This year marks the quincentenary of the fall of the Mexica-Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan and the surrender by its great speaker (huey tlatoani), Cuauhtemoc, to Hernando Cortés and allied forces at the sister city of Tlatelolco. It is therefore exceptionally timely to welcome this rigorous, interdisciplinary, and engaging treatment of the most consequential manuscript on the Aztec or Nahua worlds, largely assembled in the same Tlatelolco: the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, otherwise known as the Florentine Codex. Over three decades (1547–77) under the editorial coordination of the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, Nahua scribes recorded alphabetic text in Classical Nahuatl (earlier in the process) and illustrations (later in the process), which were joined in the text by Sahagún's translation of the first to Castilian. The resulting compilation is without a doubt the single most comprehensive source of information from the sixteenth century on...

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