Barbara E Mundy
Biographic Data
| ID | 169964 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Barbara E Mundy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Barbara E |
| FAMILY NAME | Mundy |
| SIGNATURE | MUNDY B E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Fordham University |
| ORCID | 0009-0000-1990-8316 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 46 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Sobre Kelly McDonough, Indigenous Science and Technology. Nahuas and the World Around Them
Reseña de Kelly McDonough, Indigenous Science and Technology. Nahuas and the World Around Them (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2024). 328 pp
T he M aterial W ord: Indigenous Knowledge and Christian Texts in the Braidense Lectionary
This article examines a rare sixteenth-century manuscript lectionary (Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Manoscritti, AH._X.9) containing Nahuatl translations of Biblical texts, long associated with Bernardino de Sahagún and the Franciscan evangelization project in New Spain. Through interdisciplinary analysis combining ethnohistory, art history, and conservation, the authors illuminate Indigenous roles in colonial knowledge production. The lectiona…
From Acoma to the Bajío: Indigenous Arts and the Fault Lines of Colonialism
Presidential Address: Rock, Paper, Scissors-Ethnohistory and an Indigenous Archive
The archive, broadly construed, plays a central role in the construction of histories of an Indigenous past. Offering a reflection on its limits and omissions, this essay uses two case studies. One centers on In'zhúje'waxóbe, a massive rock sacred to the Kanza and other peoples of the present-day Kansas region. The other considers a Nahuatl book of sermons written on Native paper whose creation was overseen by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún…
How to Make a New Spain: The Material Worlds of Colonial Mexico City
Indigenous image theory
Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, which contains an account of the origins of painting, offered sixteenth-century European artists a gift as they struggled to advance the status of painting as an intellectual rather than a mechanical art. The Roman authority was also read by Indigenous intellectuals in New Spain; they described their autochthonous painting practice in an account written in the Nahuatl language to respond to Pliny. This article o…
The colonial archive and its fictions
The archive has played a crucial role in art historical scholarship in helping to flesh out the identities of colonial artists, scribes, and writers. But the vagaries of history, colonialist violences, and postcolonial regimes mean that the archives undergirding such study are particularly unstable. This essay treats the role of archives (their lacunae as well as their surpluses) in shaping the historical methods and scholarly desires around thes…
The 2022 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: Mexica Space and Habsburg Time
The Aztec (Mexica) city of Tenochtitlan was transformed after the Spanish invasion of 1519–21 into a staging ground for Habsburg colonial experiments. Indigenous response is glimpsed in this essay through the lens of annals, written in Nahuatl, that document urban festivals celebrating Spanish Habsburg monarchs. I argue that the redeployment of particular spaces—long charged with meaning by Indigenous residents—was crucial to the public legitimac…
Dating the Mapa Uppsala of Mexico-Tenochtitlan
The Mapa Uppsala is the earliest known map of sixteenth-century Mexico City that was painted by indigenous artists after the city’s takeover by Spanish forces. It is one of the few indigenous-produced documents about the city and its environs from this time period. While the traditional scholarly consensus has been that the map dates to c.1554, we derive evidence from an examination of the original map to argue for a creation date of c.1537–1541.…
No Longer Home: The Smellscape of Mexico City, 1500-1600
During the course of the sixteenth century, the Aztec (or Mexica) city of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco (present-day Mexico City) was transformed from a sweet-smelling lacustrine city into a foul one, the direct result of the Spanish invasion (1519-21). This article reconstructs both the sources of odors and culturally situated ideas about smell among the city's Nahuatl-speaking residents. They are opposed to the ideas about smell held by settler colon…
Dialogues
This collection of essays reconsiders a seminal 1961 article by George Kubler, the most important art historian of Latin America of the English-speaking world at the time of its writing. Often greeted with indifference or hostility, Kubler’s central claim of extinction is still a highly contested one. The essays in this section deal with Kubler’s reception in Mexico, the political stakes of his claim in relation to indigeneity, as well as the uti…
The Emergence of Alphabetic Writing: Tlahcuiloh and Escribano in Sixteenth-Century Mexico
Over the course of the sixteenth century in Mexico (New Spain), alphabetic writing replaced pictography as the chosen form of written expression in indigenous communities. A new social role, that of the native language escribano (notary), emerged, eventually to become a principal cultural broker in the colonial period. Despite the indigenous escribano's importance, his origins and the source of his authority within the native sphere are poorly un…
Dialogues
Each of the four articles in this Dialogues draws on recent conservation and/or material analysis of a single work created in colonial Latin America, specifically New Spain, to explore the self-image of the artist as manifest through practice—that is, the techniques of manipulating a range of materials to achieve a desired aesthetic effect. The four foci are a featherwork miter and infulae, the Codex Mendoza, the Adoration of the Magi by Cristóba…
Rethinking the Aztec Economy
This book offers a valuable collection of short chapters that originated as papers in a 2015 conference panel honoring Frances Berdan. A widely acknowledged expert on Aztec material economy, Berdan, along with Patricia Anawalt, edited the significant four-volume work on the Codex Mendoza (ca. 1541–42). That work is a fundamental source on the imperial economy, due to its detailed registers of tribute items extracted from conquered provinces and d…
Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico
Amber Brian's book—the contents of which are telescoped in the title—documents the social effects of an important archive. The archive in question was the manuscripts belonging to don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (ca. 1578–1650), who, on his mother's side, was a member of the indigenous ruling family of Texcoco, one of the three city-states that once made up the Aztec Triple Alliance. Alva Ixtlilxochitl's father was Spanish and his mother a mes…
Texcoco: Prehispanic and Colonial Perspectives
This book brings together the work of 12 scholars on the important central Mexican city-state (or altepetl) of Texcoco. It is well known to historians of pre-Hispanic and colonial Mexico as one of the three altepeme comprising the famed Aztec Triple Alliance. Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, Texcoco, populated by the Acolhua ethnic group, joined with Tacubaya (ethnic Tepanec) and Tenochtitlan (ethnic Mexica). The Mexica eclipsed their part…
Out of The Shadow of Vasari: Towards A New Model of The ‘Artist’ in Colonial Latin America
Within shifts affecting colonial studies, a 'life-work model' employed in colonial art history has been left unexamined. Developed by a contemporary of Michelangelo, Giorgio Vasari (Italy, 1511–1574), this methodology was grounded in particular European social conditions that allowed the creation of the 'artist' whose 'artwork' was the inalienable product of a single mind and hand. Following the art historical paths laid by Vasari in the viceroya…
Place-Names in Mexico-Tenochtitlan
The place-names that residents of the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan (today Mexico City) gave to their city were both descriptive of topography and commemorative of history. Largely effaced from the Spanish historical register, Mexico City's Nahuatl place-names were rescued from historical oblivion by José Antonio Alzate in the eighteenth century and again by Alfonso Caso in the twentieth. However, effacement is not equal to extinction, and this …
The Images of Eighteenth-Century Urban Reform in Mexico City and the Plan of José Antonio Alzate
This article considers the urban reforms, growth, and development that took place in Mexico City, Mexico, during the 18th century. The author highlights the study of contemporary city plans, diagrams, and paintings that depict the increasing urban renewal projects that were undertaken at the time. She also comments on the influence of the colonial administrators on these development projects, including the reorganization of the city into cuartele…
Moteuczoma Reborn: Biombo Paintings and Collective Memory in Colonial Mexico City
Two-sided folding screens, called biombos, produced in Mexico City in the seventeenth century, bring together bird’s-eye views of the city with historical scenes of the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest. This article links the biombo scenes to the festival culture of the Hispanic capital, particularly that of Corpus Christi; both their iconography and the modes of viewing they inculcated helped to shape collective memory among elite city residen…
The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain
The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain." Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 40(3), pp. 126–127
The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geograficas
Mapping the Aztec capital: The 1524 Nuremberg map of Tenochtitlan, its sources and meanings
The map of Tenochtitlan published along with a Latin version of Hernán Cortés's letters (Nuremberg, 1524) was the first picture Europeans had of the Culhua‐Mexica city, the capital of the Aztec empire. The source of this woodcut map is unknown, and the author argues here that it was based on an indigenous map of the city. Once published in Europe, the city map and its companion map of the Gulf Coast, while certainly documentary, also assumed a sy…
The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas
The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geograficas
Mapping the Aztec capital: The 1524 Nuremberg map of Tenochtitlan, its sources and meanings
The map of Tenochtitlan published along with a Latin version of Hernán Cortés's letters (Nuremberg, 1524) was the first picture Europeans had of the Culhua‐Mexica city, the capital of the Aztec empire. The source of this woodcut map is unknown, and the author argues here that it was based on an indigenous map of the city. Once published in Europe, the city map and its companion map of the Gulf Coast, while certainly documentary, also assumed a sy…
Out of The Shadow of Vasari: Towards A New Model of The ‘Artist’ in Colonial Latin America
Within shifts affecting colonial studies, a 'life-work model' employed in colonial art history has been left unexamined. Developed by a contemporary of Michelangelo, Giorgio Vasari (Italy, 1511–1574), this methodology was grounded in particular European social conditions that allowed the creation of the 'artist' whose 'artwork' was the inalienable product of a single mind and hand. Following the art historical paths laid by Vasari in the viceroya…
The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas
Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico
Amber Brian's book—the contents of which are telescoped in the title—documents the social effects of an important archive. The archive in question was the manuscripts belonging to don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (ca. 1578–1650), who, on his mother's side, was a member of the indigenous ruling family of Texcoco, one of the three city-states that once made up the Aztec Triple Alliance. Alva Ixtlilxochitl's father was Spanish and his mother a mes…
No Longer Home: The Smellscape of Mexico City, 1500-1600
During the course of the sixteenth century, the Aztec (or Mexica) city of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco (present-day Mexico City) was transformed from a sweet-smelling lacustrine city into a foul one, the direct result of the Spanish invasion (1519-21). This article reconstructs both the sources of odors and culturally situated ideas about smell among the city's Nahuatl-speaking residents. They are opposed to the ideas about smell held by settler colon…
The colonial archive and its fictions
The archive has played a crucial role in art historical scholarship in helping to flesh out the identities of colonial artists, scribes, and writers. But the vagaries of history, colonialist violences, and postcolonial regimes mean that the archives undergirding such study are particularly unstable. This essay treats the role of archives (their lacunae as well as their surpluses) in shaping the historical methods and scholarly desires around thes…
The Emergence of Alphabetic Writing: Tlahcuiloh and Escribano in Sixteenth-Century Mexico
Over the course of the sixteenth century in Mexico (New Spain), alphabetic writing replaced pictography as the chosen form of written expression in indigenous communities. A new social role, that of the native language escribano (notary), emerged, eventually to become a principal cultural broker in the colonial period. Despite the indigenous escribano's importance, his origins and the source of his authority within the native sphere are poorly un…
Place-Names in Mexico-Tenochtitlan
The place-names that residents of the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan (today Mexico City) gave to their city were both descriptive of topography and commemorative of history. Largely effaced from the Spanish historical register, Mexico City's Nahuatl place-names were rescued from historical oblivion by José Antonio Alzate in the eighteenth century and again by Alfonso Caso in the twentieth. However, effacement is not equal to extinction, and this …
The Images of Eighteenth-Century Urban Reform in Mexico City and the Plan of José Antonio Alzate
This article considers the urban reforms, growth, and development that took place in Mexico City, Mexico, during the 18th century. The author highlights the study of contemporary city plans, diagrams, and paintings that depict the increasing urban renewal projects that were undertaken at the time. She also comments on the influence of the colonial administrators on these development projects, including the reorganization of the city into cuartele…
The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco: Utopia and Empire in Sixteenth-Century Mexico
Of Copies, Casts, and Codices: Mexico on Display in 1892
"In the fall of 1892, to honor the 400th anniversary of Columbus's voyage across the Atlantic, the Exposición Histórico-Americana opened its doors in Madrid. Thousands of visitors came to be awed and edified by all the known portraits depicting Columbus, feather paintings made by Christianized Aztecs, mineralogical specimens, Quimbaya gold figurines, Amerindian skulls and mummies, and even a model of a Viking ship. In a spacious structure on the …
The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geograficas
Mapping the Aztec capital: The 1524 Nuremberg map of Tenochtitlan, its sources and meanings
The map of Tenochtitlan published along with a Latin version of Hernán Cortés's letters (Nuremberg, 1524) was the first picture Europeans had of the Culhua‐Mexica city, the capital of the Aztec empire. The source of this woodcut map is unknown, and the author argues here that it was based on an indigenous map of the city. Once published in Europe, the city map and its companion map of the Gulf Coast, while certainly documentary, also assumed a sy…
The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas
The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geograficas
Painted Books from Mexico
The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas
The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain
The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain." Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 40(3), pp. 126–127
Moteuczoma Reborn: Biombo Paintings and Collective Memory in Colonial Mexico City
Two-sided folding screens, called biombos, produced in Mexico City in the seventeenth century, bring together bird’s-eye views of the city with historical scenes of the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest. This article links the biombo scenes to the festival culture of the Hispanic capital, particularly that of Corpus Christi; both their iconography and the modes of viewing they inculcated helped to shape collective memory among elite city residen…
The Images of Eighteenth-Century Urban Reform in Mexico City and the Plan of José Antonio Alzate
This article considers the urban reforms, growth, and development that took place in Mexico City, Mexico, during the 18th century. The author highlights the study of contemporary city plans, diagrams, and paintings that depict the increasing urban renewal projects that were undertaken at the time. She also comments on the influence of the colonial administrators on these development projects, including the reorganization of the city into cuartele…
Place-Names in Mexico-Tenochtitlan
The place-names that residents of the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan (today Mexico City) gave to their city were both descriptive of topography and commemorative of history. Largely effaced from the Spanish historical register, Mexico City's Nahuatl place-names were rescued from historical oblivion by José Antonio Alzate in the eighteenth century and again by Alfonso Caso in the twentieth. However, effacement is not equal to extinction, and this …
Out of The Shadow of Vasari: Towards A New Model of The ‘Artist’ in Colonial Latin America
Within shifts affecting colonial studies, a 'life-work model' employed in colonial art history has been left unexamined. Developed by a contemporary of Michelangelo, Giorgio Vasari (Italy, 1511–1574), this methodology was grounded in particular European social conditions that allowed the creation of the 'artist' whose 'artwork' was the inalienable product of a single mind and hand. Following the art historical paths laid by Vasari in the viceroya…
Texcoco: Prehispanic and Colonial Perspectives
This book brings together the work of 12 scholars on the important central Mexican city-state (or altepetl) of Texcoco. It is well known to historians of pre-Hispanic and colonial Mexico as one of the three altepeme comprising the famed Aztec Triple Alliance. Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, Texcoco, populated by the Acolhua ethnic group, joined with Tacubaya (ethnic Tepanec) and Tenochtitlan (ethnic Mexica). The Mexica eclipsed their part…
Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico
Amber Brian's book—the contents of which are telescoped in the title—documents the social effects of an important archive. The archive in question was the manuscripts belonging to don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (ca. 1578–1650), who, on his mother's side, was a member of the indigenous ruling family of Texcoco, one of the three city-states that once made up the Aztec Triple Alliance. Alva Ixtlilxochitl's father was Spanish and his mother a mes…
Dialogues
Each of the four articles in this Dialogues draws on recent conservation and/or material analysis of a single work created in colonial Latin America, specifically New Spain, to explore the self-image of the artist as manifest through practice—that is, the techniques of manipulating a range of materials to achieve a desired aesthetic effect. The four foci are a featherwork miter and infulae, the Codex Mendoza, the Adoration of the Magi by Cristóba…
Rethinking the Aztec Economy
This book offers a valuable collection of short chapters that originated as papers in a 2015 conference panel honoring Frances Berdan. A widely acknowledged expert on Aztec material economy, Berdan, along with Patricia Anawalt, edited the significant four-volume work on the Codex Mendoza (ca. 1541–42). That work is a fundamental source on the imperial economy, due to its detailed registers of tribute items extracted from conquered provinces and d…
Dialogues
This collection of essays reconsiders a seminal 1961 article by George Kubler, the most important art historian of Latin America of the English-speaking world at the time of its writing. Often greeted with indifference or hostility, Kubler’s central claim of extinction is still a highly contested one. The essays in this section deal with Kubler’s reception in Mexico, the political stakes of his claim in relation to indigeneity, as well as the uti…
The Emergence of Alphabetic Writing: Tlahcuiloh and Escribano in Sixteenth-Century Mexico
Over the course of the sixteenth century in Mexico (New Spain), alphabetic writing replaced pictography as the chosen form of written expression in indigenous communities. A new social role, that of the native language escribano (notary), emerged, eventually to become a principal cultural broker in the colonial period. Despite the indigenous escribano's importance, his origins and the source of his authority within the native sphere are poorly un…
Dating the Mapa Uppsala of Mexico-Tenochtitlan
The Mapa Uppsala is the earliest known map of sixteenth-century Mexico City that was painted by indigenous artists after the city’s takeover by Spanish forces. It is one of the few indigenous-produced documents about the city and its environs from this time period. While the traditional scholarly consensus has been that the map dates to c.1554, we derive evidence from an examination of the original map to argue for a creation date of c.1537–1541.…
No Longer Home: The Smellscape of Mexico City, 1500-1600
During the course of the sixteenth century, the Aztec (or Mexica) city of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco (present-day Mexico City) was transformed from a sweet-smelling lacustrine city into a foul one, the direct result of the Spanish invasion (1519-21). This article reconstructs both the sources of odors and culturally situated ideas about smell among the city's Nahuatl-speaking residents. They are opposed to the ideas about smell held by settler colon…
Indigenous image theory
Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, which contains an account of the origins of painting, offered sixteenth-century European artists a gift as they struggled to advance the status of painting as an intellectual rather than a mechanical art. The Roman authority was also read by Indigenous intellectuals in New Spain; they described their autochthonous painting practice in an account written in the Nahuatl language to respond to Pliny. This article o…
The colonial archive and its fictions
The archive has played a crucial role in art historical scholarship in helping to flesh out the identities of colonial artists, scribes, and writers. But the vagaries of history, colonialist violences, and postcolonial regimes mean that the archives undergirding such study are particularly unstable. This essay treats the role of archives (their lacunae as well as their surpluses) in shaping the historical methods and scholarly desires around thes…
The 2022 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: Mexica Space and Habsburg Time
The Aztec (Mexica) city of Tenochtitlan was transformed after the Spanish invasion of 1519–21 into a staging ground for Habsburg colonial experiments. Indigenous response is glimpsed in this essay through the lens of annals, written in Nahuatl, that document urban festivals celebrating Spanish Habsburg monarchs. I argue that the redeployment of particular spaces—long charged with meaning by Indigenous residents—was crucial to the public legitimac…
How to Make a New Spain: The Material Worlds of Colonial Mexico City
Latin American history and culture (27 works) · History (20 works) · Art (19 works) · Archaeology (15 works) · Indigenous (15 works) · Geography (12 works) · Art history (11 works) · History (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Political science (10 works)