Sixteenth-Century New Research Articles

Perseverance of the Eagle-Jaguar Military Ethos in Sixteenth-Century New Spain

Perseverance of the Eagle-Jaguar Military Ethos in Sixteenth-Century New Spain

Circulation and Contacts in Sixteenth Century New Cartography: Spain, Portugal and Italy

Cartographic information was highly coveted in sixteenth century Europe, especially when it came from Portugal or Spain. Maps and nautical charts produced in the Iberian Peninsula were loaded with sensitive information about the new lands discovered, which made them the object of desire of rival or curious powers. Faced with this, the Spanish and Portuguese institutions tried to limit the excessive dispersion of cartographic material, using several legislative instruments. In theory, the circulation of cartographic information beyond Iberian imperial boundaries was strictly controlled, so the possibility of leakages or exchanges seemed very unlikely. In practice, both leaks and contact occurred constantly. The objective of this article is to illustrate this idea from the identification and analysis of concrete historical events in which the circulation of cartographic information took place. The chronological framework chosen is the sixteenth century, with Spain, Portugal and Italy as the main sites.

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

The Codex Mexicanus fortifies Lori Boornazian Diel’s reputation as a leading art historian of colonial Mexico. An in-depth study of a postcontact pictorial manuscript from central Mexico, this book artfully combines a catalog of the contents with the author’s own significant analysis. Though intended for a specialist audience, the book also speaks to a broader readership by exploring connections with early modern European history. This book is informed by a variety of interdisciplinary studies, from manuscript studies to art ethnohistorical research. Diel’s analysis of the visual content is impressive and reveals the multivalent nature of the colonial source.The layout of the book follows from the general themes found in the codex, focusing on time and religion, health, lineage, and history. The first chapter establishes the context in which the manuscript was produced. Approximately sixty years after the Spanish invasion, Nahua creators in Tenochtitlan wrote and illustrated the Mexicanus as a guide containing essential information for life in New Spain. The second chapter explains how the authors and artists conceived of time and its relationship to their beliefs. In the third chapter, Diel explores connections between human and celestial bodies, presented by the authors in a distinctly European form of medical astrology. The last two chapters present the codex’s historical records represented in the forms of the lineage of the Tenochca royal house and the pictorial history of the Mexica from the ancient past until colonial rule. The final chapter reveals the author’s keen analysis of these themes to show that the codex must have served as a tool to document knowledge during a transitional and, considering the prevailing epidemics, terrifying time period. The final section of the book contains beautiful color plates of the entire codex, allowing for independent study of the visual and alphabetic texts.Building on her previous scholarship on the same manuscript, Diel contextualizes the lives of the creators. Her evenhanded analysis allows for the makers of the codex to have been engaged in balancing rather than battling various colonial systems. Her analysis does much to rescue terms such as hybrid from the heap of unfashionable terms because scholars have yet to settle on appropriate terminology for the cultural products of the colonial period. Diel nimbly avoids absolute labels of Native or European and instead explores the biculturality of religious, medical, and historical knowledge. The book benefits from Diel’s research insights on European traditions, a facet previous studies of Mexican codices have often ignored or allowed to be the sole focus of their analysis. The author brings to bear all of her impressive expertise in comparing with other codices the Mexicanus’s alphabetic and visual sections on the lineage and history of the Mexica.A topic hinted at but left partially explored is what the materiality of the Mexicanus tells us about its authors and artists and the time of its creation. Diel briefly explains throughout the book that the folios of the codex indicate whitewashing of heretical material (20), deterioration likely to the result of frequent usage (66), and poor condition of images leading to confusion of annotations (147). I would have truly enjoyed reading what Diel’s brilliant mind would puzzle together from an in-depth material analysis of the codex.The Codex Mexicanus joins the ranks of excellent books centered on a single text. In addition to providing beautiful color plates of the original manuscript, the author shows the context of its creation and comparisons with related codices. Overall, this book is a balanced and well-written examination of the content of the source, both visual and alphabetic, accompanied by Diel’s expert analysis.

Sixteenth-Century New Spain - The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain. By Lori Boornazin Diel. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. Pp. 240. $55.00 cloth.

Sixteenth-Century New Spain - The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain. By Lori Boornazin Diel. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. Pp. 240. $55.00 cloth. - Volume 78 Issue 2

The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain by Lori Boornazian Diel

Reviewed by: The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain by Lori Boornazian Diel Barbara E. Mundy Lori Boornazian Diel. The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain. U of Texas P, 2018. 228 pp. What is time? Is time the possibility of all events? If so, what is the fate of human beings, a species both cursed and blessed with memory and imagination? Dividing time into past, present, and future is how many human societies have anchored themselves, as they manage and organize the temporal flow, tether memory to the past and assign imagination to the future. But what about the relationship between the past, present, and future? A corporeal existence ensures that we carry with us always and everywhere a very particular past, that of the origin and development of our individual body. Living inside of this personal time capsule offers almost nothing to help us with both the human collective in time nor to develop an understanding that time existed before our bodies and will extend beyond them. When Norbert Elias published Über die Zeit in 1984 (translated as An Essay on Time in 2007), he pointed to the importance of the calendar and the clock as the great organizing mechanisms of social time, means through which any human group could coordinate its activities, like planting and harvesting, to ensure its survival. The calendar does more: in extending a count back through time, it offers a means to connect the past to the present, and holds out, in its reliable repetition, a promise of the future. The calendar allows a structure for commemoration, so that the past is even more strongly anchored to the present. Moreover, solar and lunar calendars, perhaps the most common ones known today, are marked by naturalism. Like a photo-realist painting, whose authority derives from closely mimicking human visual experience, calendars take their power from their alignment to the perceived movement of the celestial bodies. They thus offer a way of naturalizing what could be the arbitrary nature of human event. Set into solar time, a birthday becomes anchored in time, consistently available for annual commemoration, offering the first point of a span of life dates, ready for historical reflection. In Mesoamerican societies, two calendars were used to record time, the solar-year calendar (xiuhpohualli) and the 260-day tonalpohualli. These were recorded pictographically in manuscripts, with the years of the xiuhpohualli forming the backbone of annals-style histories. The tonalpohualli was a sacred calendar, used to understand how the cycles of past time colored the present-day moment and what they augured for the future. Once ubiquitous, only eleven pre-Hispanic tonalpohualli survive today. But calendric manuscripts continued to be produced during the sixteenth century, and Lori Boornazian Diel's new book is a close study of one of these. Produced by indigenous scribes in Mexico City who still employed traditional pictography, the 102–page Codex Mexicanus is devoted mainly to a xiuhpohualli (18–87), recording events from the departure of the Mexica from the mythic homeland of Aztlan, through the events of the Conquest, [End Page 124] up to 1581, about the time that the manuscript was largely finished. It also includes two tonalpohualli (13–14; 89–102). Reflecting its post-Conquest moment, the Mexicanus contains not only these indigenous calendars but also includes a Christian perpetual (also called dominical) calendar, used to calculate when Sundays fell in any given year, as well as European-style charts, one lunar and two zodiac, one of the latter connecting the zodiac to parts and organs of a human body to create a "zodiac man." Unique to this manuscript is a double calendar wheel representing an attempt to synch the Christian perpetual calendar with the xiuhpohualli. A single alphabetic annotation noting the arrival of Augustinians to San Pablo, one of Mexico City's indigenous neighborhoods, suggests that this might have been the ambit of its creation. Given the plurality of the Mexicanus's content, which brings together various calendars but provides no overarching rationale for their union, scholars have tended to treat only its parts, like the xiuhpohualli that dominates...

Joseph of Nazareth in Sixteenth-Century New Spain: An Elderly Saint and Popular Devotion

Despite Joseph of Nazareth’s immediate key role in the conversion of the indigenous populations of the Americas and the prevalence of 17th- and 18th-century New Spanish images of the saint, relatively few examples from 16th-century New Spain remain. As a result, an image of a young, handsome, robust foster-father prescribed by 17th-century Inquisition censors has come to dominate our understanding of his colonial iconography. This essay highlights a marginalized, yet potentially critical ingredient to Joseph’s success as a missionary saint: the role his old age played in popular devotion both in Europe and in New Spain, even as such depictions were being contested by theologians. It therefore probes the potential limits of theological and Inquisitional discourses for the study of 16th-century colonial image theory.

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

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.

Book Review: The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain, by Lori Boornazian Diel

Book Review| October 01 2019 Book Review: The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain, by Lori Boornazian Diel The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain, by Lori Boornazian Diel. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. 228 pp., 82 color, 35 black and white, 3 black and white charts/graphs. Paperback $55.00. Reviewed by Helen Burgos-Ellis. Helen Burgos-Ellis Helen Burgos-Ellis UCLA, Chicana and Chicano Studies Department Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (2019) 1 (4): 123–124. https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2019.140013 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Helen Burgos-Ellis; Book Review: The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain, by Lori Boornazian Diel. Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 1 October 2019; 1 (4): 123–124. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2019.140013 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentLatin American and Latinx Visual Culture Search In the late Postclassic period (ca. 1250–1521), which immediately precedes the Spanish conquest, the practice of recording a number of subjects—including history, timekeeping, religion, tribute, botany, and genealogy—in manuscripts was widespread in Mesoamerica (comprising parts of modern-day Mexico and Central America). The significance of Mesoamerican manuscripts cannot be overstated; however, analyzing them is an arduous exercise. Unlike the Maya, who developed hieroglyphic writing, the Aztecs (also Nahuas) used imagery and calendar glyphs exclusively. After 1521, during the colonial period, the manuscript-making practice continued and indigenous scribes adopted alphabetic text, which elucidates images and glyphs in Pre-Columbian manuscripts. Yet, the complexity of sixteenth-century society, straddling an esteemed indigenous past as it confronted new cultural realities, particularly the advent of Christianity and Aztec responses to the new religion, renders colonial manuscripts difficult to study. While Mesoamerican manuscripts have been widely analyzed, some, including the Aztec Codex Mexicanus (ca. 1580s)—currently conserved at the... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Codex Mexicanus: Time, Religion, History, and Health in Sixteenth-Century New Spain

About 60 years after the Spanish invasion and conquest of Mexico, a group of Nahua intellectuals gathered in Tenochtitlan. On the very site of the heart of the Aztec empire stood a city of a new name: Mexico City, capital of New Spain. There the Nahuas set about compiling an extensive book of miscellanea, now known as the Codex Mexicanus. Owned by the Bibliothèque National de France, the codex includes records pertaining to the Christian and Aztec calendars, European medical astrology, a genealogy of the Tenochca royal house, and the annals of preconquest and early colonial Mexico City, among other intriguing topics.

Cuentas fallidas, deudas omnipresentes. Los difíciles comienzos del mercado del libro novohispano

This article analyzes some episodes concerning printers and bookseller’s activity in sixteenth century New Spain. Although beginnings are by definition promising, book enterprises in the New World were not always so. This analysis uncovers the extreme difficulties that the first book entrepreneurs faced to establish and maintain their then-original pro jects. Through this analysis indebtedness in particular is perceived as a constant and an essential part of the operations in the business environment of that time.

Inca Architecture from the Andes to the Adriatic: Pedro Sancho’s Description of Cuzco*

AbstractIn 1556, Giovanni Battista Ramusio facilitated the publication in Venice of a report by Pedro Sancho, official secretary to the conquistador Francisco Pizarro. Sancho’s text included a lengthy description of the architecture and plan of Cuzco, the capital of the Inca Empire, and was the first such description to appear in print. Previous scholarship has used it as a primary source for reconstructing the appearance of Inca Cuzco as seen by Sancho, Pizarro, and their cohort at the moment of their arrival there in 1533. The text, however, is also evidence for other kinds of historical information, for it demonstrates how habits of description engaged in the production of space. The impact of Sancho’s textual representation of Cuzco is evident in a contemporary reaction to it — a woodcut print that accompanied it when it was first published. Considered together, the text and image lay bare the ways in which modes of representation facilitated political, architectural, and urbanistic change in the sixteenth-century New World.

The Importance of Mestizos and Mulatos as Bilingual Intermediaries in Sixteenth-Century New Spain

One of the most interesting aspects of sixteenth-century Mexico is the predominance of native languages, Nahuatl in particular, among all members of colonial society. Conquistadors, encomenderos, estancieros, missionaries, and even tradesmen learned native languages because it helped further their interests in a society divided between two cultural spheres, Hispanic and indigenous. This article highlights the unique position of sixteenth-century mestizos and mulatos as bearers of indigenous culture and language in colonial Mexico. These individuals born of mixed unions were often acculturated in both Hispanic and indigenous cultures. As people in the middle of colonial society, they were uniquely positioned to navigate within and between the two dominant cultural spheres of colonial Mexico. Using Inquisition documents, criminal records, and petitions to the crown, this article analyzes how these individuals served as more than just intermediaries between each cultural space. It suggests that mestizos and mulatos were much more prominent cultural actors than has generally been assumed. Their linguistic and cultural fluency helped shaped many aspects of New Spain's evolving culture and society.

"Mulata, Hija De Negro Y India": Afro-Indigenous Mulatos in Early Colonial Mexico

Since the fifteenth century, the term "mulato" has been used to describe individuals of mixed African and European ancestry. Through an examination of mulatos from sixteenth century New Spain this piece complicates our understanding of the usage and implication of this socio-racial ascription. Both demographic and anecdotal evidence suggests that in the early colonial period mulato frequently described individuals of mixed African-indigenous ancestry. Moreover, these individuals may have represented the majority of individuals so named. Additionally this piece uses several case studies to demonstrate that Afro-indigenous mulatos formed frequent and long-term connections to indigenous society and culture. Through acculturation and familial ties, early mulatos helped to encourage interethnic unions and may have played a key role in the growth of a highly varied, multi-ethnic colonial population in Mexico. By highlighting these important trends, this study challenges our traditional assumptions concerning the category of mulato and suggests that we must avoid the homogenizing tendency inherent in such terminology.

Espectáculo teatral profano en el siglo XVI novohispano

El espectáculo teatral profano de los dos últimos tercios del siglo XVI novohispano fue de índole callejera y se llevaba a cabo principalmente en fechas del calendario eclesiástico: Corpus Christi y día de San Hipólito, aunque también ocurrió en ocasión de algún otro tipo de celebración, por ejemplo, la llegada de un virrey o arzobispo, el aniversario de alguno de éstos o el nacimiento de un hijo del monarca español. Se trató de un entretenimiento público gratuito accesible a cualquier espectador, a diferencia del destinado a evangelizar y a exaltar dogmas y personajes eclesiásticos y seglares, como lo hicieron, respectivamente, franciscanos y jesuitas. Poco se sabe de autores y de textos teatrales profanos, pero lo suficiente para pensar, hasta ahora, que se trató de una dramaturgia adaptada, en general, a partir de la practicada en la España peninsular; de ahí que la originalidad de la novohispana deba buscarse en la recreación de temas y textos llegados de ultramar, con excepción de algunas piezas de índole histórica.

Irving A. Leonard, Books of the brave. Being an account of books and of men in the Spanish conquest and settlement of the sixteenth-century New World, Cambridge, Mass., 1949· 381 págs. + 7 grabs.

Se reseñó el libro: Books of the brave. Being an account of books and of men in the Spanish conquest and settlement of the sixteenth-century New World

The Geography of Cannibalism: Specificity in Sixteenth-Century New World Cartography and Literature

There has long been debate about the practice of cannibalism by Amerindians. Many scholars argue that Columbus, Vespucci and the other Europeans that came to the New World used the specter of cannibalism to justify the conquest, enslavement, and death of the indigenous populations. William Arens, in his book, TheMan-Eating Myth, goes further and asserts that the belief that cannibalism was a prevalent Amerindian practice represented the prejudice and racism of the Europeans encountering unknown peoples. Excluding incidents of survival cannibalism, Arens claims that are no credible first-hand accounts of cannibalism.1 I disagree with his assessment of the accounts. Delving into the extant maps, travel logs and literature, I have come to a different understanding of the accounts and, often, graphic imagery of savages roasting and gnawing on human limbs found on, and in, the early primary sources from the Columbian Encounter. Almost all references to cannibalism and the accompanying illustrations in sixteenth-century literature refer to areas of the New World from the Gulf and Mesoamerica to South America. During the first centennial of contact, journals, logs, letters and histories of the Columbian Encounter are replete with commentary about the practice of cannibalism. This literature is geographically specific. The cartography that accompanied the European exploration and mapping of this fourth part of the world is also geographically specific in its depictions of cannibalism. As stated earlier, the preponderance of journals and imagery on maps discussing or illustrating cannibalism respectively, were located in the Lower Antilles, Mesoamerica and South America (especially the northern Gulf region and the interior of Brazil the elbow or bulge). The indigenous people of North America were not literally or graphically depicted as cannibals. I assert that the lack of literary or graphic reference to the indigenous peoples of North America as cannibals is not an omission. It is instead an affirmation that Europeans encountered the practice of cannibalism in specific areas of the New World. The encounters in the Lower Antilles and Mesoamerica were chronicled in accounts by early and the cartography of the first decades of exploration contained labels indicating the presence of cannibals in the Lower Antilles. However, for over a century, the tales of encounters and the vast majority of cartographic depictions of cannibals were located in South America. From initial contact, Columbus began to fuse expectations, myths and reality in his description of the Amerindians. During his first voyage, Columbus interpreted hand signals and facial expressions as a description of a fierce rival tribe, caniba or carib.2 His log entry for 23 November 1492 contained a description of a rival tribe that Columbus extrapolated through the language barrier from the Taino, the gentle Arawak people of first contact. This description referred to another island where there were people on it who had one eye in their foreheads,

Following Estevanico: The Influential Presence of an African Slave in Sixteenth-century New World Historiography*

Africans were ubiquitous not only to the Conquest of Mexico but also to the entire endeavor of Spanish invasion and colonization in the Americas. Because the majority of such Africans arrived as sl...

Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest (review)

Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest (review)

From Archive to Map to Pastoral Landscape: A Spatial Perspective on the Livestock Ecology of Sixteenth-Century New Spain

The European invasion of the Americas rejoined two ecosystems that had been diverging since the Pangean supercontinent fragmented some 200 million years ago. On a hemispheric scale, exotic pathogens exploded through native populations, Old World biologies and institutions filled empty niches to bursting, and capitalists commodified landscapes, accumulating space and extinguishing species. On a regional scale, much still remains unclear, especially the initial ecological effects and processes of what Alfred W. Crosby labeled the Columbian Exchange.' Because Spain established the first substantial European presence in the New World using livestock integral to frontier expansion, the ecological effects of cattle and sheep in sixteenth-century New Spain remain as central to environmental history as a comprehensive evaluation of those effects remains elusive and controversial. For New Spain, now central Mexico, some scholars have claimed a leading role for livestock in the ecological upheaval; others have just as persistently denied it. In the former view, a metaphorical plague of sheep and cows pervasively degraded the environment. An exponential increase in livestock densities resulted in extreme overgrazing, a decrease in vegetation cover, more frequent and greater floods, and dramatic soil erosion. In the latter view, the introduction of livestock coincided with environmental recovery. By the time the Spaniards arrived in 1519, high population densities were already testing environmental thresholds, with native agriculture periodically disrupting vegetation cover and causing the erosion of soil from hillside fields. As native populations declined in a series of sixteenth-century

Art Ritual, and Confraternities in Sixteenth Century New Spain. Penitential Imagery at the Monastery of San Miguel, Huejotzingo

During the sixteenth century in New Spain, the celebration of some Christian feasts, especiality Holy Week and Corpus Christi, was much more complex than any of the dramatic rites of Late Medieval Spain. Theater, architecture, and sculpture were used by the mendicant orders, and by the confraternities associated to them, to reinforce instruction. Mural painting was used to chronicle these celebrations as well as to remind the faithful of their representation, as is discussed in this analysis of the Franciscan murals of Huejotzingo.