The Codex Mendoza. New Insights, edited by Jorge Gómez Tejada, brings together recent scholarship that fundamentally reexamines one of the most famous and well-studied colonial Mexican manuscripts, revealing important and sometimes surprising new understandings. Previous scholarship has long held that the Codex Mendoza, now at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England, was commissioned in 1541-1542 by the Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza and painted by a Nahua tlahcuiloh -painter-scribe, plural tlahcuilohqueh-, often identified as Francisco Gualpuyoguacal, before being translated into Spanish by a mendicant friar. Famously, the codex was then thought to have been shipped across the Atlantic to King Charles V of Spain, only to be intercepted instead by French pirates. The commission’s purpose though ultimately foiled by the pirates, was to obtain information for the Spanish Crown about the subjects treated in the three parts of the codex -Mexica imperial history, tribute under the Aztec empire, and an ethnographic account of Nahua life-, the first two of which are believed to have been copied from pre-colonial prototypes. In writings that date as far back as the 18th century, various scholars have viewed these three sections as a crucial source on Mexica history, economics, society, and glyphic writing, presenting the codex as a rare window onto the pre-colonial past.

Across its fourteen chapters, the new volume reexamines nearly every aspect of this narrative and often either arrives at entirely different conclusions or else places key elements in doubt. As such, it will be an important read for scholars of Mesoamerican manuscripts and colonial Latin American art, while some chapters will also be valuable for undergraduate and graduate courses. Published in both a Spanish and an English version, The Codex Mendoza. New Insights contains contributions by scholars based in Ecuador, Mexico, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Italy. The majority of the contributors are art historians, and on the whole, the volume foregrounds issues and methodologies drawn from art history. This grounding is valuable given the dominance of anthropology in much of the work on the Codex Mendoza published over the last few decades, especially the watershed, four-volume ^{The Codex Mendoza}, edited by ^{Frances Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt (1992)}. At the same time, the new volume also makes use of material analysis, codicology, paleography, and linguistic anthropology to re-examine in detail the codex’s construction, paintings, glyphs, alphabetic texts, and circulation. The most successful chapters seamlessly integrate art historical analysis with approaches from other disciplines, including economics, history, translation theory, and textual analysis; and the methodological rigor and innovation of these chapters will make them of interest to scholars beyond those with an immediate interest in the Codex Mendoza.

• ^{The Codex Mendoza}
  The Codex Mendoza, 1992
  The Codex Mendoza
• ^{Frances Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt (1992)}
  Glyphic Conventions of the Codex Mendoza

  Berdan and Anawalt 1992, 1992
  Glyphic Conventions of the Codex Mendoza

In his opening chapter, Gómez Tejada describes the volume as “organized around three axes: material analysis, textual and stylistic interpretation, and reception and circulation studies” (p. 29). These themes are readily apparent in certain chapters, particularly the material and codicological studies by Davide Domenici et al. and B. C. Barker-Benfield (chs. 2 and 3), and the reception studies by Gómez Tejada, Daniela Bleichmar, and Todd Olson (chs. 1, 10, and 11, respectively). Many more of chapters provide close readings of the codex’s paintings, glyphs, and Spanish text, and there is a hefty imbalance in the number of chapters pertaining to the second axis versus the first and the third. The volume unfortunately does not include any thematic subsections to organize its fourteen chapters, and more care was needed in their sequencing and flow, as it is often unclear why chapters appear in the order that they do. The lack of both a dedicated introduction and a conclusion to the volume was also a missed opportunity to situate and synthesize the highly valuable contributions of the volume’s studies.

The Codex Mendoza. New Insights in many ways serves as a response to ^{Berdan and Anawalt’s foundational The Codex Mendoza (1992)}, published exactly thirty years prior. The intent of the earlier publication was to provide “an accessible facsimile edition as well as a scholarly update of the information contained in the Codex Mendoza, particularly in light of recent breakthroughs in ethnohistorical and archaeological research” (Berdan and Anawalt 1992, 1: XIII). Largely featuring the work of anthropologists, the publication included a first volume with studies of the codex’s circulation, codicology, style, contents by section, glyphs, and representations of insignia, featuring two authors, Barker-Benfield and Berdan, who also appear in the 2022 publication. Along with the facsimile itself (vol. III), two additional volumes (ii and iv) provided descriptions of each page and a drawn facsimile including transcriptions and English translations of the codex’s annotations.¹ In their introduction, Berdan and Anawalt (1992, 1: XIII) described the Codex Mendoza as “the most comprehensive of the Mesoamerican codices, serving as a major source for studies of Aztec history, geography, economy, social and political organization, [and] glyphic writing.” Their publication in many ways cemented the understanding of the codex as source, in particular through their monumental undertaking to compile and synthesize its wide range of data and to correlate it with other sources (Berdan and Anawalt 1992, 1: Appendices A-K).

• ^{Berdan and Anawalt’s foundational The Codex Mendoza (1992)}
  Glyphic Conventions of the Codex Mendoza

  Berdan and Anawalt 1992, 1992
  Glyphic Conventions of the Codex Mendoza

If the 1992 publication was largely interested in the Codex Mendoza as a source, the new volume views it instead as an artwork, wich was produced in and is reflective of a colonial moment. Virtually all of the authors in The Codex Mendoza. New Insights approach the codex as a constructed representation, and this leads them to a different line of questioning than that seen in much of the 1992 volume. The new contributors are interested in the artistic and social history of the manuscript’s production and reception, as well as what these aspects tell us about colonial art more generally. In so doing, the new volume builds on Donald ^{Robertson’s (1994)} foundational study of the Codex Mendoza and picks up on a minor approach in the 1992 volume, seen especially in Kathleen Stewart Howe’s chapter (^{Howe 1992}, 1: 25-33), which many of the 2022 contributors cite.

• ^{Robertson’s (1994)}
  Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Schools, 1994
  Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Schools
• ^{Howe 1992}
  The Relationship of Indigenous and European Styles in the Codex Mendoza. An Analysis of Pictorial Style

  Berdan and Anawalt 1992, 1992
  The Relationship of Indigenous and European Styles in the Codex Mendoza. An Analysis of Pictorial Style

In its reconsideration of the Codex Mendoza as a colonial artwork, the new volume queries the codex’s engagement with indigenous art prior to colonization, its forms of colonial innovation, and how colonial power dynamics shaped the relationship between its pictographic and alphabetic texts. Individual chapters reconstruct the colonial tlahcuilohqueh’s use of visual and rhetorical tropes that reach as far back as the Formative and Classic Periods or examine indigenous painter-scribes and commissioners’ use of Mexica history in the political context of 1540s Mexico-Tenochtitlan (chs. 4, 6, 7, 9, 13). The contributors also find nuanced expressions of colonial innovation that speak both to tlahcuilohqueh’s ongoing connections with tradition and their simultaneous reconfiguration of those same norms. Especially notable is Domenici et al.’s finding that the Codex Mendoza uses pigments traditionally reserved for mural paintings or used only outside of central Mexico, details that the authors argue reflect the tlahcuilohqueh’s growing reconceptualization of codices not as materializations of “flowery speech” but as something akin to a European book (p. 44). Still other authors show how colonial power dynamics and transcultural translation fundamentally shaped relations between the codex’s painted and alphabetic elements and the ways in which the codex has been read over the centuries (chs. 7, 10, 14). These findings are suggestive for the critical vantage that they provide onto uses of the Codex Mendoza as a source and their insistence that readers not elide the difference and unequal power relations between the various components of the manuscript. Contributing to a growing body of scholarship written in the wake of theoretical critiques of hybridity, the chapters also provide a far more nuanced and complex understanding of how the manuscript and its creators navigated intercultural colonial dynamics and mobilized indigenous art and history in the context of their own colonial moment.

In its focus on the Codex Mendoza’s production, the volume also returns to some basic questions, including when it was made; who commissioned, painted, and annotated it; its process of creation; its source material; and how it arrived at its present location. Some of these issues were left unresolved in the 1992 volume; others were thought to be settled in 1992 but here are reexamined. Through this investigation, the chapter authors collectively generate almost entirely new tombstone information for the Codex Mendoza. This includes the proposal that it was painted by two tlahcuilohqueh in a single workshop, possibly in the late 1540s or early 1550s, that it was translated by a Spanish legal scribe, and that it was commissioned not by Mendoza but by Nahua elites of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Analysis of the source material for the Codex Mendoza’s three parts also gives rise to new proposed prototypes, including representations of Mexica military campaigns for Part 1 (ch. 14), a presentation copy of taxes delivered on a single occasion for Part 2 (ch. 7), and a tonalamatl (260-day ritual calendar) for Part 3 (ch. 13). While the evidence and degree of certainty for these new interpretations vary, the authors do an admirable job of laying out their evidence transparently and in a way that allows the reader to evaluate their conclusions.

Chapter 1, by Gómez Tejada, which emerges from the author’s dissertation (^{Gómez Tejada 2012}), provides a history of the circulation and early publications on the Codex Mendoza and shows how these owners and scholars shaped modern understandings of the codex. The chapter first traces the codex’s movements between its private owners, André Thevet, Richard Hakluyt, Samuel Purchas, and finally John Selden, who donated it to the Bodleian. Gómez Tejada then turns to how 18th to mid-20th-century reproductions by Francisco Clavijero, Lord Kingsborough, Antonio Peñafiel, and others shaped popular views of the codex, including by connecting it to Mexican nationalism. The second part of the chapter reconstructs the origins in the writings of these same individuals of the ideas that the Codex Mendoza was captured by pirates and commissioned by Viceroy Mendoza. Gómez Tejada shows that these ideas emerged from claims made, respectively, by Purchas (1625) and Clavijero (1781). Though lacking evidence to disprove either idea, Gómez Tejada reveals the shaky ground on which both are built and demonstrates the significance of these periods of the Codex Mendoza’s history to scholars seeking to understand the manuscript today.

• ^{Gómez Tejada 2012}
  Making the Codex Mendoza, Constructing the Codex Mendoza. A Reconsideration of a 16th Century Mexican Manuscript, 2012
  Making the Codex Mendoza, Constructing the Codex Mendoza. A Reconsideration of a 16th Century Mexican Manuscript

Chapters 2 and 3 provide detailed studies of the codex’s pigments and codicology, based on direct examinations conducted at the Bodleian Library. Domenici, Grazia, Buti, Cartechini, Rosi, Gabrieli, Lladó-Buisán, Romani, Sgamellotti, and Miliani’s “The Painting Materials of Codex Mendoza” is noteworthy as the first scientific analysis of the codex’s pigments. Expanding on an earlier publication (Domenici et al. 2019), the chapter describes molab’s analysis of pigments on five folios across the codex’s three parts to reconstruct the main palette used by its painters. Revising earlier scholarship, the authors find that the palette is fairly homogeneous and comprised almost entirely of Mesoamerican pigments used prior to colonization. The limited but suggestive colonial innovations were the use of European cinnabar in the red alphabetic writing and the inclusion of Mesoamerican pigments traditionally used only outside of central Mexico or exclusively in mural painting (p. 42). As noted above, the latter finding provides new insights into colonial innovation at this moment, which rather than solely featuring the incorporation of European materials also shows Nahua tlahcuilohqueh engaging in new ways with traditional indigenous materials and artforms. Shedding light on the codex’s production, the authors further conclude, based on the homogeneity of the palette across its three parts, that it was painted in a single workshop, likely between the 1530s and 1560s, based on comparison with other colonial manuscripts’ palettes.

In chapter 3, Barker-Benfield expands on his contribution in the 1992 volume to document the Codex Mendoza’s watermarks, collations, and bindings (^{Barker-Benfield 1992}, 20-24). This chapter captures physical details that are highly valuable for specialists, although it is written with a density of detail that will make it difficult for most readers to access. The author meticulously reconstructs the quire signatures, foliation, and the assembly and alteration of the quires and bindings over the course of the codex’s history. Particularly interesting are Barker-Benfield’s findings that the pages were originally numbered to be read as openings, across a verso and recto folio; that the famous frontispiece folio (2) was replaced during the making of the codex; and that there is a quire break between Parts 2 and 3, with extra pages at the end of Part 2’s quire having been cancelled. The author does not interpret these findings, but they may reflect an intention for facing Spanish texts and Nahua pictography to be read together as well as a division of labor in the creation of Part 3. Barker-Benfield also dates the book’s first binding to 1553-1587, while in the possession of Thevet, and its second and current binding to 1655-1665 in England. While these findings could have been connected more productively to discussions in other chapters, they nonetheless provide significant evidence for future studies of the manuscript’s production, text-image relations, and circulation.

• ^{Barker-Benfield 1992}
  Addendum: Further Data and Analyses of Codex Mendoza Watermarks

  Berdan and Anawalt 1992, 1992
  Addendum: Further Data and Analyses of Codex Mendoza Watermarks

Chapters 4 and 5 both focus on the issue of style. In “The Concept of Style for the Nahua Painters of New Spain”, Diana Magaloni Kerpel proposes viewing style not as an index of culture, as it often has been in studies of colonial art, but as a reflection of a specific moment of creation that, within Mesoamerican philosophies, simultaneously invokes earlier iterations of cyclical time. Through analyses of the philosophical underpinnings of images of foundation in an Olmec jade, the Codex Tovar, the frontis-piece of book 12 of the Florentine Codex, and the frontispiece of the Codex Mendoza, Magaloni argues that “pictorial style is a recourse for providing images with the temporal plurality they require” (p. 89-90). Magaloni here builds on ^{Alfredo López Austin’s (1996)} writings on the temporality of myth as well as ^{María Elena Bernal García and Ángel García Zambrano’s (2006}, 92) observation that the altepetl (city-state) is “a ‘portable entity.’ It is founded and founded again, and in so doing the past becomes a part of the present.” A fuller explication of these interlocutors’ ideas and a more precise definition of style as opposed to making would have been helpful to this argument. Nonetheless, it is a suggestive inquiry into the historicity of style that takes seriously the implications of cyclical conceptions of time for art history.

• ^{Alfredo López Austin’s (1996)}
  Los mitos del Tlacuache: Caminos de la mitología mesoamericana, 1996
  Los mitos del Tlacuache: Caminos de la mitología mesoamericana
• ^{María Elena Bernal García and Ángel García Zambrano’s (2006}
  El Altepetl colonial y sus antecedentes prehispanicos: Contexto teorico-historiografico

  Territorialidad y paisaje en el Altepetl del siglo XVI, 2006
  El Altepetl colonial y sus antecedentes prehispanicos: Contexto teorico-historiografico

Approaching style from a more connoisseurial vantage, in chapter 5, Gómez Tejada uses stylistic analysis to determine the number of artistic hands in the Codex Mendoza (see ^{Gómez Tejada 2012}). The author does so by establishing different types for certain, repeating motifs, with the goal of isolating “idiosyncratic choices of individual artists in order to differentiate between them” (p. 100). The repeated motifs include items such as seated and standing men and women, feather shields, and temples. The types tend to be based on major formal differences, such as alternate stances for human figures. For the author, such deliberate artistic choices are a surer basis for discerning hands than stylistic considerations, such as stroke quality or form, which he asserts can be affected by fatigue and other unconscious factors (p. 100). Gómez Tejada’s approach is most convincing in his analysis of temples, which appear in two very different styles without any apparent reason for differentiation. In other cases, however, this approach does not seem to allow adequately for context or aesthetic considerations that might prompt a single artist to introduce variations, particularly with shields and insignia. Attention to formal concerns could have been helpful in identifying types that appear stylistically to be the work of one hand and that may represent one artist’s decision to depict a variant of the item. Gómez Tejada’s analysis leads him to conclude that the Codex Mendoza was painted by two artists who worked together across all three parts of the codex. In closing, he analyzes the Spanish alphabetic texts and their relation to the paintings, concluding that there is evidence of the commentaries having been added over ten days, followed by a later campaign of corrections, and that instances of the Spanish scribe and Nahua tlahcuilohqueh correcting one another’s work suggests considerable collaboration between the two.

• ^{Gómez Tejada 2012}
  Making the Codex Mendoza, Constructing the Codex Mendoza. A Reconsideration of a 16th Century Mexican Manuscript, 2012
  Making the Codex Mendoza, Constructing the Codex Mendoza. A Reconsideration of a 16th Century Mexican Manuscript

The next three chapters present close analyses of pictorial representations and glyphs in specific sections of the Codex Mendoza, honing in on their relation to Mesoamerican and early colonial Mexican society and representational norms. In chapter 6, Mary Miller examines the reason for the pervasive representation of unembellished, white clothing in Part 3. Through comparison with 8th-century Maya murals at Bonampak and their association of white clothing with women and captives, Miller concludes that the Codex Mendoza artist used white clothing to forge a visual distinction between those people with viable roles in the colonial period, dressed in white, and those tied inextricably to the pre-colonial past, including priests and warriors, who alone were shown wearing brilliant colors.

In chapter 7, Claudia Brittenham provides an insightful new analysis of the representation of taxation in Part 2 and interactions between its Nahua pictorial contents and Spanish alphabetic texts. Revealing the selectiveness of its representation of the Aztec economy, she shows how Part 2 focuses narrowly on imperial taxation to the exclusion of markets, trade, and taxes paid in labor. By comparing the Mendoza with other representations of Mesoamerican tribute and taxation, including Maya vase paintings and murals, Mexican manuscripts, and Spanish chronicles, Brittenham demonstrates that Part 2 takes part in a larger Mesoamerican “performance of taxation” (p. 141), in which the payment of taxes served as a display of sovereign and imperial power. Building on this finding, the author draws attention to the fact that the Nahua paintings in Part 2 do not note the periodicity of payments, and that this information in fact comes from the Spanish text alone. On this basis and in light of notable discrepancies with Part 2’s two partial cognates, Brittenham proposes that the prototype might have been “not a record of taxes owed or paid in an entire year, but rather an elaborate presentation copy of the taxes that were being given at a particular moment -an exquisitely calligraphic bill of lading, as it were” (p. 143). From this vantage, widespread interpretations of Part 2 as a representation of an entire system of taxation in fact betray the alphabetic text radically recasting the paintings, while also masking the changing nature of Mexica taxation and subject provinces.

^{Berdan’s chapter returns to the subject of her 1992} essay and examines Nahua glyphic writing in Parts 1 and 2 in light of recent scholarly developments (Berdan 1992, 93-102). The chapter addresses, first, reasons for variation in glyphs’ rendering, and, second, the incorporation of foreign placenames into Nahua glyphic writing. Berdan finds that variation typically occurs in the optional use of phonograms, especially for locatives, and in the number of component signs used for a glyph (p. 158). Berdan concludes that these traits support Alfonso ^{Lacadena’s (2008)} description of phoneticism as an optional resource in Nahua glyphic writing. She also finds that the typical use in the Mendoza of multiple phonetic signs rather than one logograph may suggest the tlahcuiloh’s alignment with Lacadena’s Texcocan school of writing, while this writing style’s appearance in a Tenochca workshop suggests a certain geographic porosity between schools. Turning to her second question, Berdan examines the rendering of Mixtec and Huastec placenames in the Codex Mendoza versus in their native writing systems. The two cases demonstrate different strategies, with the Mixtec examples featuring some Nahuatl calques of Mixtec names and some entirely distinct Nahuatl names used for Mixtec places. In contrast, the tlahcuiloh represented Huastec placenames using Nahuatl phonograms. Although Berdan interprets the latter as the scribe translating Huastec placenames into Nahuatl -“Tamuoc, then, in Nahuatl, became ‘Place Where Things Are Measured,’” p. 173-, they might better be understood as examples of fully phonetic writing used to render foreign terms.

• ^{Berdan’s chapter returns to the subject of her 1992}
  Glyphic Conventions of the Codex Mendoza

  Berdan and Anawalt 1992, 1992
  Glyphic Conventions of the Codex Mendoza
• ^{Lacadena’s (2008)}
  Regional Scribal Traditions: Methodological Implications for the Decipherment of Nahuatl Writing

  The pari Journal, 2008
  Regional Scribal Traditions: Methodological Implications for the Decipherment of Nahuatl Writing

Chapters 9 to 12 focus on the social context of production, circulation, and reception of the Codex Mendoza in New Spain and Europe. Chapter 1 shares key concerns with these chapters and could have logically appeared in this cluster. In chapter 9, Barbara Mundy integrates original archival and art historical research to resituate the Codex Mendoza in its political moment of production in 1540s Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Complementing findings by ^{Gómez Tejada (2012)} , Mundy argues that the Codex Mendoza was commissioned by Nahua elites of Tenochtitlan, possibly between 1541-1547.² The chapter analyzes the rhetorical concerns of Parts 1 and 2, which depict the altepetl of Tenochtitlan as protagonist and its indigenous rulers as the organizers of historical time. Mundy connects this visual argument to archival evidence of the contemporary concerns of Nahua gobernadores, who were lobbying Charles v during this period for material support for their governance, based on their status as descendants of Tenochtitlan’s traditional rulers. Due to their participation in this lobbying campaign and their access to probable prototypes for the Mendoza, Mundy proposes three potential Nahua patrons of the Codex Mendoza -Pablo Xochiquentzin- Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin, and Diego de San Francisco Tehuetzquititzin, and hypothesizes that the manuscript was produced in a workshop associated with the indigenous tecpan.

• ^{Gómez Tejada (2012)}
  Making the Codex Mendoza, Constructing the Codex Mendoza. A Reconsideration of a 16th Century Mexican Manuscript, 2012
  Making the Codex Mendoza, Constructing the Codex Mendoza. A Reconsideration of a 16th Century Mexican Manuscript

In chapter 10, Daniela Bleichmar builds on several recent articles (^{Bleichmar 2015}; ²⁰¹⁹) to propose a fascinating chain of production for the Mendoza that involved its painting by tlahcuilohqueh, oral recitation into Nahuatl, oral translation into Spanish, and simultaneous written translation into Spanish by a legal scribe. Through this process, images and texts became “inextricably imbricated,” and translation emerged as its primary mechanism 4 of production (p. 203). Bleichmar’s argument is based on her careful reexamination of the Mendoza’s Spanish texts, in particular the lengthy description and critique of the manuscript’s translation that appears on its last folio. Bleichmar stresses the text’s use of the phrase “a uso de proceso” (“in the legal manner”), suggesting its translation by a legal scribe (notario or escribano) rather than a grammarian (gramático) (p. 203-205). This meant that the Codex Mendoza was created through a process far more like the legal Codices Huexotzinco, Tepetlaoztoc, and Osuna than mendicant-supervised codices like the Florentine Codex. Following a “stratigraphic approach” (p. 207) to reconstruct the layered contributions to the folios by its different contributors, Bleichmar examines the knowledge wielded by each as they responded and added to the pages’ existing content, often recasting earlier contributions in the process. Ultimately, she argues that these interactions and the pervasiveness of Spanish translations, though rarely questioned, deeply shaped how scholars from the 16th century on have used the codex as a key to Nahua knowledge. Complementing Brittenham’s findings, Bleichmar concludes that the Spanish text transformed the document into a source and “made Aztecs legible to Western audiences” (p. 202).

• ^{Bleichmar 2015}
  History in Pictures: Translating the Codex Mendoza

  Art History, 2015
  History in Pictures: Translating the Codex Mendoza
• ²⁰¹⁹
  Painting the Aztec Past in Early Colonial Mexico: Translation and Knowledge Production in the Codex Mendoza

  Renaissance Quarterly, 2019
  Painting the Aztec Past in Early Colonial Mexico: Translation and Knowledge Production in the Codex Mendoza

Todd Olson’s chapter 11, “Abduction: The Reception and Reproduction of the Codex Mendoza in France and England (1553-1696)”, examines the Codex Mendoza’s reception by unintended audiences in France and England, centering on its owners, Thevet, Hakluyt, and Purchas, and its reproductions by Purchas and Melchisédech Thévenot. Olson situates the codex in the context of these individuals’ larger collections and publication projects in order to reconstruct how each might have understood the Codex Mendoza’s structure, forms, and contents. Ultimately, the author argues that, although made for Spanish viewers, the codex was intelligible to French and English audiences because of “its correspondence to known epistemological and local pictorial conventions” (p. 234).

In chapter 12, Carmen Fernández-Salvador looks comparatively at a chapter of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s 1615 El Primer Nueva Crónica y Buen Gobierno entitled, “Conzederaciones.” In comparison with the Codex Mendoza, Fernández-Salvador argues that there was an underlying similarity between Mesoamerican and European associations of images with memory that contrasts with the Andes, which had no pre-colonial manuscript tradition. As such, for Guaman Poma, using images as mnemonics entailed applying European theories drawn from the Andean author’s exposure to preaching in colonial churches and recorded in printed sermons. The chapter primarily analyzes how specific images in “Conzederaciones” invoke memory, connecting them with Andean churches and rhetorical strategies used in preaching.

In closing, chapters 13 and 14 examine Parts 1 and 3’s connection to indigenous source material and knowledge; these might also have been grouped effectively with chapters by Miller and Brittenham given their related concerns. Joanne Harwood’s chapter 13, which presents research related to her doctoral dissertation (^{Harwood 2002}), analyzes the relationship between Part 3’s depictions of punishments for drunkenness, thievery, and adultery with the tonalamatl, or traditional 260-day ritual calendar. Based on parallel representations of these subjects in the trecenas of the patron gods Itztlacoliuhqui and the couples Tonacatecuhtli and Tonacacihuatl, Cipactonal and Oxomoco, and Xochiquetzal and Xochipilli, Harwood argues that the tlahcuiloh based Part 3 on a tonalamatl while downplaying ritual elements to make it more palatable for a Spanish audience. The argument has some lapses, including addressing the motives for including a disguised tonalamatl in the context of the larger document and the significant omission of the tonalpohualli (260-day count) as a structuring component. Nonetheless, Harwood makes a strong argument for connecting the representation in Part 3 of personal failings with the Nahua understanding, explored by ^{Louise Burkhart (1989)} , that such actions damaged beings beyond the individual, including the larger society and even the cosmic order. Relatedly, the author makes the important point that tonalli (solar-derived animacy) would have been a key subtext for Nahua readers of Part 3, which deals with topics like the bathing of infants and different outcomes of one’s manner of living that are directly related to care for tonalli. Ultimately, Harwood’s work calls into question the notion that Part 3 is an entirely novel and largely etic genre in the context of Mesoamerican manuscripts and suggests ways in which it may represent a secularized account of Nahua beliefs about the course of human life.

• ^{Harwood 2002}
  Disguising Ritual: A Re-Assessment of Part 3 of the Codex Mendoza, 2002
  Disguising Ritual: A Re-Assessment of Part 3 of the Codex Mendoza
• ^{Louise Burkhart (1989)}
  The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico, 1989
  The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

In the final chapter, Sun uses a detailed examination of Part 1’s correlation with Mexica military history and geography to argue convincingly that the conquered towns in Part 1 are organized by chronological military campaign. Using mapping, he finds that the cities are ordered primarily by military campaigns and only secondarily by spatial proximity, since unified military campaigns tended to occur within circumscribed geographies. In this way, the pages on Axayacatl are ordered based on his three military campaigns in Tlatelolco and the area west of Tenochtitlan; Cuetlaxtlan and the Tepeacac region; and the Huastec region in the north Gulf Coast (p. 285-286). Sun also finds rhetorical adjustments in which the tlahcuilohqueh highlighted especially significant conquests by moving them up and out of chronological sequence. This organizational schema coheres with that used in the Moteuczoma I Stone, while differing from the arrangement of the territories in Part 2 of the Codex Mendoza. Sun proposes that the differences between Parts 1 and 2 suggest their use of both distinct representational schemes -military campaigns versus tributary provinces- and prototypes. Both are, however, linked rhetorically by their use of an armature of year signs and imperial provinces along the folios’ margins, while the center shows experiential aspects of these entities in the form of concrete conquests and tribute goods.

On the whole, the volume is a valuable contribution to the field that brings together important new work on the Codex Mendoza, highlighting the special contributions of art historical inquiry. Nonetheless, a stronger editorial hand would have increased its usability. The quality and accessibility of the chapters vary, and the framing of the volume as new studies of the Codex Mendoza makes dubious the relevance of select chapters that do not center on this codex. More deliberate framing of these as comparative studies would have helped clarify their contribution to the discussion. The lack of an overarching organization for the chapters, though problematic, is ameliorated somewhat by the fact that the chapter authors clearly read one another’s contributions, citing and engaging intellectually with the other chapters in a practice that is as productive and desirable as it is uncommon. Nonetheless, more top-down organization was needed to orient the reader and clarify the chapters’ relation to one another. Similarly, despite its large number of color images, the volume suffers from an ineffectual use of illustrations, with some images repeated multiple times while others that are necessary to the argument are omitted. The actual production and copyediting of the volume is also lacking: there are annoying typographic and translation errors throughout, including in a chapter title, as well as extensive information missing from image captions. These editorial problems are unfortunate as they detract from the clear intellectual contribution of the volume.

The choice to omit a conclusion and to employ Gómez Tejada’s chapter 1 as both its own study of the history of the Codex Mendoza and, to a lesser extent, an introduction to the volume (p. 13-14, 29-31) was also unfortunate. This combination of roles for chapter 1 gives short shrift to providing an intellectual framing for the volume or exploring the rich connections between chapters. This was also a missed opportunity to reflect on how the authors’ new findings collectively change our understanding of the Codex Mendoza, including its suitability for the types of readings to which it has been put in the past. I especially missed the chance for reflection on what it means to examine the Codex Mendoza from an overtly art historical perspective and how the chapter’s findings contribute to our understanding of colonial Mexican art, beyond the Codex Mendoza alone. Despite these problems, this volume is an exceptionally important contribution to the state of knowledge on the Codex Mendoza and colonial manuscripts more generally, and it will be an important touchstone for scholars for many years to come.