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The Florentine Codex is a manuscript containing a hand-written version of the encyclopedic account of Aztec society assembled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagun. Beginning in the 1540s, Sahagun first asked questions of groups of Nahuatl-speaking elders (presumably all male) from the heart of the former Aztec empire. The earliest version of his work, the Codex Matritense, consists of short entries, accompanied by drawings, that act as something of an analytic dictionary of terms in the Nahuatl language.
By the time the Florentine Codex was completed (it is thought in 1577), Sahagun had decided on a way to organize the information he had received, modeled on contemporary encyclopedias. So the codex was divided into twelve books, each with a title suggesting the subject matter, and each provided with a preface further focussing the reader's attention. Some sections continued to give the appearance of dictionary entries. Others have a stronger narrative sense, presumably the result of continued dialogue with Nahuatl informants. Sahagun's chosen organization included books summarizing information about history, the major gods, the calendar, the different kinds of people that made up Aztec society (making up three books, one devoted to merchants, one to nobles, and one to the people in general), and the natural world as the Aztec understood it. Much of the information about life within the house compound, about the transitions of birth, marriage, and death, and especially about women's lives, were contained in a volume Sahagun intended to illustrate rhetoric and moral philosophy. His selection of speeches was, he states, made to illustrate the positive moral sentiments they conveyed. It is only because these speeches are embedded in descriptions of their social setting that we can recover anything about these marked moments in Aztec life. The Florentine Codex is, for these reasons, inherently biased in its portrayal of Aztec society and Aztec women toward the interests of control by male Aztec elites, further screened by their conformity with Spanish clerical authority. It is astonishing that any sense of everyday joy survives through this filtering. Nonetheless, the Florentine Codex offers a unique advantage: the original language, Nahuatl, was preserved, and careful reading against the grain turns up images, ideas, and actions that can be seen quite differently than was intended by their compiler.
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