The literary heritage of the celebrated Fray Toribio de Mendieta or Paredes, better known by his Indian name of Motolinía, poses serious questions with respect to authorship and the relation between his various writings, especially between the important chronicle commonly, but improperly, according to the editor of the book under review, known as the Historia de los indios de la Nueva España, and the no less important Memoriales. The heat generated by controversy over these questions sometimes recalls the ferocity of Fray Toribio’s own diatribe against Bartolomé de Las Casas, as witness the recent sharp exchange between two leading students of Motolinía, Professors Georges Baudot and Edmundo O’Gorman.
A major difficulty is the fact that no holograph manuscript of the Historia (or Relación, as the editor of this book prefers to call it) is known to exist; hence the importance of establishing which of the three known sixteenth-century copies (the copy reproduced here and baptized by the editor the Manuscrito de la ciudad de México and two other copies cited in the title) is the oldest and therefore presumably closest to the missing original. In his introduction, the editor, aided by the distinguished paleographer Agustín Millares Carlo, provides a detailed physical description and paleographic study of the three manuscripts. There follows a paleographic transcription of the Mexico City manuscript, accompanied by notes indicating the variations, omissions, transpositions of text, and other differences among the three manuscripts. A photographic facsimile of the Mexico City manuscript forms the last part of the book.
On the basis of his close study and collation of the three manuscripts, the editor concludes that all three belong approximately to the second half of the sixteenth century and that the Mexico City manuscript is the oldest, or father, copy from which the other two were made. Granted this priority, it would be premature to conclude that the Mexico City manuscript most closely approximates the last or definitive version of the Historia. In his Utopie et Histoire au Mexique (1977), Georges Baudot identifies and describes an eighteenth-century copy in the library of the Palacio Real of Madrid that differs at many points from the sixteenth-century copies, that conforms more closely to Motolinía’s wishes for the organization of his chronicle, and whose sixteenth-century model may have been Motolinía’s autograph manuscript. Clearly, many problems posed by the corpus of Motolinía’s writings remain to be solved. This caution is not meant to detract from the value of this handsome and scholarly edition of the Historia for the study of the great Franciscan’s thought and style.
