The Florentine Codex: An Encyclopedia of the Nahua World in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

by Jeanette Favrot Peterson (Editor), Kevin Terraciano (Editor)

Honorable Mention, 2021 LASA Mexico Humanities Book Prize, Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Section In the sixteenth century, the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and a team of indigenous grammarians, scribes, and painters completed decades of work on an extraordinary encyclopedic project titled General History of the Things of New Spain , known as the Florentine Codex (1575–1577) . Now housed in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence and bound in three lavishly illustrated volumes, the codex is a remarkable product of cultural exchange in the early Americas. In this edited volume, experts from multiple disciplines analyze the manuscript’s bilingual texts and more than 2,000 painted images and offer fascinating, new insights on its twelve books. The contributors examine the “three texts” of the codex—the original Nahuatl, its translation into Spanish, and its painted images. Together, these constitute complementary, as well as conflicting, voices of an extended dialogue that occurred in and around Mexico City. The volume chapters address a range of subjects, from Nahua sacred beliefs, moral discourse, and natural history to the Florentine artists’ models and the manuscript’s reception in Europe. The Florentine Codex ultimately yields new perspectives on the Nahua world several decades after the fall of the Aztec empire.

Genres: History, Indigenous

256 pages, Hardcover

Published September 10, 2019

Reviews

[Randy Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let’s start with the title. It is very misleading. This monumental 16th Century encyclopedia ended up in Florence Italy but the subject matter is Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest. What makes this book special is that it reflects two different viewpoints; the Spanish, the Nahua people and also much of the book is illustrated which gives a third perspective on this culture and the events of 16th century Mexico.

The project was spearheaded by Fray Bernardino de Sahagun who utilized many Nahua writers and artists to translate the Spanish text into the Nahuatl language which makes the work richer and ultimately more subversive. The twelve volumes covers among other things, Gods, Astrology, Kings, Earthly things, the People and most significantly the Conquest. It is this last chapter which allows the Nahua people via their writing and their art to tell a more complex and nuanced story about how Spanish came to rule them.

This scholarly book is a handsome volume with terrific many reproductions of the much of the art found in the Florentine Codex. It is also a series of academic essays that aren’t particularly illuminating about the totality of this amazing work. Individually the essays are engaging and worth reading but they don’t give an adequate overview of the original volume or help the reader walk through the book itself. The question that I left feeling unanswered was, why can’t someone publish a reproduction of the Codex? After finishing this book I had little sense of the book that was the source material for all these essays.

[Josh Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bought this thinking it was the actual Florentine Codex, which it is not, which was on me. Instead, it is a collection of scholarship on the Florentine Codex grouped thematically. Images from that Spanish conquest-era text are reproduced in this volume, but often appear so small on the page as to lose their effectiveness. Be that as it may, the scholarship, by artists and historians, sheds light on the historical document in ways that emphasize the Nahuatl artists' subtle resistances to colonization through the artwork that survived them as the result, ironically, of Spanish efforts to erase their cultural identity from history.