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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2016

Lori Boornazian Diel
Lori Boornazian Diel*
Affiliation:
Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas
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Extract

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.

Type
Articles
Information
The Americas , Volume 73 , Issue 4 , October 2016 , pp. 427 - 458
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2016 

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References

1. The entire manuscript (Fonds Mexicain 23–24) is accessible online through the Bibliothèque National de France: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b55005834g.

2. Ernst Mengin published the only thorough study of the Codex Mexicanus. See his “Commentaire du Codex Mexicanus, nos. 23-24 de la Bibliothèque National de Paris,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 41:2 (1952): 387–498. His was certainly a valiant effort, given that Mexican manuscript studies were still in their infancy at the time he worked. Nevertheless, he left gaps in his explication of the work and failed to link the Mexicanus's unwieldy contents into a unified whole.

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4. The calendric sections of the work have received the most attention. A number of specialists interested in native timekeeping and its relation to intellectual thought in preconquest and early colonial central Mexico have analyzed the calendric portions of the Mexicanus specifically or more broadly through comparisons with other works. For examples, see Prem, Hanns, “Comentario a las partes calendáricas del Codex Mexicanus 23–24,” Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl 13 (1978): 267–288 Google Scholar; Prem, , Manual de la antigua cronología Mexicana (Mexico: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 2008)Google Scholar; Brotherston, Gordon, “Indigenous Intelligence in Spain's American Colony,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 36:3 (2000): 241–253 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brotherston, , Feather Crown: The Eighteen Monthly Feasts of the Mexica Year (London: British Museum, 2005)Google Scholar; Brotherston, , “America and the Colonizer Question: Two Formative Statements from Early Mexico,” in Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, Moraña, Mabel, Dussel, Enrique, and Jáuregui, Carlos A., eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 23–42 Google Scholar; Spitler, Susan, “Colonial Mexican Calendar Wheels: Cultural Translation and the Problem of ‘Authenticity,’” in Painted Books and Indigenous Knowledge in Mesoamerica, Boone, Elizabeth Hill, ed. (New Orleans: Middle American Research Institute, 2005), 271–288 Google Scholar; Spitler, “Nahua Intellectual Responses to the Spanish: The Incorporation of European Ideas into the Central Mexican Calendar” (PhD diss., Tulane University, 2005); and Aveni, Anthony, Circling the Square: How the Conquest Altered the Shape of Time in Mesoamerica (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2012)Google Scholar.

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13. All translations by author, unless otherwise noted.

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27. Ibid., 40.

28. Ibid., 46.

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30. Chaves, Chronographia, 172r–183v.

31. Andrés de Li, Reportorio de los tiempos, 22.

32. Constituciones del Arzobispado y provincial de la muy insigne y muy leal ciudad de Tenoxtitlan, Mexico, de la Nueva España (Mexico: Juan de Pablos, 1556).

33. Anonymous, Repertorio de los tiempos (Valladolid: Francisco Fernandez de Cordova, 1554), 27v; Chaves, Chronografia, 134v–135v.

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45. Ibid., 110.

46. Translated in Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 102.

47. Boone, Cycles of Time and Meaning, 29.

48. Chaves, Chronografia; Martínez, Reportorio.

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54. Boone, Stories in Red and Black, 242–243.

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57. Boone, Stories in Red and Black, 242.

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