Nahuatl scholarship

[Susan Gilchrist]

On Spanish speakers examining Nahuatl picture writing in a legal context
around the time Cortés returned from New Spain, I'm working on a project to
show that the painting of El Jardín de las Delicias/The Garden of
Delights(Museo del Prado) includes a Nahuatl chronology, or more
precisely mnemonics
for one. Inter alia it's more or less a big wall chart for remembering e.g.
that 1524 was the year the Franciscans arrived and it was also the year
6-tecpatl. It's complicated to since nobody specializes in both the European
allegories and the Nahuatl picture writing, and I've resorted to a blog at
http://elboscoblog.blogspot.com/, which now has two side blogs at
http://hieronymus-bosch-miscellanea.blogspot.com/ and
http://anonymousartists.blogspot.com/, one for explanations from different
starting points and one for reattributions of paintings that will also
include some European images of Indians. The main blog is in the middle of a
digression on memory systems but will soon get back to the year 2-tecpatl.
It's so complicated that it almost boils down to a demonstration of how
people might have decided to accept Nahuatl documentation but keep it
simple.
Susan Gilchrist

On 7/10/06, b.leeming at rivers.org <b.leeming at rivers.org> wrote:
>
>
> Listeros-
>
> I have lately been reading Lockhart's "Nahuas and Spaniards."   From what
> I know of
> his work it seems that one of his major contributions has been the
> translation and
> analysis of some of the large corpus of Nahuatl-language documents that
> survives from
> the 16th to the 18th centuries.  As a result, we have gained a much
> clearer picture
> of the Nahua perspective of Contact and life in Colonial Mexico.
> In  "Nahuas and
> Spaniards" Lockhart gives the impression that the task of translating and
> analyzing
> the more mundane Nahuatl documents such as titles, testaments, annals,
> etc. that he
> uses as his source material (as opposed to the better-known codices) is a
> relatively
> recent undertaking.
>
> However,  "Nahuas and Spaniards" was published in 1991 and "The Nahuas
> After the
> Conquest" in 1992.  So my question is, What is the current state of
> scholarship on
> this corpus of documents?  Who has carried on the work so ably conducted
> by Lockhart
> in the 90s?  As a soon-to-be doctoral student who is hoping to focus his
> research on
> Nahuatl documents such as these, I am interested in determining what are
> the
> persistent problems, questions and unexplored avenues that remain.  Or,
> put another
> way, where would you advise a would-be scholar who wants to work with
> Nahuatl source
> material turn his attention?
>
> Any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated!
>
> Ben Leeming
>
> _______________________________________________
> Nahuatl mailing list
> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>
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