The Codex Mexicanus, a Nahua pictorial text from Mexico City produced in the 1570s and 1580s, has not received the kind of scholarly attention that other pictorials from central Mexico have. Lori Diel has finally given this document the attention it deserves and, in the process, added to our understanding of late sixteenth-century life for Nahuas in the viceregal capital. Her careful pictorial analysis should not be ignored by historians, who will find in this book a nuanced study of how Nahuas took a variety of information—calendrical, medicinal, historical—brought over from Europe, incorporated it into existing native systems of knowledge, and adapted it to their own purposes.
Most of the pictorial content of the Codex Mexicanus was, according to Diel, painted all at once in 1578–79 by a group of painters working in San Pablo Teopan, in Mexico City. But there are many later additions. Nahuatl glosses were added in...
