Colonial Mexico - The Florentine Codex: An Encyclopedia of the Nahua World in Sixteenth-Century Mexico. Edited by Jeanette Favrot Peterson and Kevin Terraciano. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019. Pp. 241. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $50.00 cloth.

Marvels of Medicine makes a compelling case for including sixteenth century medical and surgical writing in the critical frameworks we now use to think about a genealogy of cultural expression in Latin America. Focusing on a small group of practitioners who differed in their levels of training, but who shared the common experience of having left Spain to join colonial societies in the making, this book analyses the paths their texts charted to attitudes and political positions that would come to characterize a criollo mode of enunciation. Unlike the accounts of first explorers, which sought to amaze audiences back in Europe with descriptions of strange and astonishing lands, these texts instead engaged the marvellous in an effort to supersede it, stressing the value of sensorial experience and of verifying information through repetition and demonstration. Vernacular medical writing became an unlikely early platform for a new form of regionally anchored discourse that demanded participation in a global intellectual conversation yet found itself increasingly relegated to the margins. In responding to that challenge, anatomical treatises, natural histories and surgical manuals exceeded the bounds set by earlier templates becoming rich, hybrid narratives that were as concerned with science as with portraying the lives and sensibilities of women and men in early colonial Mexico.

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Angélica Jimena Afanador-Pujol, The Relación de Michoacán (1539-1541), And the Politics of Representation in Colonial Mexico, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2015, 269 p.

Relaciones Estudios de Historia y Sociedad ◽

10.24901/rehs.v37i145.33 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 37 (145) ◽

pp. 326

Author(s):

Luise M. Enkerlin Pauwells

Keyword(s):

Colonial Mexico ◽

Politics Of Representation ◽

University Of Texas

La obra que a continuación se reseña es un libro necesario. The Relación de Michoacán (1539-1541), And the Politics of Representation in Colonial Mexico cuya autora es la historiadora del arte colombiana Angélica Jimena Afanador-Pujol.

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Revising the Narrative of the Conquest of Mexico: Bernardino de Sahagún’s 1585 Relación de la conquista de esta Nueva España

Textual Cultures ◽

10.14434/textual.v13i2.31592 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 13 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Amber Brian

Keyword(s):

Sixteenth Century ◽

Spanish Translation ◽

Bernardino De Sahagun ◽

Aztec Empire ◽

Florentine Codex ◽

Conquest Of Mexico

2021 represents the five-hundred-year anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire. This essay addresses the rendering of the events that culminated in the Spanish domination of that region in two texts associated with the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590). The first is Book Twelve of the Florentine Codex, a bilingual manuscript written collaboratively with Indigenous intellectuals in Nahuatl with a Spanish translation and accompanied by nearly two thousand illustrations that represent a third text. Completed in 1579, under increasing scrutiny by religious authorities, the manuscript was confiscated and sent to Europe, eventually coming to reside in the Medici Library in Florence. In 1585, Sahagún, authored Relación de la conquista de esta Nueva España, which sought to revise the narrative of the conquest found in Book Twelve. Sahagún’s revision reveals how the narrative of the conquest changed in the hands of the Franciscan friar as the sixteenth century drew to a close.

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