Florentine Codex: Introduction and Indices: Introductory Book (Volume 1) (Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain)

"The History of the Things of New Spain" by Sahagun was one of the first ethnographic studies. Friar Sahagun, who had learned Nuahtl, the Aztec language, helped run a Franciscan college in Mexico, where young, male, Aztec pipiltin (nobles) were educated. The male pipiltin were taught the bible, latin, xstian culture, & Euro science. Sahagun hired some of his Aztec students as scribes and assistants, and sought out male, xstian, Aztec tlamantine ("wise ones" - sage, older clerics), and asked them to record their history, culture, and sociology, using their pictographic language. His former students, now grown scholars, had been young boys before the Spanish Occupation, so they had attended the calmeac (high schools for the pipiltin), so they were familiar with the material the tlamantine were creating. Sahagun also conducted interviews of the tlamantine. The young men interpreted the pictographic paintings and Sahagun's interviews in written Nahuatl, and Sahagun translated the Nahuatl to Spanish.Before the Spanish Invasion, ancient Mesoamericans created what we call Codices, pictographic books that related history, religious thought & rites, and sociology. The Spanish burned every pre-Invasion Codex they cld find, so nearly all the info from the surviving codices were written during the Spanish Occupation thru a Christian/male filter, by male Spanish and Indian xstians. The Aztecs, once they rose to power, also burned all the codices they cld find, so they cld re-write Mesoamerican history to play up their own role.The pictographic materials in Sahagun's History are basically a "Codex," (thus the term: Florentine Codex) while "The History of the Things of New Spain" is the Codex materials, with Sahagun's intros, interpretations & commentaries. He split the entire work into 12 books - he used "books" as a device to divide his work into more digestible parts, a common practice at the time - each book addressed a particular subject, like, "the Gods," or "the Soothsayers." Sahagun wrote introductory material for each book, followed by the Aztec writing (side by side with Spanish translation) and pictographs, followed by Sahagun's conclusions and reactions to the Nahuatl section. In the Aztec Codex sections, the Nahuatl text is on one side of the page, with a Spanish translation on the other, interjected with the pictographic material. In Sahagún’s original manuscript pictures were injected within the text, sometimes they are on completely separate pages. The Dibble/Anderson English translations have English on one side, and Nahuatl - or in the case of this book, Spanish - on the other side.Sometimes Sahagun's prologues don't introduce the Nahuatl so much as describe his process in developing the material. There's a lot of xstian handwringing over the (surely exaggerated) stories of executions of POWS, what xstians call “human sacrifice” when other ppl do it, and “executions” when they tortured & burned clerics/ppl of diff religions, or slaughtered captive soldiers & put their heads on pikes (the tlamantine wanted to please their new xstian masters and retain the small privileges their pipiltin status afforded them), meanwhile the Spanish were essentially sacrificing the Aztecs and other indigenous people in their brutal system of slavery. They forced Natives to work in mines, in terrible conditions, plus, bc there were no horses in the Americas, except what the conquistadors brought for themselves, they used Indigenous ppl literally as pack animals to carry extremely heavy loads of ore, metal and stone objects the Spanish were stealing to bring back to Spain, and other goods.When the Spanish first arrived in the Americas they unwittingly caused a small pox epidemic which reduced the ancient Mesoamerican population of 25 million people by 50% 90%, which is really why Cortes and his Indigenous allies (mostly the Tlaxcallans who hated the Aztecs) were able to defeat the them. Before the epidemic, Cortes was unsuccessful in even approaching Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. Anyway, the Indigenous population was just over a million after a decade of Spanish occupation, and more than a decade before Sahagún started interviewing older Aztec noblemen. All those ppl died thru epidemics (sm pox was followed by influenza & the bubonic plague) war, terribly oppressive slavery, torture and execution for still practicing their own religion by the Spanish Inquisition, and the usual criminal/POW executions that were a common spectacle in Euro-xstian society, drawing huge cheering/jeering crowds. Of course the Aztecs wld never have sacrificed ppl at the rate Indigenous Americans were sacrificed to Spanish greed, the violence of the European criminal justice system, and the Spanish Inquistion's reign of terror. Not to mention the epidemics caused by animal diseases brought into the human world by Europeans bc they slept with their barn animals and never bathed. Tenochtitlan had been a clean, sanitary city, it was part of Aztec religion that cleanliness was godliness, they swept & bathed daily, unlike the colonizers, whose unsanitary way of life invited the Black Plague (to what was now called Mexico City), which wld never have gotten a foothold in sanitary TenochtitlanAnyway, for some odd reason, rather than publishing a full edition, or at least a chronological edition in 3 volumes, like the full Spanish translation, the publisher and translators decided to pull out the Aztec "Florentine Codex,” both the writing and illustrations, and split it into 12 physical books. Unfortunately, the publisher did not preserve the integrity of each book, but instead separated out the illustrations from the text, and even more annoying, all the color illos in Book One were printed in black and white, which is sad, bc the colors are half the beauty and meaning of the artwork. Another sore point is that in Sahagún’s original mss, among the written Spanish-Nahuatl side-by-side text, there are small intersticial color illustrations of plants, flowers, and decorative designs, only some of which are included, in b&w, as chapter headings in Dibble & Anderson’s translation.This book, the subject of this review, is all of the material Sahagún actually wrote, the introductory materials and epilogues to each of the separate books, plus essays by the translators. To be clear, there is absolutely no Aztec artwork in this book, it is all Sahagún. While this makes a sort of sense, if you actually wanna read the "History of the Things of New Spain" the way Sahagún intended, you will hafta buy this text, along with the 12 Codex books, read Sahagún's introductory material in this book, then read "Book One: The Gods," then refer back to this book to read Sahagún's conclusions, & his intro to Book Two, then read "Book Two: The Ceremonies," then back to this book to read Sahugun's conclusion, and so forth, back and forth betw this book, and the other 12 texts.So this book is necessary if you wanna read Sahagún’s complete work, which is a costly endeavor, as this book is currently around $50, and the other 12 books are in the $22 - $36 range. Many of the 12 books are skinny little things, that are less than a hundred pages, others are over 200 pages. The translation is very readable. One of the drawbacks is Dibble & Anderson def prepared their work for scholars, so their footnotes are in Spanish, German and French. Sometimes the notes show alternate spellings of Nahuatl words in different translations/editions (Sahagún prepared several editions over his lifetime), sometimes they're quotes from various intl scholars who've studied and/or translated the History. There are some notes in English, which are very helpful.The essays by Dibble and Anderson are very informative and interesting, and help put Sahagún's work into context. There has never been a complete printing of Sahagún's entire work in English before, which is stunning when you consider there isn't a full translation in any language other than Spanish, altho there are partial translations. How is it that the first ethonographic study, and the most extensive contemporaneous ethnographic study done of ANY Native American nation, has never been fully translated into English before, nor in any European languages other than Spanish?There is a photographic copy of the final draft of Sahagún’s handwritten & hand illustrated manuscript, on the internet at the World Digital Library website, if you wanna see ALL the pictographs in color, and see the internal paintings of Mesoamerican plants and flowers.

It's perfectly reasonable to pick up the individual books in the series that address topics that you think will be most useful or interesting to you. However, this book provides Sahagun's context for each of the main topics as well as Dibble et al's historiographic and methodological notes, both of which are absolutely essential for digesting the others. As an example, book 10 provides me with excellent material on the specific sub-topic of disease, treatment, and related professions. But once you place it within the rationale that Sahagun provides for its existence, namely that of a disillusioned man of faith who feels the land itself is at odds with keeping the faith and true conversion, and you start to get a much more nuanced sense of the author/editor's approach to the material he's compiling. Without the introductions, it can be tempting to take Sahagun out of his time and place and either ignore his importance as the key directorial voice in the project or turn him into a cartoon version of modern day ethnographic standards.This is a very accessible work for a non-specialist, and I recommend it strongly.

Anyone claiming to an expert on Latin America should read this first!