"Pastoral Quechua" tells the story of how the Catholic church in post-conquest Peru attempted to "incarnate" Christianity in Quechua, the principal language family of the former Inca empire. These efforts resulted in the development and imposition of an official, standardized form of Quechua and of an extensive catechetical, liturgical, and devotional literature for use in parishes throughout the Andes. The book explores this Quechua-language Christian literature from historical, linguistic, and textual angles to reveal missionary translation as a highly strategic and contested activity on the front lines of Spanish colonialism in the Andes.