Julia Madajczak
Biographic Data
| ID | 221392 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Julia Madajczak |
| GIVEN NAMES | Julia |
| FAMILY NAME | Madajczak |
| SIGNATURE | MADAJCZAK J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Warsaw |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6309-2243 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Beyond Mictlan
This article attempts to clarify the nature and structure of the Nahua otherworlds. It follows in the footsteps of scholars who have demonstrated the inaccuracy of the Sahaguntine view of the Nahua destinations of the dead. The article begins by analyzing multiple Mesoamerican alphabetic and graphic accounts of journeys to the world beyond, and concludes that the Nahua divided their supernatural dimension into two parts, classified by the numbers…
Kelly S. McDonough. Indigenous Science and Technology
Nahua Fasting in a Series of Don'ts
Although the precontact Nahua nezahualiztli ritual received significant coverage in historical sources, the Christian discourse of these sources misinterpreted it as either fasting or penance, inscribing nezahualiztli in the Western idea of the sacred. In order to learn more about the Nahua worldview, this article uses methods derived from philology, cognitive linguistics, and anthropology to reconstruct the meaning that nezahualiztli had for the…
Sisters, liaisons, and dangerous things
This article unpacks a Nahuatl metaphor based on the kin term hueltiuh, “man's elder sister,” used in multiple sixteenth-century Nahuatl texts and their Spanish derivatives. Through a minute analysis of several Nahua stories, the article identifies various roles described with this term: spies, “toothed-vagina” femmes fatales, heart-eating monsters, and seducers. Applying a method borrowed from cognitive linguistics, it then constructs a model of…
The Bathed Ones
In the sixteenth century, Fray Diego Durán gave rise to a scholarly myth that the primary purpose of Nahua ritual baths was "purification." This article deconstructs his interpretation, focusing on baths performed on deities' impersonators (ixiptla), and particularly the so-called tlaaltiltin, "bathed ones." It argues that "baths," which often consisted of merely sprinkling one's face with water, had, above all, a transformative power. In the cas…
Fragments of the Sixteenth-Century Nahuatl Census from the Jagiellonian Library
Fragments of the Sixteenth-Century Nahuatl Census from the Jagiellonian Library: A Lost Manuscript provides a missing chunk of the sixteenth century Marquesado census—one of the earliest known texts in Nahuatl. In the critical edition of this manuscript, Julia Madajczak, Katarzyna Granicka, Szymon Gruda, Monika Jaglarz, and José Luis de Rojas reveal how it traveled across the Atlantic only to be lost during World War II and then rediscovered at t…
Loans in Colonial and Modern Nahuatl
Guardians of Idolatry
The Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions and Customs That Today Live among the Indians Native to This New Spain, 1629, by Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, is one of the most significant, but at the same time puzzling, sources on Nahua colonial culture. Several decades after the greatest works of Nahua missionary ethnography (such as Bernardino de Sahagún's Florentine Codex) had been completed, Ruiz de Alarcón, who was a creole priest, documented native…
An Animating Principle in Confrontation With Christianity? De(re)constructing the Nahua “Soul
Yoliais one of the principal indigenous terms present in Christian Nahua terminology in the first decades of European contact. It is employed for “soul” or “spirit” and often forms a doublet withánimain Nahuatl texts of an ecclesiastical, devotional, or secular nature. The term-yolia/teyoliahas also lived a rich and fascinating life in scholarly literature. Its etymology (“the means for one's living”) is strikingly similar to that of the Spanish …
Toward a Deconstruction of the Notion of Nahua “Confession”
Life-Giver
This paper explores the ancient Nahua concept of “father,” employing early Colonial sources written in both Nahuatl and Spanish. A careful contextual analysis of the occurrences of various Nahuatl terms for “father” or “parent” leads to the conclusion that the principal criterion for creating their metaphorical extensions differed considerably from parallel Spanish criterion. While the latter referred to the power relationship (“father” is the on…
Teotamachilizti
The article analyses the document teotamachilizti, a sermon in a Nahuan language from colonial Guatemala. It concludes that the language is a Central Nahuan language closely related to "classical Nahuatl", but with some features of an Eastern Nahuan language closely related to Pipil Nawat. It is suggested that the document was written by an ecclesiastic who was schooled in Central Mexican Nahuatl, but who was adapting the sermon to a local audien…
Diálogo con Europa, diálogo con el pasado. Antepasados y tradición entre la nobleza colonial nahua
In this paper we discuss the ways in which the Nahua nobility referred to the past as reflected in the testimonies of the colonial period. The reading of sources allows us to distinguish two perspectives: intellectual and pragmatic. While the first of them was closely linked to attempts of combining the indigenous and European historical traditions, the second one involved the quest for arguments in an ongoing struggle for land and privileges. We…
An Animating Principle in Confrontation With Christianity? De(re)constructing the Nahua “Soul
Yoliais one of the principal indigenous terms present in Christian Nahua terminology in the first decades of European contact. It is employed for “soul” or “spirit” and often forms a doublet withánimain Nahuatl texts of an ecclesiastical, devotional, or secular nature. The term-yolia/teyoliahas also lived a rich and fascinating life in scholarly literature. Its etymology (“the means for one's living”) is strikingly similar to that of the Spanish …
Nahua Fasting in a Series of Don'ts
Although the precontact Nahua nezahualiztli ritual received significant coverage in historical sources, the Christian discourse of these sources misinterpreted it as either fasting or penance, inscribing nezahualiztli in the Western idea of the sacred. In order to learn more about the Nahua worldview, this article uses methods derived from philology, cognitive linguistics, and anthropology to reconstruct the meaning that nezahualiztli had for the…
The Bathed Ones
In the sixteenth century, Fray Diego Durán gave rise to a scholarly myth that the primary purpose of Nahua ritual baths was "purification." This article deconstructs his interpretation, focusing on baths performed on deities' impersonators (ixiptla), and particularly the so-called tlaaltiltin, "bathed ones." It argues that "baths," which often consisted of merely sprinkling one's face with water, had, above all, a transformative power. In the cas…
Life-Giver
This paper explores the ancient Nahua concept of “father,” employing early Colonial sources written in both Nahuatl and Spanish. A careful contextual analysis of the occurrences of various Nahuatl terms for “father” or “parent” leads to the conclusion that the principal criterion for creating their metaphorical extensions differed considerably from parallel Spanish criterion. While the latter referred to the power relationship (“father” is the on…
Loans in Colonial and Modern Nahuatl
Teotamachilizti
The article analyses the document teotamachilizti, a sermon in a Nahuan language from colonial Guatemala. It concludes that the language is a Central Nahuan language closely related to "classical Nahuatl", but with some features of an Eastern Nahuan language closely related to Pipil Nawat. It is suggested that the document was written by an ecclesiastic who was schooled in Central Mexican Nahuatl, but who was adapting the sermon to a local audien…
Diálogo con Europa, diálogo con el pasado. Antepasados y tradición entre la nobleza colonial nahua
In this paper we discuss the ways in which the Nahua nobility referred to the past as reflected in the testimonies of the colonial period. The reading of sources allows us to distinguish two perspectives: intellectual and pragmatic. While the first of them was closely linked to attempts of combining the indigenous and European historical traditions, the second one involved the quest for arguments in an ongoing struggle for land and privileges. We…
Toward a Deconstruction of the Notion of Nahua “Confession”
Life-Giver
This paper explores the ancient Nahua concept of “father,” employing early Colonial sources written in both Nahuatl and Spanish. A careful contextual analysis of the occurrences of various Nahuatl terms for “father” or “parent” leads to the conclusion that the principal criterion for creating their metaphorical extensions differed considerably from parallel Spanish criterion. While the latter referred to the power relationship (“father” is the on…
An Animating Principle in Confrontation With Christianity? De(re)constructing the Nahua “Soul
Yoliais one of the principal indigenous terms present in Christian Nahua terminology in the first decades of European contact. It is employed for “soul” or “spirit” and often forms a doublet withánimain Nahuatl texts of an ecclesiastical, devotional, or secular nature. The term-yolia/teyoliahas also lived a rich and fascinating life in scholarly literature. Its etymology (“the means for one's living”) is strikingly similar to that of the Spanish …
Fragments of the Sixteenth-Century Nahuatl Census from the Jagiellonian Library
Fragments of the Sixteenth-Century Nahuatl Census from the Jagiellonian Library: A Lost Manuscript provides a missing chunk of the sixteenth century Marquesado census—one of the earliest known texts in Nahuatl. In the critical edition of this manuscript, Julia Madajczak, Katarzyna Granicka, Szymon Gruda, Monika Jaglarz, and José Luis de Rojas reveal how it traveled across the Atlantic only to be lost during World War II and then rediscovered at t…
Loans in Colonial and Modern Nahuatl
Guardians of Idolatry
The Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions and Customs That Today Live among the Indians Native to This New Spain, 1629, by Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, is one of the most significant, but at the same time puzzling, sources on Nahua colonial culture. Several decades after the greatest works of Nahua missionary ethnography (such as Bernardino de Sahagún's Florentine Codex) had been completed, Ruiz de Alarcón, who was a creole priest, documented native…
The Bathed Ones
In the sixteenth century, Fray Diego Durán gave rise to a scholarly myth that the primary purpose of Nahua ritual baths was "purification." This article deconstructs his interpretation, focusing on baths performed on deities' impersonators (ixiptla), and particularly the so-called tlaaltiltin, "bathed ones." It argues that "baths," which often consisted of merely sprinkling one's face with water, had, above all, a transformative power. In the cas…
Nahua Fasting in a Series of Don'ts
Although the precontact Nahua nezahualiztli ritual received significant coverage in historical sources, the Christian discourse of these sources misinterpreted it as either fasting or penance, inscribing nezahualiztli in the Western idea of the sacred. In order to learn more about the Nahua worldview, this article uses methods derived from philology, cognitive linguistics, and anthropology to reconstruct the meaning that nezahualiztli had for the…
Sisters, liaisons, and dangerous things
This article unpacks a Nahuatl metaphor based on the kin term hueltiuh, “man's elder sister,” used in multiple sixteenth-century Nahuatl texts and their Spanish derivatives. Through a minute analysis of several Nahua stories, the article identifies various roles described with this term: spies, “toothed-vagina” femmes fatales, heart-eating monsters, and seducers. Applying a method borrowed from cognitive linguistics, it then constructs a model of…
Kelly S. McDonough. Indigenous Science and Technology
Beyond Mictlan
This article attempts to clarify the nature and structure of the Nahua otherworlds. It follows in the footsteps of scholars who have demonstrated the inaccuracy of the Sahaguntine view of the Nahua destinations of the dead. The article begins by analyzing multiple Mesoamerican alphabetic and graphic accounts of journeys to the world beyond, and concludes that the Nahua divided their supernatural dimension into two parts, classified by the numbers…
Latin American history and culture (12 works) · History (11 works) · Archaeology (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Colonialism (6 works) · Nahuatl (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Linguistics (5 works) · History (4 works) · Indigenous Cultures and Socio-Education (4 works)