The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain

Abstract

The Codex Mexicanus, a Nahua pictorial text from Mexico City produced in the 1570s and 1580s, has not received the kind of scholarly attention that other pictorials from central Mexico have. Lori Diel has finally given this document the attention it deserves and, in the process, added to our understanding of late sixteenth-century life for Nahuas in the viceregal capital. Her careful pictorial analysis should not be ignored by historians, who will find in this book a nuanced study of how Nahuas took a variety of information—calendrical, medicinal, historical—brought over from Europe, incorporated it into existing native systems of knowledge, and adapted it to their own purposes.Most of the pictorial content of the Codex Mexicanus was, according to Diel, painted all at once in 1578–79 by a group of painters working in San Pablo Teopan, in Mexico City. But there are many later additions. Nahuatl glosses were added in places, as were some supplementary Nahuatl texts. Later still, texts in Spanish and French were added. Work on the Codex Mexicanus appears to have stopped in 1583. The text is similar in function to certain coeval Spanish books called repertorios de los tiempos, which grew out of the medieval almanac tradition in Spain. These repertorios collected a variety of seemingly unrelated information—saints' calendars, astrology, and medicine, for example—that was all nonetheless connected to the theme of time.The Codex Mexicanus, too, has often been seen by scholars as a collection of seemingly unrelated information and, therefore, has been studied only piecemeal. But Diel looks at the codex as a complete work, letting the connection to the repertorios guide the organization of her book. Diel has divided her study into four thematic discussions, following the topics covered by the manuscript. In each of them, Diel marshals her impressive knowledge of myriad pictorial and alphabetic texts from the early colonial period to provide the definitive reading of the Codex Mexicanus's pictorial contents. Following an introductory chapter, chapter 2, which is devoted to time and religion, explores the calendrical portions of the manuscript. These include a perpetual calendar that correlates Christian holy days with pre-Hispanic festivals, two calendar wheels, and a tonalpohualli (pre-Hispanic sacred year) organized into trecenas. In chapter 3, devoted to astrology and medicine, Diel examines the parts of the Codex Mexicanus that explore connections between the stars and human health. Diel notes that the astrological information all comes from Europe; indigenous astrology is not included here. Diel suggests that the native authors may have been particularly interested in European astrology and medicine because foreign diseases were ravaging indigenous communities at precisely the same time that the codex was created.Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the historical texts contained in the Codex Mexicanus. Chapter 4 examines the codex's two-page genealogy of the Mexica ruling line. Diel concludes that this genealogy, far from a neutral depiction of past rulers, is in fact a carefully constructed narrative of unbroken Mexica imperial authority, its divine origins and unblemished nature. Chapter 5 treats the part of the Codex Mexicanus to which its native authors devoted the most space: a pictorial history of the Mexica. This history is structured as a precontact-style continuous year-count annals, or xiuhpohualli, in which each year is represented as a year glyph contained within a cartouche and historical events and information for the year are attached to or located in close proximity to the glyph. The Codex Mexicanus's year count begins with the year 1 Flint (1168 CE) and ends with 7 Rabbit (1590 CE). While most of this annals history deals with the pre-Hispanic past, Diel is careful to remind her readers that this is nonetheless a colonial document and must be interpreted as such. Its authors, she notes, “reconceptualized the historical past in order to make sense of how this past prepared them to live as Nahua Christians in late sixteenth-century New Spain” (p. 137). This reconciliation of a pagan past with a Christian present is, of course, not unique to Latin America, and Diel highlights the parallels between the Codex Mexicanus's attempts at reconciliation and early Christian texts from Europe, particularly Augustine's City of God, a work that wrestles with late antique Christianity's relationship with the pagan past of Rome.This work is yet more evidence that art historians are in the vanguard of colonial native history. Diel's study of the Codex Mexicanus is invaluable not just for its masterful reading of the codex's pictorial content but also for its contribution to our understanding of early colonial Nahuas. By placing the codex firmly in its colonial context, Diel adds fascinating detail to the ways in which Nahuas negotiated both native and European systems of knowledge—knowledge of time, of medicine, of the stars, of the past—to create a text that contained information useful in their own late sixteenth-century lives.