The Florentine Codex

An Encyclopedia of the Nahua World in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2829669
AutoresD M Carballo (0000-0002-9546-6318, Boston University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2021
Volumen101
Número3
Páginas510-511
Fecha de publicación2021-08-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
EditorialDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-9051951
OpenAlexW3184452699
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas7

This year marks the quincentenary of the fall of the Mexica-Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan and the surrender by its great speaker (huey tlatoani), Cuauhtemoc, to Hernando Cortés and allied forces at the sister city of Tlatelolco. It is therefore exceptionally timely to welcome this rigorous, interdisciplinary, and engaging treatment of the most consequential manuscript on the Aztec or Nahua worlds, largely assembled in the same Tlatelolco: the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, otherwise known as the Florentine Codex. Over three decades (1547–77) under the editorial coordination of the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, Nahua scribes recorded alphabetic text in Classical Nahuatl (earlier in the process) and illustrations (later in the process), which were joined in the text by Sahagún's translation of the first to Castilian. The resulting compilation is without a doubt the single most comprehensive source of information from the sixteenth century on a Native culture of the Americas.Jeanette Favrot Peterson and Kevin Terraciano's edited volume analyzing the Florentine Codex features contributions from exemplary specialists and is richly illustrated with graphic reproductions from the manuscript and Sahagún's earlier Primeros memoriales. This attention to imagery is appropriate as the editors present the volume as the first to consider simultaneously all three narratives of the Florentine Codex—the texts in Nahuatl and Spanish and the illustrations by Native scribes. Nearly all 13 chapters plus the introduction query both text and image, from the perspective of either more textually based historians or art historians. Chapters are divided in four thematic parts dealing respectively with issues of translation, elite history and governance, cosmology and the natural world, and rhetoric and social discourse. The first part includes contributions that address how images intersect with authorship and translation (Favrot Peterson's chapter), the manuscript's reception and translation in Italy (Ida Giovanna Rao's chapter), the conquest narrative of book 12 (Terraciano's chapter), and hybridity in image aesthetics (Pablo Escalante Gonzalbo's chapter). Part 2 includes treatments of deities (by Eloise Quiñones Keber), rulers and deities (by Elizabeth Hill Boone), and the complex and nuanced Nahuatl term teotl (by Guilhem Olivier). Part 3 addresses the lacustrine environment of the Aztec imperial core (Barbara Mundy's chapter), the sacred nature of tlaquimilolli bundles (Molly Bassett's chapter), and the different audiences for text and images regarding ritual and deity impersonators (Diana Magaloni Kerpel's chapter). Part 4 contains essays on rhetoric and acculturation viewed through book 6 of the codex (by Favrot Peterson), moral discourse in book 10 (by Lisa Sousa), and Nahua notions of how this moral discourse was embodied (by Ellen Baird).The breadth of coverage in the chapters gives some indication of the breadth of the Florentine Codex's 12 books and why its assembly has earned Sahagún the lofty but somewhat problematic title of “first anthropologist of the Americas.” In the introduction, Terraciano charts the production chronology of the manuscript and situates its organization within the encyclopedic models that Sahagún would have been familiar with. Among these are the Etymologiae compiled by Isidore of Seville in the early seventh century and reproduced widely in Castile during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which covers the same major themes as the Florentine Codex. Yet Sahagún's coverage and classification schemes also share similarities with other medieval and classical works, including the thirteenth-century General estoria, recorded by the court of Alfonso X in Castilian rather than Latin—a relatively early application of the regional vernacular.The relative influence of earlier texts is explored by multiple contributors, as are the aesthetic conventions drawn from contemporary Mesoamerican and European art on the codex's over-1,800 images. In general, the Nahuatl text tends to be longer than Sahagún's translation, which are given side by side; the resulting gaps in the Spanish column are filled with illustrations. This applies to many of the codex's descriptions of Nahua material culture. There are some exceptions to this, however, such as one noted by Terraciano in book 12 where the translation goes into detail regarding depictions of deities, likely as a means of identifying what the Franciscan perceived to be idolatrous practices. In gleaning aspects of Nahua thought in the text that might predate the arrival of the Spaniards or be less inflected by colonial-period acculturation, contributors note rhetorical practices in Nahuatl such as repetitive phrases that bring nuanced connotations to a description and the use of difrasismo, the joining of two terms into a single metaphoric unit. Examples of repetition are seen in a passage from book 11 describing jaguars (analyzed by Bassett) and in the transcription of the orally transmitted “speech of the elders” (huehuetlatolli) in book 6 (analyzed by Favrot Peterson and others). Examples of difrasismo are addressed in Olivier's discussion of connections between notions of sacredness and water, including the central Nahua concept of “water-fire” (atl-tlachinolli) and the joining of sky and water in the sea (ilhuicaatl, “sky water”) (pp. 32, 114). Probing such rhetorical conventions brings us closer to understanding the words and minds of early colonial Nahuas, which this superb book assures will live on some five centuries after tragic attempts to erase them

Archaeology · Art · Humanities · Nahuatl · Classics · History · Latin American history and culture