Review: Transcending Conquest: Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico
Stephanie Wood starts Transcending Conquest with a twelve-website page foreword in which she describes not only her methodology and resource base, but also her motivations for pursuing this undertaking. Probably as a preemptive protection-she notes that some may possibly dismiss her as “missing adequate authority” to strategy the Nahuatl codices as an American English-speaker-Wooden spends a good deal of her introduction describing childhood encounters with Mexican migrant staff just before turning her notice to extra technical matters (ix). This decidedly informal introduction looks oddly folksy, and pretty much jarring, when the reader moves from people web pages into Wood’s explanation of her methodology and the intended goal of her investigation. She largely confines secondary sources and historiographical facts to this preface and to her conclude notes there is minimal context offered about the conquest alone, other than when related to a precise scene or figure.
Transcending Conquest includes six chapters, each individual transferring forward in time to a unique chronological level when a specific kind of codex or manuscript was most probable composed and was most common. She includes several illustrations of each individual resource sort, and weaves illustrations all over the text alternatively than confining them to an insert somewhere near the book’s center. Therefore, in the chapter describing codices prepared closest to the actual day of the conquest, a pictograph of a Spaniard battling an indigenous warrior seems just prior to Wood’s evaluation of that pictograph. As she states in her preface, Wooden looks beyond the a lot more apparent aspects of indigenous portrayals of Spaniards to observe that these portrayals frequently belie the regular assumption that the Aztecs and other indigenous groups regarded the Spanish as gods returned from the heavens.
Wooden explicitly states that she intends to create not a monolithic treatise on indigenous views of the Spanish conquest and colonial period, but somewhat a collection of chapters that functionality as thematically similar essays drawing from a popular indigenous source foundation. Perhaps appropriately specified the gradual introduction of alphabetic writing to Nahua “creator-artists,” Wood employs only pictorial sources in her original chapters, incorporating manuscripts and other textual resources as the e-book progresses from the conquest period to the colonial (23). Her picked pictographs and scenes appear from codices in archives found in each the Americas and France.
Wooden carefully reads her chosen sources-she argues that pictographs can in fact be examine, due to the fact they mainly provide the identical operate as alphabetic texts-for clues and insights perhaps neglected by some others who could possibly have dismissed or downplayed the relevance of pictorial proof, provided the popular European choice for word-based products. She does not categorically exclude textual sources, but in the chapter dealing with títulos, penned documents detailing a town’s rights to declare sure allotments of land, Wood appears a bit a lot less assured than in those people about codices and mapas, documents combining textual and pictographic aspects to relate community histories and genealogies.
Transcending Conquest is probably a little bit temporary, with only 162 webpages of textual content, like the preface Wood’s notes and bibliography are rather significant by comparison, having up fifty-three further pages. In spite of her mentioned first trepidation, Wooden succeeds with her argument that there are further more clues to be identified in indigenous codices and manuscripts, even for individuals inherently outside the discursive framework of indigeneity.
