The Náhuatl word tlacuilolli means something written or something painted and can be applied to any of the group of native Mexican pictorial documents generally known as codices. The European tradition in the study of these materials, which received its major impetus under Eduard Seler in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, continues today under the leadership, among others, of the author of this work, who has in recent years published studies of Codices Becker I and II, Codex Mendoza, and various objects in the Museum für Völkerkunde and the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna.
The present book is his most ambitious undertaking, the result of many years of work. Essentially it is a catalogue and stylistic study of some well-known but complicated codical texts. There is no effort to assemble or treat all Mexican pictorial manuscripts in an exhaustive or bibliographical way. The concentration is rather on texts with religious, ritualistic, or calendrical content and deriving in whole or in substantial part from the pre-conquest period. These are divided into four groups, relating to four geographical areas: Tenochtitlán, represented by the Tonalamatl Aubin; Cholula-Tlaxcala, represented by Codex Borgia; Mixteca, represented by Codex Vindobonensis; and an unknown area, represented by Codex Fejervary-Mayer and Codex Laud. There follows a series of sixty-seven plates reproduced from these and other codices, together with descriptive and analytic commentary for each and clearly sketched plans of page layouts with identifications of figures and signs. The final section is a catalogue of the codices themselves (location, dimensions, commentary, and bibliography) and of their contents (calendrical elements, deities, other iconographic forms).
This work is an important contribution to the technical study of ritual codices. Although much of the commentary has appeared before, much also has not, and nowhere else do we have so systematic and clearly expressed an analysis of components of so large a corpus of texts. The catalogue of the final section makes an encyclopedic reference work, summarizing and making accessible present knowledge. The placement of layout sketches on verso pages so that they may be directly compared with the pictorial originals on the facing rectos is a practice of which all students will approve.
