Nahuatl scholarship

[Stephanie Wood]

Nahuat-L listeros,

I also thank Michael for his good suggestions.  There is so much to  
be done, and I am excited about the research directions of the Leiden  
group. Regarding Michael's first point, one could say that some  
progress is being made in this area.  I found some testaments in  
parish archives, and Cati Pizzigoni's work included some testaments  
from some of these more local archives.  Miriam Melton-Villanueva is  
also working with a cache of testaments which, I believe, are not  
from a national archive.  What is exciting, too, about Miriam's  
sources are how "late" some of them are -- early 19th c.  We have  
often sought nineteenth-century, mundane Nahuatl records, but without  
much success so far.  Getting to more local archives should help.

Another great development is the work of the late Luis Reyes García's  
students. Lidia Gómez García and Raúl Macuil Martínez, for instance,  
are visiting local archives in the states of Puebla and Tlaxcala, and  
are busy digitizing manuscripts in Nahuatl that they find. These are  
very gradually being made available through the Early Nahuatl Virtual  
Library Project that we are developing at the Wired Humanities  
Project at the University of Oregon.  Transcriptions and translations  
will come in time.  (We have no grant for this project, yet --  
suggestions are welcomed!)

We are also digitizing and developing studies of pictorial  
manuscripts in the Mapas Project. For this project, we have just  
landed an NEH grant to develop four of the mapas. The Mapas Project  
is particularly interdisciplinary, with linguists and art historians  
assisting, and while the sources are colonial, we are bringing in  
ethnographic and archaeological information to help us understand the  
content of the manuscripts.  Nahuas in John Sullivan's courses at  
IDIEZ have also agreed to work on some of the transcriptions and  
translations.

Best wishes,
Stephanie Wood
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