IN THE NEWS: Commemorations

The Codex Mendoza is one of the earliest known post-conquest manuscripts created in New Spain. Produced in Mexico City, likely in the 1540s, it consists of a collection of paintings crafted by Aztec or Nahua painter-scribes (Nahuatl tlacuilo pl. tlacuiloque) that were then glossed in detail and supplemented by a lengthy text written in Spanish by a legal scribe. The manuscript crossed the Atlantic soon after, perhaps as early as the 1550s... It has functioned since the 17th century as a sort of Rosetta Stone for Mexican pictorial writing. Recent exhibitions have described it as one of the most important ‘treasures’ among the magnificent collections of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, where it has been held since 1659.
It is unclear if the codex ever reached Spain, and also unclear how it ended up in the hands of its first recorded owner: André Thevet (c.1516-90), a French traveller and author of books on the Americas, royal cosmographer to the Valois court. By 1587, it appears, the codex had passed to Richard Hakluyt (c.1552-1616)...

Pic 1: The title page of Purchas’s 1625 ‘Pilgrimes’; Part III contains much of the contents of the Codex Mendoza

For Purchas, the Codex Mendoza represented much more than a collectible example of exotic writing: it constituted a unique indigenous source about the Aztec world. Indeed, the Mendoza was extraordinary at that moment. A small number of pre- and post conquest Mexican manuscripts were then held in various collections across Europe, but nobody knew how to make sense of the former and almost nobody saw the latter. The Spanish-language text made the Mendoza one of the very few Mexican manuscripts that Europeans found legible. The fact that it was a history - a highly regarded genre at the time - mattered greatly to Purchas’s assessment of the codex, helping to prove Aztec governance and civility and to establish the Aztecs as a sophisticated civilisation. Purchas’s high esteem for the manuscript is evidenced by the decision to reproduce it almost in its entirety, which involved having the Spanish text translated into English and also commissioning a large number of woodcut reproductions of the figures, a laborious and costly choice. Indeed, no other American manuscript was publicly reproduced in print in its entirety before the 19th century.

Pic 3: Scenes of daily Mexica/Aztec life from the Codex Mendoza, reproduced from woodcuts in Purchas’s ‘Pilgrimes’