Awards

• Winner of Roland H. Bainton Book Prize, The Sixteenth Century Society and Conference 2019 (United States)

Overview

Winner, Roland H. Bainton Book Prize, The Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, 2019 Some sixty years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, a group of Nahua intellectuals in Mexico City set about compiling an extensive book of miscellanea, which was recorded in pictorial form with alphabetic texts in Nahuatl clarifying some imagery or adding new information altogether. This manuscript, known as the Codex Mexicanus, includes records pertaining to the Aztec and Christian calendars, European medical astrology, a genealogy of the Tenochca royal house, and an annals history of pre-conquest Tenochtitlan and early colonial Mexico City, among other topics. Though filled with intriguing information, the Mexicanus has long defied a comprehensive scholarly analysis, surely due to its disparate contents. In this pathfinding volume, Lori Boornazian Diel presents the first thorough study of the entire Codex Mexicanus that considers its varied contents in a holistic manner. She provides an authoritative reading of the Mexicanus's contents and explains what its creation and use reveal about native reactions to and negotiations of colonial rule in Mexico City. Diel makes sense of the codex by revealing how its miscellaneous contents find counterparts in Spanish books called Reportorios de los tiempos. Based on the medieval almanac tradition, Reportorios contain vast assortments of information related to the issue of time, as does the Mexicanus. Diel masterfully demonstrates that, just as Reportorios were used as guides to living in early modern Spain, likewise the Codex Mexicanus provided its Nahua audience a guide to living in colonial New Spain.

Full Product Details

9781477316733

Table of Contents

Reviews

The Codex Mexicanus includes a fifty-two-page color facsimile of the original manuscript, to which Boornazian Diel refers often in her analysis, as well as to more than three dozen facsimile excerpts from other contemporaneous pictorial Nahua manuscripts. She is thus able to situate the Mexicanus solidly within the intellectual and religious context of late sixteenth-century New Spain. * New Mexico Historical Review * Diel's book is a useful and notable contribution to Mesoamerican scholarship in general and Pre-Columbian and colonial manuscript study specifically...Diel's arguments and suggestions elicit novel ways of evaluating the Codex Mexicanus, Mesoamerican manuscript-making tradition, and Amerindians' experiences in colonial society including their struggle in the sixteenth century to reconcile the preservation of their traditions with their embrace of Christianity. * Latin American Latinx Visual Culture * In this superb monograph by Lori Boornazian Diel, the Codex Mexicanus has finally found its integration...[The Codex Mexicanus] feels like a definitive step forward in Mexican manuscript studies because of how it illuminates not just the codex but also the wider, unstable environment in which native people were challenged to reconcile their established world with a new one imposed by their colonizers. * caa.reviews * Well-written and beautifully illustrated. * CHOICE *

Well-written and beautifully illustrated. * CHOICE *

Author Information

Lori Boornazian Diel is an associate professor of art history at Texas Christian University. She is the author of The Tira de Tepechpan: Negotiating Place under Aztec and Spanish Rule.

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