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[books 2008] Mexican history
Jan. 15th, 2008 09:34 pm3. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, edited & introduced by Miguel Leon-Portillo
I must be feeling ambitious - I tackled a primary source! Nicely edited and commentated and brief as primary sources go, so it wasn't painful at all.
I hadn't realized that the Aztec accounts were both a) in Nahuatl and b) so early - some date from the late 1520s. That's not the few pre-conquest codices that the Spanish didn't burn, it's Nahuatl written in the Latin alphabet. Those Franciscans got busy really quickly! I did know that it's a living language, but I wasn't aware that it's a written and indeed literary language as well as being spoken by indigenous peoples. That's cool.
What one really wants are contemporary chronicles to gauge whether the bad omens that happened before the arrival of the Spaniards were really interpreted that way at the time or whether hindsight has a lot to answer for, but one can't have everything.
I'm sitting here looking at the history of the Conquest from the other side, Bernal Diaz's History of the Conquest of New Spain. There's an awful lot more of it, so it might take me a while to work up to it.
I must be feeling ambitious - I tackled a primary source! Nicely edited and commentated and brief as primary sources go, so it wasn't painful at all.
I hadn't realized that the Aztec accounts were both a) in Nahuatl and b) so early - some date from the late 1520s. That's not the few pre-conquest codices that the Spanish didn't burn, it's Nahuatl written in the Latin alphabet. Those Franciscans got busy really quickly! I did know that it's a living language, but I wasn't aware that it's a written and indeed literary language as well as being spoken by indigenous peoples. That's cool.
What one really wants are contemporary chronicles to gauge whether the bad omens that happened before the arrival of the Spaniards were really interpreted that way at the time or whether hindsight has a lot to answer for, but one can't have everything.
I'm sitting here looking at the history of the Conquest from the other side, Bernal Diaz's History of the Conquest of New Spain. There's an awful lot more of it, so it might take me a while to work up to it.
