The Madrid Codex: New Approaches to Understanding an Ancient Maya Manuscript

Chapter 2: The Paper Patch on Page 56 ofthe Madrid Codex

The Paper Patch on Page 56 of the Madrid Codex HARVEY M. BRICKER THE PROBLEM Several years ago, Michael Coe suggested that the substrate of the Madrid Codex consisted in part of an amalgam or sandwich of indigenous bark paper and European paper (Coe and Kerr 1998:181–182). The pages Coe identified as composed in part of European paper are the outside, or cover, pages of the codex in its present form—pages M. 1 (and M. 57 on the other side of it) and M. 56 (and M. 112 on its other side). On both outer pages, according to Coe (in Coe and Kerr 1998:181), “fragments of European paper with Spanish writing are sandwiched or glued between layers of bark paper, and can be seen where the latter has been worn away.” Coe arrived at this conclusion on the basis of an examination of the Graz photographic facsimile (Codex Tro-Cortesianus 1967), not the original codex itself. Coe considered and rejected the possibility that the European paper was a later addition or patch: “. . . the Western paper appears not to have been a mere repair, but to have been incorporated in the C H A P T E R 2 HARVEY M. BRICKER 34 codex during its manufacture” (Coe and Kerr 1998:181). If this is true, it follows that the physical object known as the Madrid Codex is a post-Conquest book. How all this came about, and specifically when and where the codex was manufactured, was characterized by Coe as “indeed a mystery” (Coe and Kerr 1998:181). Coe thought, however, that the answers to these questions might be indicated by the content of some European script on the European paper on page M. 56. The line of argument went like this (1998:181): On page 56 most of the writing appears in reverse, because what is visible is the back of a sheet through which the ink has seeped. Looking at the Graz facsimile in a mirror . . . it is possible to make out something that looks like “prefatorum” and, in the line above it, “. . . riquez.” Stephen Houston has pointed out to me that there was a Franciscan missionary named Fray Juan Enríquez, who was killed by the Maya of Sacalum in 1624, along with Captain Francisco de Mirones Lezcano, during Lezcano’s ill-advised and abortive attempt to conquer Tayasal and open a road between Yucatán and Guatemala. Accepting the hypothetical links with Fray Juan Enríquez and the town of Tayasal, Coe concluded his scenario as follows (Coe and Kerr 1998:181): Thus the Madrid would necessarily be later than the conquest of Yucatán, probably even post-1624, and could even have been made at Tayasal, which did not fall to the Spaniards until 1697. Could the intrusive paper have been looted from Sacalum following the massacre of Mirones and his party, and carried off to Tayasal? We do not know. The entire train of argument or supposition starts from the proposition that the European paper is an integral part of the substrate of the Madrid Codex . If this should not be true, there is no need to proceed further along the road described by Coe. In his discussion of the affected pages of the Madrid Codex, Coe (Coe and Kerr 1998:181) said “few seemed to have noticed” the presence of European paper. One who did notice it and reported, in print, that it was a patch, not part of the substrate, was Ferdinand Anders (1967), who examined the original codex in the 1960s while doing the photography for the Graz facsimile edition. Curiously, Coe did not mention Anders’s, work even though it was published in the commentary booklet accompanying the Graz facsimile Coe used. It was this conflict between Anders’s report and Coe’s speculation that first brought Victoria Bricker and me into the matter. As a result of a letter concerning this discrepancy from Victoria Bricker to Coe in April 1997, she was contacted and eventually interviewed by Angela Schuster, at the time a Senior Editor of Archaeology magazine. Ashort news article entitled “Redating the Madrid Codex” (Schuster 1999) appeared in the January-February issue of the magazine; it highlighted the Coe position about a seventeenth-century THE PAPER PATCH ON PAGE 56 OF THE MADRID CODEX 35 Tayasal provenience for the Madrid, but it noted that “scholars, including Victoria R. Bricker of Tulane...