Florentine Codex

Page 51 of Book IX from the Florentine Codex. The text is in Nahuatl; World Digital Library.

The Florentine Codex is a 16th-century ethnographic research study in Mesoamerica by the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. Sahagún originally titled it La Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España (in English: The General History of the Things of New Spain).[1] After a translation mistake, it was given the name Historia general de las Cosas de Nueva España. The best-preserved manuscript is commonly referred to as the Florentine Codex, as the codex is held in the Laurentian Library of Florence, Italy.

In partnership with Nahua elders and authors who were formerly his students at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, Sahagún conducted research, organized evidence, wrote and edited his findings. He worked on this project from 1545 up until his death in 1590. The work consists of 2,500 pages organized into twelve books; more than 2,000 illustrations drawn by native artists provide vivid images of this era.[2] It documents the culture, religious cosmology (worldview) and ritual practices, society, economics, and natural history of the Aztec people.[2] It has been described as "one of the most remarkable accounts of a non-Western culture ever composed."[3]

Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson were the first to translate the Codex from Nahuatl to English, in a project that took 30 years to complete.[4] In 2012, high-resolution scans of all volumes of the Florentine Codex, in Nahuatl and Spanish, with illustrations, were added to the World Digital Library.[5] In 2015, Sahagún's work was inscribed into the Memory of the World register by UNESCO.[6] In 2023, the Getty Research Institute released the Digital Florentine Codex which gives access to the complete manuscript.

  1. ^ Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain (Translation of and Introduction to Historia General de Las Cosas de La Nueva España; 12 Volumes in 13 Books ), trans. Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O Anderson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1950–1982). Images are taken from Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, The Florentine Codex. Complete digital facsimile edition on 16 DVDs. Tempe, Arizona: Bilingual Press, 2009. Reproduced with permission from Arizona State University Hispanic Research Center.
  2. ^ a b "Digital Florentine Codex Online". Getty.
  3. ^ H. B. Nicholson, "Fray Bernardino De Sahagún: A Spanish Missionary in New Spain, 1529-1590", in Representing Aztec Ritual: Performance, Text, and Image in the Work of Sahagún, ed. Eloise Quiñones Keber (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2002).
  4. ^ Ann Bardsley and Ursula Hanly, U Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Professor Charles Dibble Dies Archived 2016-03-05 at the Wayback Machine, 5 Dec. 2002, University of Utah. Accessed 7 July 2012.
  5. ^ "World Digital Library Adds Florentine Codex". News Releases – Library of Congress. 2012-10-31. Retrieved 2012-11-12.
  6. ^ United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. "The work of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590)". www.unesco.org. Retrieved 2024-04-02.