UNAM has performed a valuable service in reproducing Diego Muñoz Camargo’s Descriptión de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala de las Indias y del Mar Océano para el buen gobierno y ennobletimiento. Based on a copy of the original manuscript housed in the Hunter Collection at the University of Glasgow, this facsimile edition beautifully presents the 234 folios of text, 2 calendric wheels, and 157 pictures of the Descriptión.
In the prolog, René Acuña relates how the Descriptión, written between 1580 and 1585 in response to a 1577 memoria ordering the composition of relaciones geográficas, made its way in 1585 from Mexico to Felipe II’s Royal Library in Madrid. In the early eighteenth century, in an unknown manner, Scottish physician William Hunter acquired the manuscript; at his death in 1783, it passed to the University of Glasgow.
Both historians and anthropologists will find information of interest in this splendid edition of the mestizo cronista’s description of late sixteenth-century Tlaxcala.
