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Thèse : The Codex Xolotl: The Visual Discourse of Place and History in Early Colonial Mexico

Créateur

  • Woodward, Hayley Bristow
  • Boone, Elizabeth. Directeur de thèse

Résumé

The Codex Xolotl, a sixteenth-century painted manuscript made in the Valley of Mexico, is a prime example of Nahua history-writing and map-making. It exhibits hundreds of individual scenes of pre-Invasion history over the course of ten pages of native paper. The history begins in the early twelfth century and continues until 1431, ninety years before the fall of Tenochtitlan at the hands of the Spanish. Employing a pictorial and glyphic language, its Nahua makers recorded three centuries of migrations, community foundations, genealogies, ethnic alliances, and martial conflict, amongst other events, all arranged within a spatial projection emulating the Basin of Mexico.

Past studies of the Xolotl have taken the sheer volume of historical information to indicate its complete, comprehensive, and cohesive nature. However, this project considers the Xolotl as a material object, one whose visual information reveals that it is a reflection and an assertion of many histories of multiple voices and contexts. From its materiality, iconography, and style, many versions of the past emerge within the Xolotl’s pictorial field. The Xolotl requires intensive engagement that reads against the assumption of image as synchronic text or as a static, documentary projection of the pre-Hispanic past. While the Xolotl serves as an important ethnohistorical source regarding the pre-Hispanic past, this project emphasizes the Xolotl’s communicative capabilities while it applys a skeptical eye towards any notion of a single, uncontested truth found within its painted compositions. In excavating traces of interface from the Xolotl’s ten tableaus—in its means of inscribing both place and history—this project emphasizes the potentials of materiality and form to recover the conditions of making and remaking a significant manuscript in sixteenth-century New Spain.

Informations pratiques


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Olivier Jacquot (3 mai 2025). Thèse : The Codex Xolotl: The Visual Discourse of Place and History in Early Colonial Mexico. Amoxcalli. Consulté le 17 janvier 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/13uxo


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