Abstract
Following the dictum of Edgar Allan Poe's detective hero, C. Auguste Dupin, that ‘If it is any point requiring reflection, we shall examine it to better purpose in the dark’, the source material of the present article – sixteenth-century Mexican codices – is considered ‘in the dark’, by and large without taking its meaning for and within native American cultures into account. Instead, the focus is on the independent lives that images deriving from these codices can live as they pass through the hands of different European collectors, many of them oblivious to what these images were originally supposed to represent. The result of the investigation is not a history but a number of micro-histories.
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