Читать книгу The Codex Mendoza: new insights - Barbara E. Mundy - Страница 5

Foreword

Since its moment of origin, Codex Mendoza has been a document of the utmost international significance, as reflected by its early travels. Its European paper must have crossed the Atlantic twice, there and back in quick succession by the early 1540s. On the manuscript’s last folio, its Spanish commentator states that the manuscript remained in Mexico less than ten days after completion, before the fleet was due to sail. After a period in Renaissance France, it came to rest in Oxford and has been kept safe here at the Bodleian Library for over 350 years.

Codex Mendoza embodies an overwhelming tragedy: the dissolution of a civilization. Yet, it also crystallizes and almost celebrates the culture of that civilization by recording and interpreting not only its history, geography (through tax returns), and everyday life, but also its art, language, and pictographic writing. All this is keyed as if to facilitate wider understanding in a European language.

Even before it was gifted to the Bodleian Library by John Selden’s executors around 1659, the manuscript’s intellectual content had been available for wider study through a set of woodcut images in the third volume of Purchas his Pilgrimes (Purchas 1625). Codex Mendoza took pride of place in 1831 as the first item to be fully printed in color in the first volume of the Antiquities of Mexico, reproduced by Lord Kingsborough in lithographic facsimile. That publication, like successive photographic facsimiles of the twentieth century, proved to be too costly for wider circulation. However, in just the last few years, digital technology has enabled the reproduction of the pages of the Codex Mendoza online as well as closer study of its colors through non-destructive instrumental analysis and multispectral photography.

As such, it is with the greatest pleasure that I welcome this new color facsimile of the Codex Mendoza, published in Ecuador with wide-ranging contributions by scholars from Latin America, the United States, and Europe. This publication meets the aim of the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford to make this manuscript and all of its unique features available to be more extensively studied throughout the world.

Richard Ovenden

Bodley’s Librarian