on the QE2, where her main responsibility seems to have been to organise flights home for passengers who found a round-the-world cruise too tedious.
In the 1980s she changed tack, moving to Rome to work in the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, where she specialised in development projects in Latin America and the Caribbean. And then to the University of Essex, where after a degree in Latin American studies and an MA in Latin American government and politics, she moved over to art history for her PhD (which I supervised).
With hindsight, there is perhaps some logic here: her enjoyment of travel, her fluency in Spanish and her impatience with disciplinary or cultural boundaries of any kind laid the groundwork for her all-too-brief career as a researcher and academic.