Elizabeth Boone has written a book that is remarkable in many ways, a work that historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians will realize they have been in need of once they have delved into it. In an unparalleled effort, she takes the reader through dozens of central Mexican and Oaxacan manuscripts, broadly speaking, the “pictorial histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs,” according to her subtitle; most of them were made just before the Spanish invasion of Mexico in 1519 or in the first few generations after. At the end, the reader not only knows what is in a given manuscript, according to Boone’s reading, but also how to find one’s own way through a manuscript.
Heretofore the decipherment of manuscripts has been a highly specialized art, one open only to the advanced scholar. Interpretations of individual manuscripts lie in scholarly articles, the occasional monograph in either Spanish or English, and...
