The Renaissance Reception of Nahua Paideia in the Writings of Bernardino de Sahagún: An Aesthetic Approach to Religion

In this article, I propose that books I–VI of Bernardino Sahagún’s Códice florentino, which discuss the moral and religious philosophies of indigenous Mexicans, should be interpreted through the lens of Renaissance humanist linguistic and philosophical theories. I demonstrate that, utilizing Franciscan–Bonaventurean epistemology, Sahagún put forward a method of evangelizing that intended to separate “the good from the bad” in indigenous cultures. In an effort to defend my claim, I first lay out some of the problems surrounding the Códice florentino. Second, I describe the general theological and cosmological views held by the Aztecs, so that, third, I may develop the main principles of the philosophy of flor y canto (in xochitl in cuicatl). Against a political interpretation that is often defended by appealing to the traditional rituals performed in the Aztec empire, I contend that their philosophy should be interpreted from the perspective of Nahua religion and aesthetics. I also discuss Sahagún’s reception of Aztec philosophy in the Códice with a focus on his interest in the linguistic and empirical dimensions of Nahua religion.

Francisco Cervantes de Salazar’s Mexico City in 1554: A Dramaturgy of Conversion

The interplay between cities, theatricality and conversion becomes manifest in exclusive or semi-private spaces, such as classrooms and private studies. As this chapter illustrates, the rhetorical textbooks of Fernández Salazar sought to train students in the art of Rhetoric by performing didactic dialogues that took place against the background of colonial Mexico. In so doing, the textbooks linked Renaissance humanism to the transformation of urban, social, and religious spaces that followed the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire.

The Aztec Empire

The Aztec Empire (1428–1521 CE) grew out of a system of small city-states that covered central Mexico starting in the twelfth century CE. Armies from the capital, Tenochtitlan, conquered over 500 polities throughout what is today central and southern Mexico. The empire employed indirect control of its provinces, with inner provinces paying regular taxes and outer provinces acting as client states to guard imperial borders. Few or no services were provided by the empire in provincial areas. The imperial capital, Tenochtitlan, was a large, wealthy, and complex urban center of 200,000 inhabitants. The Aztec Empire came to an end with conquest by Hernando Cortés in 1521.

On the first book of medicinal plants written in the American Continent:The LibellusMedicinalibus Indorum Herbisfrom Mexico, 1552. A review

The "Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis" (Little Book of Indian Medicinal Plants) was composed by the indigenous sages Martín De la Cruz and Juan Badiano, 31 years after the Aztec Empire fall. The former was the author, and the latter translated the manuscript from the Nahuatllanguage to Latin. It contains numerous recipes for treating human diseases and 185 colored drawings of the prescribed plants. In 1939 it was first published as "An Aztec Herbarium". However, it also contains XVI century European diseases and medical practices. We present an updated review of this beautiful codex, its history, conception, creators, and botany; as well as, the chemistry and pharmacology of fiveplants therein cited. The Libellusis a window in the time that allows the scientific research of ancient ethnopharmacological knowledge in Mesoamerica and document its persistence, disappearance, or transformation. However, this requires overcoming linguistic defies, but also derived from its historical, anthropological, cultural, botanical, and medical context.

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

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.

Old Foes, New Allies

After establishing a base at Veracruz, the Cortés expedition began their march inland to the heart of the Aztec Empire. This chapter focuses on the initial encounter between the expedition and the Tlaxcalteca, who would eventually become the key Mesoamerican allies to Spanish efforts at toppling the Aztecs, as well as in continued conquests throughout Mesoamerica, creating New Spain in the process. Yet first, the Tlaxcalteca and allied Otomis from Tlaxcala’s northern frontier fought fiercely with the foreigners, including weeks of fighting at Tecoac and Tzompantepec. The Tlaxcalteca had resisted incorporation into the Aztec Triple Alliance empire through a mix of military resistance and by organizing themselves into one of the most inclusive and collective states of the Precolumbian Americas, which provided incentives for fighting bravely. They eventually made the strategic decision that by joining the Spaniards they could topple the existing political order in their favor. The first offensive of the joint Spanish-Tlaxcalteca force was aimed at Cholula, on the way to entering the Mexica-Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan.

Chicano Literature

Chicano literature began as a critical and creative response to discrimination and prejudice that affected Mexicans who immigrated into the United States after the 1900s, as well as those naturalized citizens who became Mexican Americans with roots in the American conquest of the Southwest after 1848. The term “Mexicano” was initially pronounced “Meshicano” during the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Centuries later, the “sh” sound became a harder tonal “ch,” spelling it with an “x” and linguistically evolving into a hard “ch” sound. Chicano then became a shortcut term for Mexicano as working-class youth adopted it. Thus, Chicano is pronounced “Xicano,” with a “ch” sound for the “x.” Many Mexican Americans who were naturalized Americans after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo used the term “Chicano” derisively to identify working-class Mexicans not fully accepted by their Mexican compatriots because they were mestizo, they lacked education, and they spoke a mixture of English and Spanish, forming clever neologisms. The term “Chicano” itself was also embraced by a growing base of Chicanos, who rejected Latin American, Mexican American, Hispanic, and even Latino (“I don’t speak Latin, therefore I am not Latino”) during the nascent Chicano movement, along with the farmworker movement. Although scholars tend to trace the embryonic origins of Chicano literature to writings that derive from the explorers Cabeza de Vaca and Hernan Cortés, these writers did not use the term “Chicano” in their references, nor did they call themselves “Chicanos.” What is striking, however, is that the tales, legends, and myths passed down orally manifested themselves in the folktales, legends, and stories of la llorona (the Weeping Woman)—a version of La Malinche, the betrayer of the Aztec Empire and paramour of Cortés, known as Dona Marina. Historically, these stories of conflict and conquest, of love and rejection, of heroes and traitors, of tragedy and comedy, become enmeshed in the social, geographical, and environmental landscape that eventually became Chicano literature. Chicano literature is therefore written by a group of people who identify with the political, cultural, and social Chicano movement, and who use expository writing, autobiography, fiction, poetry, drama, and film to document the history of Chicano consciousness in the United States. From this early Chicano movement, and the long marches of the United Farm Workers, emerged a literature giving voice to the disenfranchised, the working-class, the migrant worker, and the field hand, both male and female alike, as they fought for the right to tell their story in the growing body of American literature, just as the once rejected Walt Whitman fought to have his musings and writings accepted in the years following the American Civil War. The collective stories of sin and redemption, of territories lost and gained, of legends and myths ingrained in the greater Southwest are reflections of hundreds of years of human toil as Chicano literature evolved into another chapter of American literature.

Sobre Susan Schroeder, Tlacaelel Remembered: Mastermind of the Aztec Empire

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