Descendants of Aztec Pictography: The Cultural Encyclopedias of Sixteenth-Century Mexico

Abstract

In 2000, Elizabeth Hill Boone published Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of Aztecs and Mixtecs. This earlier work organized, categorized, and explained a subset of pictorial documents—specifically, histories—produced by the Nahuas and Mixtecs of pre-Hispanic and colonial Mesoamerica. In 2007, her Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate did the same for pictorial divinatory texts. And now Descendants of Aztec Pictography does a similar service for a third pictorial genre, what Boone has called “cultural encyclopedias.” Together, Boone's three works constitute their own kind of encyclopedia of Mexican manuscript painting by one of the field's foremost scholars.For Boone, the painted manuscripts examined here form their own special category. These documents are in many ways similar to those examined in her previous two volumes—and, indeed, some of these cultural encyclopedias received attention in her earlier work—but their content and function make them different enough to warrant their own stand-alone volume. The defining feature of these manuscripts is that they all organize information about the pre-Hispanic past into cultural categories and present it in such a way as to explain it to an outsider. The audience for all these documents was a non-Indigenous, culturally European one: either an audience in Europe or creoles in Mexico.The nine pictorial manuscripts that constitute this corpus of cultural encyclopedias range in date of composition from the early to the late sixteenth century. By the seventeenth century, Indigenous painting had been substantially transformed, and pictorial elements were increasingly secondary to and dependent on alphabetic elements within many documents. Some of the manuscripts examined here—particularly the work overseen by friars Bernardino de Sahagún and Diego Durán—reflect these late sixteenth-century changes. But the majority of the book is focused on early and mid-sixteenth-century manuscripts in which the paintings dominate the discourse and the alphabetic elements are dependent on and supplementary to the images.The initial chapters of this volume describe the sixteenth-century Mexican environment in which these encyclopedias were produced. They include discussions of the various graphic systems in use in Mexico in this period, the encyclopedic tradition from Europe, and the evangelization project of the mendicant orders as well as its interest in understanding pre-Hispanic Indigenous cultures. The remaining chapters examine the corpus of pictorial encyclopedias, moving chronologically. Many of these documents, particularly the late sixteenth-century work of Sahagún and Durán, will be broadly familiar to historians, though the pictorial elements of these works may not be. Others of the corpus—the Codex Borbonicus, the Codex Ríos, or the Codex Tudela, for instance—are perhaps familiar but not as consistently addressed in the secondary literature. Part of the problem for historians is that these manuscripts often describe unfamiliar pre-Hispanic cultural phenomena. Another issue faced by historians is reading the often-stylized pictorial system employed to deliver the content and narrative. Boone solves both of these problems for those of us interested in the pre-Hispanic and colonial Nahuas but uncomfortable with the nonalphabetic portions of these manuscripts.This work is, as Boone describes it, a “synthetic analysis” of cultural encyclopedias, and much of the work is therefore dedicated to providing a reading of these manuscripts based on the latest research by a host of scholars (p. xiv). Boone's capacious knowledge of the texts themselves and the secondary literature on those texts is on full display here and allows her to craft a sort of guidebook to the pictorial encyclopedia genre. Her contribution with this book, then, is not a novel reading of a particular manuscript—though she does offer her own arguments and critiques of others' interpretations in many places—but rather the work that she has done to categorize, systematize, and organize these documents. Indeed, her typology of Mexican manuscript painting, of which this volume is but the latest installment, is what makes her work so foundational to the study of Nahua culture and history. The University of Texas Press is to be commended for its decision to print every page on coated paper, which allows all of Boone's many wonderful images of the cultural encyclopedias to be rendered in full color.This work, taken with her two previously published books, is an invitation to ethnohistorians to incorporate the amazing corpus of pictorial manuscripts more fully into historical and anthropological scholarship on the pre-Hispanic and colonial Nahuas. It is also an opportunity to do it in a sophisticated way that acknowledges the goals and biases of the author-painters and that allows for a nuanced reading of their work. But Boone's text is also accessible to the nonspecialist, and advanced undergraduate and graduate students will enjoy her introductions to these often-difficult sources as well.