Humanities Seminar

Abstract: The Codex Mendoza, a striking illustrated manuscript created in Mexico City ca. the 1540s, is one of the earliest, most detailed, and most studied post-conquest accounts of pre-Hispanic indigenous life. In this talk, I propose a new approach to this important manuscript and, more generally, to the investigation of visual culture and knowledge production in sixteenth-century Mexico. I focus on the complex process through which Nahuas and Spaniards manufactured the document, arguing that multiple translations—across media, languages, and cultural framings—were needed to render Aztec images and culture legible and acceptable to non-native viewers and readers. This process of transculturation had profound epistemological and ontological implications for both the making and the use of images. The Codex Mendoza, I argue, is not only a record of Aztec life but also a register of the cultural interpretations and negotiations involved in making and looking at images, books, and knowledge in early colonial Mexico.