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  • The Codex MexicanusTime, Religion, History, and Health in Sixteenth-Century New Spain
  • Lori Boornazian Diel (bio)

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.1

Filled though it is with fascinating records, the manuscript has defied comprehensive scholarly analysis, most likely due to its disparate contents.2 Indeed, when Donald Robertson considered the Mexicanus in his pioneering study of Aztec pictorial manuscripts, he appeared to diminish its value by describing its contents as “more a compendium or gathering together of seemingly unrelated information than a proper well-ordered manuscript.”3 Scholars who have considered the Codex Mexicanus more recently have concentrated on particular sections of the work, but in so doing, they [End Page 427] have been unable to adequately explain the significance of the codex in its entirety.4

Here, I take a holistic approach to the book and make sense of it by revealing how the miscellaneous content of the Mexicanus finds a counterpart in Spanish books called reportorios de los tiempos. Based on the medieval almanac tradition, reportorios contain vast assortments of information related to the facets and faces of time—its passage as well as its influence—as does the Mexicanus. Indeed, scholars who have studied the calendric information contained in the Mexicanus have noted that reportorios likely served as source material for those sections.5 However, other sections of the Mexicanus, such as its genealogy and history, also find counterparts in some reportorios, which points to the Mexicanus as a whole being modeled after these Spanish books. Reportorios were used as guides to living in early modern Spain; likewise, the Codex Mexicanus would have provided its native audience a guide to living in colonial New Spain.

By comparing the contents of the Mexicanus with various sixteenth-century Spanish reportorios, I bring to light points of convergence and divergence between the native codex and the Spanish books. The Mexicanus painters did not slavishly copy the contents of the reportorios but modified them by compiling a variety of texts, putting them together in new ways, and even going so far as to translate Spanish alphabetic texts into the Aztec pictorial system of writing. At the same time, they wove information pertaining to the Aztec world into the codex, surely using Aztec books as the sources for this information and thereby establishing a corollary between the Spanish world and the Aztec one. Moreover, the creators of the Mexicanus were selective in the types of information they chose to include. The reportorios contain copious amounts of information that are not included in the Mexicanus. [End Page 428]

The Mexicanus includes one anomalous page (shown in Figure 2) that does not find a corollary in the reportorio tradition: an image of biblical visions received by a native convert that serves to establish the Mexicanus’s owners and contributors as exemplary Christians. This was a particularly important message given the colonial context in which the codex was produced. The late sixteenth century was a particularly turbulent time for Spain’s colonial project and one in which many Spaniards were questioning the success of their earlier attempts to convert the Nahuas.

Created by native intellectuals living at a time of transition under Spanish colonial rule, the Mexicanus functioned as colonial discourse, a means by which its compilers attempted to gain control over an increasingly unstable world.6 María Fernández uses the concept of cosmopolitanism to better understand Mexican visual culture from this era, as it “entails juxtapositions, amalgamations, and translations of visual materials from various cultural traditions.”7 She sees this process as fundamental to identity formation. Hence, the Codex Mexicanus, with its contents...

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