Mexican Manuscript Research Articles

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

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.

Monumentalizing metaphors: diphrasis in the murals of Tulum

At Tulum, as well as other Maya sites in the Yucatan Peninsula, mural painting traditions are related to the style and symbol-set associated with Central Mexican manuscript cultures. The murals reflect the widespread Postclassic Mesoamerican manuscript cultures lourishing from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries AD, during which iconic and logosyllabic scripts were used in the construction of regionally distinct manuscript forms. The murals at Tulum relate to manuscript culture not only in their style and symbol set, but also in their use of metaphorical dualisms, in which significant iconic elements are contrasted as an indicator of a more abstract concept. Recognizing metaphorical juxtaposition as an underlying principle of Mesoamerican ritual language, this paper discusses the process by which manuscripts become monuments and considers the sacred metaphors painted on the temples of Tulum as mechanisms for reinforcing political power.

Conquest, Reason, and Cannibalism in a Sixteenth-Century Mexican Manuscript

The manuscript known as the Relación de Michoacán (1539–41) was commissioned by Spanish viceroy Antonio de Mendoza (1490–1552) and produced in colonial Mexico by an anonymous friar and Indigenous artists and informants. While in many of the manuscript’s paintings, the pre-Columbian rulers (the Uanacaze), are often fasting, one of the paintings—a rare depiction by an Indigenous artist—shows their enemies feasting on human flesh. An analysis of these images reveals how the Indigenous artists transformed European and pre-Columbian models of cannibalism and ritual consumption to represent local concepts connecting food, reason, and conquest while furthering the interests of the Indigenous leaders under colonial rule.

Review: Descendants of Aztec Pictography: The Cultural Encyclopedias of Sixteenth-Century Mexico, by Elizabeth Hill Boone

Review: <i>Descendants of Aztec Pictography: The Cultural Encyclopedias of Sixteenth-Century Mexico</i>, by Elizabeth Hill Boone

The art of printing: a Mexican manuscript from the nineteenth century

AbstractThis review discusses the contribution of Marina Garone’s 2016 book, El Arte de ymprenta de don Alejandro Valdes (1819) to the history of written culture in Latin America.

André Thevet's ‘true’ portrait of Moctezuma and its European legacy

André Thevet's ‘true’ portrait of Moctezuma and its European legacy

Presencia indígena en el léxico del &lt;em&gt;Códice Tudela&lt;/em&gt;

This study analyzes Spanish vocabulary of indigenous origin. It employs a source that until now has gone unnoticed among Americanists: a l6th-century Mexican manuscript containing paintings and text in Spanish, the Codice Tudela , currently housed in the Museo de America in Madrid. The indigenous borrowings found here provide early evidence of the influence of Native American languages —specially Nahuatl— on Spanish. The analysis focuses on two complementary themes: the semantic fields of the borrowings, and their persistence in present day Spanish.

The “Map of Metlatoyuca” – A Mexican Manuscript in the Collection of the British Museum

This study investigates the Map of Metlatoyuca, a Mexican pictorial manuscript of early Colonial time, in the collection of the British Museum. The map, which is painted on cloth, demonstrates a road and river system, place signs and genealogical records. The historical and geographical content is studied and compared with available iconographic and written historical sources. Using these ancient sources and analysing the pictograms of the place signs, the region represented on the map is identified as being located in the far northern part of the state of Puebla adjacent to Vera Cruz and Hidalgo. This assessment is confirmed by redrawing the ancient map utilising modern standards of cartography.

The “Map of Metlatoyuca” – A Mexican Manuscript in the Collection of the British Museum

The “Map of Metlatoyuca” – A Mexican Manuscript in the Collection of the British Museum

Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Schools

Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Schools

Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Schools.

Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Schools.

Illuminated Mexican Manuscript

Illuminated Mexican Manuscript

SMMS Mexican Manuscript Collection, California State Library, Sutro Branch: Key to Subject Classifications

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Dollars Over Dominion: The Triumph of Liberalism in Mexican—United States Relations, 1861-1867 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS185 Merchants," a dry, turgid affairwhich relies too much on too many tables which unimaginatively say much the same thing. In a broader context Wiener's difficulties in relating his statistical material to the body of the narrative reflect the excessively narrow conceptual base on which he built his work. By too closely identifying class interests with ownership of the means of production and by too mechanically equating politics with the expression of class interests, Wiener frequently struck this reviewer as an economic determinist whose reductionist conclusions left no room for a politics of cultural, ethnic, and ideological conflict botii within the planter class itself and between that class and rival groups jockeying for political power. For example, Wiener identified die Whigs as the political party of the planters, and in so doing overlooks the fact that planters were at least as likely to be Democrats by the 1850's; he defines planters, and insists that tiiey viewed themselves, "as a nonbourgeois class," tiius ignoring the distinct possibility that theplanters werestrugglingwithinthemselves to deny or purge that very acquisitive, entrepreneurial drive which was essential to their economic survival in a very competitive marketplace; and, in a critical oversimplification, he slights theexcruciatingimpact of the war and its casualties on the perceptions and sensibilities of the planters and their sons and assumes tiiat because the landholding planter elite in the Alabama black belt survived the war largely intact (pp. 8-34), any claim they subsequentiy made "about die world they had lost" amounted to a sham. In conclusion, I feel that the serious weaknesses of the study flow inexorably from its very considerable strengths. Wienerhas provided us witii a closely argued and perceptive account of the largely successful efforts of Alabama's planter class to reestablish its political and economic hegemony after the Civil War and has forced us to revise any neat formulations which posit the rise of powerful new classes from the ashes of the planter regime. However, the rigid economic focus of die work belies its very title which promises an examination of the "social origins" of postwar Alabama. There is, in fact, little analysis of either social or cultural conditions and but scant treatment ofdie CivilWar, die watershed in the lives of this generation of Alabamians. Nonetiieless, any compelling reinterpretation of the New South must confront directly the framework laid down by Professor Wiener for Alabama. University of North CarolinaWilliam L. Barney DoUars Over Dominion: The Triumph of Liberalism in Mexican— United States Rehtions, 1861-1867. By Thomas D. Schoonover. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. Pp xx, 316. $17.50.) The "central thesis" of tiiis book "is that the Liberal party in Mexico and 186CIVIL WAR HISTORY the Republican party in the United States shared an ideology—laissez faire liberalism—which led them to define tiieir respective problems ... as interrelated, and which alleviated some of die stress on United States-Mexican relations during the crisis years of the 1860s, while permitting the mutually desired American economic penetration of Mexico during the 1860s and 1870s." In developing this diesis the author utilizes an enormous body of both primary and secondary sources, including Mexican manuscript and archival holdings previously unfamiliar to most Civil War historians. To have written so thoroughly researched a work on such an important topic as Mexican-American relations during die 1860's is a considerable achievement. This volume, however, has serious flaws. Perhaps the most regrettable defect of the book is the virtual incoherence of much of the writing. Here are only a few examples of the author's imprecise language. A group of people "stemmed from New Orleans." "A certain flair for words . . . found vent." A diplomatist's "credentials . . . rested upon his service ." The "agreements . . . obtain significance." People "viewed their projects invarious lights." Some "diplomats interpreted the foreign intervention into Mexico in terms similar to liberal opinion." Someone registered "complaints with die foreign intervention." "Romero . . . urged upon him the dangerous precedent of that course." And so on. Additional deficiencies in the author's writing style are (1) his penchant for using grandiose, imprecise language to express relatively simple, familiar ideas; (2) his excessive use of jargon (such as "concretization," "implementing," and "generate"); (3...

Reproduction of a Mexican Manuscript (Ms. Mexican d. I)

Reproduction of a Mexican Manuscript (Ms. Mexican d. I)

: Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Schools . Donald Robertson.

American AnthropologistVolume 63, Issue 6 p. 1374-1375 Free Access GENERAL AND ETHNOLOGY: Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Schools. Donald Robertson Charles E. Dibble, Charles E. Dibble University of UtahSearch for more papers by this author Charles E. Dibble, Charles E. Dibble University of UtahSearch for more papers by this author First published: December 1961 https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1961.63.6.02a00330AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Volume63, Issue6December 1961Pages 1374-1375 RelatedInformation

Robertson, D., "Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period" (Book Review)

Robertson, D., "Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period" (Book Review)

Donald Robertson,Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Schools

(1960). Donald Robertson, Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Schools. Art Journal: Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 60-60.

Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period, The Metropolitan Schools

Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period, The Metropolitan Schools

Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period, the Metropolitan Schools.

Reprint of the Yale U. Press original (Yale Historical Publications. History of Art, v.12) of 1959 with a new (8 p.) foreword by Elizabeth H. Boone. The Yale edition is cited in BCL3. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.