The Herbal of the Florentine Codex: Description and Contextualization of Paragraph V in Book XI

2018 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-488
Author(s):  
Victoria Ríos Castaño

In contemporary studies, three texts dating from the second half of the sixteenth century continue to be treated as essential primary literature concerning pre-Hispanic and early colonial medicine. These are the herbal Libellus de medicinalibus indorum herbis (1552), composed by the Nahuas Martín de la Cruz and Juan Badiano in the Imperial College of Santa Cruz of Tlatelolco; the Historia natural de Nueva España, written by Philip II's protomédico (royal physician) Francisco Hernández, a “scientific envoy” in New Spain in the 1570s; and the Florentine Codex, the only extant manuscript of the 12-book encyclopedia on the world of the Nahuas, Historia universal de las cosas de Nueva España (ca. 1577), which was directed by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún.

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amber Brian

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.


1957 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-86
Author(s):  
†M. M. Lacas

No tourist who visits central Mexico will fail to pay a visit to the world-famous lake of Pátzcuaro. This beautiful and placid lake, with the several islands which dot its surface and the surrounding hills that frame it, formed, in olden times, the hub of the Michoacán Kingdom. Even today, it is the main habitat of the peaceloving Tarascan Indians who cluster around it and, partly at least, live on its abundant fish. An ancient author tells us that the word Michoacán means “fishing place,” and that the main occupation of the early Indians was the mild art of fishing, so opposed to the war-like activities of their neighbors to the east, the cruel Aztecs.


2017 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 123-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aysha Pollnitz

ABSTRACTThe Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, established in 1536, liberally educated the sons of Nahua (Aztec) leaders in New Spain. Its Franciscan pedagogues, including Bernardino de Sahagún (c. 1499–1590), Andrés de Olmos (1491–1571) and Juan Bautista (c. 1555–1606/13), worked with indigenous students and alumni to collect, edit and circulate Nahuatl huehuetlahtolli, or ‘speech of the ancients’. This paper examines the largest collection of these orations printed in pre-modern Mexico, the Huehuetlahtolli [1601] edited by Juan Bautista and indigenous intellectuals from the college. It argues that the Tlatelolcans adapted Nahuatl ‘old words’ for the New World of colonial society. They ornamented the speeches with rhetorical techniques derived from Santa Cruz's Erasmian curriculum. They interpolated biblical sentences, particularly from Proverbs and Sirach, to enhance the evangelising potential of the discourses. Finally, they drew on Erasmus's theory of speech, as expressed in his pedagogical and spiritual writings, to explicate Nahuatl los difrasismos concerning eloquence and good counsel. Contextualising the Huehuetlahtolli [1601] in Santa Cruz's Erasmian schoolroom reveals the contours of its argument for vernacular evangelisation, the liberal education of indigenous youth and for the elegance of the Nahuatl tongue.


Ethnohistory ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-406
Author(s):  
Allison Caplan

Abstract Previous studies suggest that late postclassic and early colonial Nahua viewers understood specific artistic creations to contain tonalli, a solar-derived animating force. This article advances understanding of the animacy of Nahua featherworks by examining attention to tonalli in the various stages of featherwork production. Analysis of a classificatory distinction used in the sixteenth-century Florentine Codex between tlazohihhuitl (beloved feathers) and macehualihhuitl (commoner feathers) suggests that this distinction registers specific types of feathers’ differential ability to contain tonalli. Ultimately, this classification posited tlazohihhuitl as living beings and macehualihhuitl as inanimate materials. The relationship between these two classes of feathers is integral to Nahuatl descriptions of the treatment of specific feather types in the production stages of bird hunting, dyeing and selling feathers, and mosaic construction. Understanding these production practices through Nahuatl descriptions suggests that care for tonalli represented a central commercial and artistic concern in featherwork production.


1952 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 179 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Kubler ◽  
Arthur J. O. Anderson ◽  
Charles E. Dibble

2005 ◽  
Vol 61 (04) ◽  
pp. 571-610
Author(s):  
Jeanette Favrot Peterson

It was in 1531 that, according to the apparition legend first recorded over a hundred years later in 1648, Juan Diego’s visionary experience of the Virgin of Guadalupe was miraculously mapped onto his tilma (tilmatli in Nahuatl) or woven cloak. This painted cloth, hereafter referred to as the tilma image, is said to be the same relic venerated today in the basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City (fig. 1). However, no sacred image is invented from whole cloth, to use a highly appropriate metaphor here, and the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe is no exception. Moreover, its very materiality makes it vulnerable to the passage of time, the laws of physics and human intervention. As an object of human craft produced post-Conquest, it has a traceable genealogy within the combustible mix of art modes, mixed media and theological tracts found circulating in early colonial New Spain.


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