Translation, Mobility, and Mediation: The Case of the Codex Mendoza, (original) (raw)

Sites of Mediation

Connected Histories of Places, Processes, and Objects in Europe and Beyond, 1450−16501450-1650

Edited by
Susanna Burghartz Lucas Burkart
Christine Göttler

B R I L L
LEIDEN | BOSTON

Acknowledgements … VII
Notes on the Editors … IX
Notes on the Contributors … XI
List of Illustrations … XV
Introduction: ‘Sites of Mediation’ in Early Modern Europe and Beyond.
A Working Perspective … 1
Susanna Burghartz, Lucas Burkart, and Christine Göttler
PART 1
Staging Encounters
1 Rome and its Indies: A Global System of Knowledge at the End of the Sixteenth Century … 23
Antonella Romano
2 Staging Genoa in Antwerp: The Triumphal Arch of the Genoese Nation for the Blijde Inkomst of Archduke Ernest of Austria into Antwerp, 1594 … 46
Ivo Raband
3 Setting the Stage for Oneself and Others: Venice and the Levant in the Fifteenth Century … 71
Benedikt Bego-Ghina
4 The Queen in the Pawnshop: Shaping Civic Virtues in a Painting for the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi in Venice … 94
Nicolai Kölmel
5 Through the Stained-Glass: The Basel Schützenhaus as a Site of Encounter … 125
Michael Schaffner

PART 2
Translation, Transmission, Transformation
6 The Kux as a Site of Mediation: Economic Practices and Material Desires in the Early Modern German Mining Industry 159 Tina Asmussen

7 Mediating between Art and Nature: The Countess of Arundel at Tart Hall 183

Jennifer Rabe

8 The ‘Hortus Siccus’ as a Focal Point: Knowledge, Environment, and Image in Felix Platter’s and Caspar Bauhin’s Herbaria 211

Davina Benkert

9 Translation, Mobility, and Mediation: The Case of the Codex Mendoza 240

Daniela Bleichmar

10 Collaborative Craftsmanship and Chimeric Creation in SeventeenthCentury Antwerp Art Cabinets 270

Nadia Baadj

PART 3
Fluid Worlds
11 Hermaphrodites in Basel? Figures of Ambiguity and the Early Modern Physician 299

Sarah-Maria Schober

12 Riches of the Sea: Collecting and Consuming Frans Snijders’s Marine Market Paintings in the Southern Netherlands 328

Stefanie Wyssenbach

13 Negotiating Arctic Waters: John Davis’s The Worldes Hydrographical Discription 353

Franziska Hilfiker

14 Fortunes at Sea: Mediated Goods and Dutch Trade, Circa 1600 373

Claudia Swan

Index Nominum 407
For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV

Translation, Mobility, and Mediation: The Case of the Codex Mendoza*

Daniela Bleichmar

Historians of the early modern world (ca. 1450-1800) have characterized the period as the first truly global moment in history, a time when cultures and peoples encountered one another in unprecedented ways: more often, at a greater scale, across larger distances, and more deeply and irrevocably than ever before. Histories became inextricably ‘connected’. 1{ }^{1} For Europeans, the world grew both in breadth and depth: while explorations, new trade routes, and the circulation of people and things expanded the globe geographically, the humanist rediscovery of classical antiquity and the investigation of the past through its textual and physical remains expanded a sense of time and history. 2{ }^{2} The intertwined interests in the far away and the long ago often took visual and material forms. Images circulated widely, in part due to the spread of print as an artistic and commercial product. Objects-the ‘worldly goods’ that populated the marketplace as well as the more intimate realm of the collection-allowed people to encounter and possess distant worlds while making claims about their own status. 3{ }^{3} But the growing interest in distant places and cultures was also linked to economic, political, and religious agendas that often had dramatic repercussions for non-European peoples.

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- I am grateful to Christine Göttler, Susanna Burghartz, Lucas Burkart, Maike Christadler, and the members of the ‘Sites of Mediation’ project at the University of Bern and University of Basel for their thoughtful feedback on this essay.
  1 Sanjay Subrahmanyam coined the phrase ‘connected histories’ in a seminal article, Subrahmanyam S., “Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia”, Modern Asian Studies 31 (1997) 735-762, and has continued to develop it in numerous publications.
  2 Grafton A., New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: 1992).
  3 The literature on the early modern material turn and the role of collections is vast. On crosscultural aspects in particular see, among others, Bleichmar D. - Mancall P.C. (eds.), Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia, PA: 2011) and Bleichmar D. - Martin M. (eds.), Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World, special issue of Art History 38 (2015). ↩︎

Given the complex flows and frictions involved in early modern encounters and connections, the idea of ‘sites of mediation’ emerges as a crucial category for the historical analysis of the period as it focuses our attention on both the locations and the processes at work, suggesting the need to consider them in tandem. This essay pursues this two-pronged approach by exploring the interconnected functions of manuscripts as privileged sites and of translation as a central technique of mediation for cross-cultural production in the early modern period. It does so through an analysis of the making, circulation, and interpretation of a manuscript known as the Codex Mendoza. Created in Mexico City around 1542, the Codex Mendoza circulated physically from place to place for the next eight decades, and then on paper through reproduction for another two centuries. 4{ }^{4} Examining it through the lens of translation highlights some of the complex phenomena encompassed by the term ‘mediation’: the act of bridging or bringing together two separate regions, positions, or realms; the notion of negotiation or arbitration in an attempt at resolving differences in a contested situation; as well as mediation in terms of the material movement between media or registers, such as from an oral to a written register, manuscript to print, or image to word. The essay also suggests that the page constituted one of the most frequent, lively, and versatile sites of mediation for encountering peoples, objects, and knowledges in the early modern world, in Europe as well as in other parts of the world that engaged with Europe through paper. From lavish illustrated atlases to cheap broadsheets, from travel narratives to inventories and letters, across genres and media, in print or manuscript, through text and image, paper pages connected the early modern world.

Translation as Mediation

Mesoamerican cultures like the Nahua, Mixtec, and Maya possessed sophisticated traditions of pictorial writing, which they used to produce records with multiple functions-historical, calendrical, divinatory, and so forth. In Central Mexico, indigenous ‘painter-scribes’ (Nahuatl tlacuilo, pl. tlacuiloque) created such documents by using paint on cloth, treated deerskin, or amatl bark paper. These manuscripts existed in three main formats: screenfolds composed of multiple glued square pages that would open and close in the manner of an accordion, cloths (lienzos), and rolls. Thus, while Latin Americanists today use

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4 For more on the mobility of this codex, and the connection between mobility and translation, see Bleichmar D., “History in Pictures: Translating the Codex Mendoza”, Art History 38 (2015) 682−701682-701. ↩︎

the term ‘codex’ to refer to indigenous manuscripts, pre-Columbian Mexican books did not in fact use the European book format, nor was the term in wide use in the early modern period. 5{ }^{5}

After the Spanish arrived in Mexico, these ‘painted books’ fascinated Europeans on both sides of the Atlantic. But, while collectors in the Old World valued them as rare examples of exotic writing, early missionaries in New Spain destroyed the vast majority of pre-Columbian pictorial manuscripts because of their ‘idolatrous’ - in other words, sacred or ritual—content. Nevertheless, painter-scribes continued to make codices after the conquest, adapting their craft and incorporating both native and European traditions.

This is the case with the pictorial manuscript we know as the Codex Mendoza, created in Mexico City around 1542 [Figs. 9.1, 9.2]. 6{ }^{6} To make it, indigenous artists painted colorful figures that recorded information about Aztec history, tributary practices, and social life. 7{ }^{7} Some of the drawings adhere to

5 Latin Americanists use the word ‘codex’ for any work connected to Amerindian traditions of pictorial writing and understood to have involved indigenous makers, regardless of its format, support, date, the absence or presence of European elements, or use of alphabetic text—it is the indigenous referent that is crucial. The foundational English-language publication on Mesoamerican pictorial documents in the colonial period is Robertson D., Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Schools (Norman, ок: 1994). Also indispensible are the works of Elizabeth Hill Boone, among them Boone E.H., Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs (Austin, TX: 2000); Boone E.H. - Mignolo W. (eds.), Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (Durham, NC: 1994); Boone E.H. - Cummins T.B.F. (eds.), Native Traditions in the Post-Conquest World (Washington, DC: 1998); and Boone E.H. (ed.), Painted Books and Indigenous Knowledge in Mesoamerica: Manuscript Studies in Honor of Mary Elizabeth Smith (New Orleans, LA: 2005). In this essay I use the terms ‘Aztec’ and ‘Mexica’ interchangeably.
6 The standard source is the magnificent edition Berdan F. - Anawalt P.R. (eds.), The Codex Mendoza, 4 vols. (Berkeley, CA: 1992). See also Gómez-Tejada J., Making the Codex Mendoza, Constructing the Codex Mendoza: A Reconsideration of a Sixteenth-Century Mexican Manuscript, Ph.D. dissertation (Yale University: 2012). As of January 2015, an online scholarly edition is available at http://codicemendoza.inah.gob.mx/index.php?lang=english (accessed: 02.08.2016).
7 The codex does not address the number or ethnicity of the painters and scribes, though scholars have assumed on stylistic grounds that the artists were indigenous. Based on meticulous formal analysis, Gómez-Tejada suggests that two artists worked on the images, see Gómez-Tejada, Making the Codex Mendoza, chapter 2. Scholarly speculation about the possible identity of artists and scribes is discussed in Nicholson H.B., “The History of the Codex Mendoza”, in Berdan - Anawalt, The Codex Mendoza vol. 1, 1-2 and Gómez-Tejada, Making the Codex Mendoza 37−3937-39.

pre-Hispanic pictorial conventions, while others show their Europeanization. 8{ }^{8} Following indigenous custom, these figures provided the basis for an oral account in Nahuatl, speech that an interpreter then rendered into spoken Spanish. In a final step, scribes set down this narrative as a Spanish-language text. Thus, this codex emerged from a complex and multi-step process that engaged American and European makers and traditions. Amerindian aspects include the pictographic writing and oral account, the artists and interpreter, some of the pigments used in the figures, and the information the document contains. European aspects include the paper, ink, and some pigments; the book format and adherence to pages as the narrative unit, rather than the preColumbian screenfold, scroll, or cloth; the alphabetic writing; the scribes; and the intended audience, as it was made for export to Spain.

From its arrival in Europe in the sixteenth century, this codex has been celebrated as a key document for the study of Mesoamerica, receiving more sustained attention than any other Mexican manuscript, particularly in the early modern period. Authors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries referred to it as ‘a Mexican picture historie’, ‘Mexican hieroglyphs’, and ‘Mexican painted annals’. 9{ }^{9} In 1780, the Mexican Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero, writing in exile in Italy, suggested that the first viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza (1495-1552), commissioned the codex. Although that provenance is uncertain at best, it has since that moment provided a name for the document. 10{ }^{10} Today, scholars cherish the Codex Mendoza for the detailed information it provides about Nahua history, economy, and culture a mere two decades after the conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521. It is also of remarkable artistic quality and historical importance. Finally, the document is unique in providing an alphabetic gloss to every single pictograph, which has positioned it as a sort of ‘Rosetta Stone’ or primer for the study of Nahua glyphs-both in the early modern period and more recently. The Bodleian Library at Oxford, which owns it, exhibits it as a ‘treasure’.

Scholarship on the Codex Mendoza has tended to focus on interpreting the pictographs, mining the document for empirical data about Aztec society, and

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8 On style, see Howe K.S., “The Relationship of Indigenous and European Styles in the Codex Mendoza: An Analysis of Pictorial Style”, in Berdan - Anawalt, The Codex Mendoza vol. 1, 25-33 and Gómez-Tejada, Making the Codex Mendoza, chapters 1 and 2. These phrases were used by the authors of the publications listed in Table 9.1. Clavijero described it as ‘la raccolta de Mendoza’ (Mendoza’s collection) in Clavijero F.S., Storia antica del Messico, 4 vols. (Cesena, Gregorio Biasini: 1780-1781) vol. 1, 22. The connection is questioned by Nicholson, “The History of the Codex Mendoza” 1-5, and GómezTejada, Making the Codex Mendoza. ↩︎

FIGURE 9.1 Codex Mendoza, Mexico City, ca. 1542, fol. iv. Oxford, The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford ( MM s. Arch. Selden A. 1).
IMAGE © THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY.

FIGURE 9.2 Codex Mendoza, Mexico City, ca. 1542, fol. 2r. Oxford, The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (Ms. Arch. Selden A. I).
IMAGE © THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY.

using it as evidence of indigenous practices and agency. This essay contributes to the scholarship by analyzing the Mendoza’s trajectories and transformations through a focus on translation. Scholarship on early Spanish American visual and material culture has tended to parse indigenous and European elements, describing works that show traits from both traditions as examples of a unique ‘hybrid’ or ‘mestizo’ mixture characteristic of the region. 11{ }^{11} However, although the Codex Mendoza presents both European and American elements, its makers for the most part did not combine them. Quite to the contrary, the codex carefully juxtaposes image and text, Nahua and Spanish elements, presenting them as related but separate and distinct. It is less an example of hybridization or mestizaje than an instance of translation, suggesting the constant movement, adjustments, and transformations-in short, mediations-involved in negotiating differences between languages, writing systems, and cultures. 12{ }^{12}

The Codex Mendoza was created at a time when practices of linguistic and cultural translation were critical to almost every aspect of public and private life in New Spain. Post-conquest codices often display the figure of the interpreter in a prominent position, featuring in particular the best known and most infamous of colonial go-betweens: Cortés’s aide and lover Malintzinwho both translated for the Spaniards and underwent translation herself, as she was also known as Malinche, the Hispanized version of her Nahua name, and as Doña Marina, her baptismal name. 13{ }^{13} Early missionaries faced the challenges posed by linguistic barriers by learning indigenous languages and creating a copious literature that included dictionaries, grammars, catechisms, collections of sermons, and confesionarios. The first printed Spanish-Nahuatl dictionary, Vocabulario en la lengua castellana y Mexicana (Vocabulary in the Castillian and Mexican languages) by the Franciscan Alonso de Molina, offered an impressive 520 pages of paired entries; it was widely used and repeatedly emulated and expanded upon. 14{ }^{14} The Franciscans also undertook

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11 Among the vast literature on this issue, see especially Dean C. - Leibsohn D., “Hybridity and its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America”, Colonial Latin American Review 12 (2003) 5-35 and Gruzinski S., The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization (New York, NY: 2002).
12 On early colonial Mexican art and translation, see Russo A., The Untranslatable Image: A Mestizo History of the Arts in New Spain, 1500-1600 (Austin, TX: 2014).
13 She is prominently depicted as an interpreter in the Relación de Tlaxcala, the Codex Durán, and the Florentine Codex, among others. See Karttunen F., “Rethinking Malinche”, in Schroeder S. - Wood S. - Haskett R.S. (eds.), Indian Women of Early Mexico (Oklahoma City, ок: 1997) 291-312.
14 Molina Alonso de, Vocabulario en la lengua castellana y Mexicana (rev. ed. Mexico City: 1571; 1st ed. Mexico City: 1555). ↩︎

the education of elite Nahua boys at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, inaugurated in 1536, where they provided a humanistic and religious education in Spanish and Latin. 15{ }^{15} The college’s library, whose collection of printed books provided models of European texts and images, is linked to two important colonial codices that are roughly contemporary with the Mendoza: the Codex de la Cruz-Badiano or Libellus de medicinalibus indorum herbis (Little Book of the Medicinal Herbs of the Indies, 1552, in Latin and Nahuatl) and the Florentine Codex (ca. 1555-1577, in Nahuatl and Spanish). To live in Mexico City in the mid-sixteenth century meant to constantly engage in acts of linguistic and cultural translation. Multilingualism was a central tool for mediation.

It is important to note that, in the early modern period, the word ‘translation’ had two meanings, both of which relate to mediation. Sebastián de Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish language), the first dictionary of any European vernacular, defines traduzir (to translate) as ‘to take one thing from one place to another’ and 'to turn a statement from one language into another. 16{ }^{16} Translation could refer to physical or linguistic movement, making the concept particularly well suited to the Codex Mendoza, a document produced through processes of linguistic and cultural translation, set in physical motion across space, and then repeatedly transformed in printed versions that constituted new acts of interpretive translation. This essay’s sections follow the codex through these three types of translation and mediation.

Colonial Translation and the Making of the Codex Mendoza

The Codex Mendoza is an illustrated manuscript in book format, composed of seventy-one folios of European paper measuring roughly 30×21 cm30 \times 21 \mathrm{~cm}. It consists of seventy-two pages of pictorial content annotated with Spanish glosses and sixty-three pages of textual commentary in Spanish, with pages of text and image interpolated [Figs. 9.1, 9.2]. The codex is divided into three sections. The first, in sixteen folios (fols. 1r-18r), presents a history of the Aztecs from the founding of the capital city of Tenochtitlan in 1325 to its fall in 1521.

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15 The classic work on the early Franciscans is Ricard R., The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, trans. L.B. Simpson (Berkeley, CA: 1966), originally published in French in 1933.
16 ‘Llevar de un lugar a otro alguna cosa, o encaminarla […] el bolver la sentencia de una lengua en otra’, see Covarrubias Sebastián de, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Madrid, Luis Sanchez: 1611) unpaginated. ↩︎

This is a political and military history organized chronologically according to the reign of each emperor or tlatoani, providing the dates of his rule through blue-coloured year glyphs and the names of the towns he brought into the imperial fold as tributaries [Fig. 9.3].

The second and longest section, in thirty-nine folios (fols. 18v-56r), relates Aztec imperial geography to economics. It details the tributary obligations of subject towns in the sixteenth century, organized by region and specifying such items as fine feathers, animal skins, precious stones, gold, mantles, liquidambar, and cacao beans, among others [Fig. 9.4]. As in the first section, the content, format, and style are highly regimented. Towns are listed on the margin, starting at the top left and moving counterclockwise around the page. Tribute items occupy the majority of the page, accompanied by glyphs indicating quantities and organized in horizontal registers, with clothing always at the top of the page, military insignia such as warrior’s uniforms and shields at the center, and foodstuffs and other items at the bottom.

Whereas the first two sections follow pre-Columbian traditions, the third represents a colonial innovation-there is nothing like it before. 17{ }^{17} In sixteen folios (fols. 56v−71v56 \mathrm{v}-71 \mathrm{v} ), it describes Aztec social life: the upbringing of boys and girls from birth until age fifteen, when girls should be married and boys enter a trade or specialized schooling; various occupations, including detailed depictions of military orders and their uniforms; information about governance; and depictions of old age and death [Fig. 9.5]. This section provides a unique glimpse of ‘their private and public rites from the grave of the womb to the womb of the grave’-to use the evocative words of a seventeenth-century commentator-just as they were being thoroughly transformed in the new viceregal society. 18{ }^{18}

Making the codex involved various steps and types of translation and mediation: from painted image to spoken word in Nahuatl, to spoken word in Spanish, to alphabetic writing in Spanish. First, indigenous artists working in the Mesoamerican tradition recorded information about Mexica history, culture, religion, and tributary practices pictorially, leaving blank pages in between their paintings. In a second step, a narrator provided an oral account

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17 The second section is related to the Matrícula de Tributos (Codex Moctezuma), see Berdan F.F. - Durand-Forest J. de, Matrícula de tributos (Codice de Moctezuma), Museo National de Antropología, Mexico (Cod. 35-529): Vollständige Farbreproduktion des Codex in verkleinertem Format, Codices Selecti Phototypice Impressi 118 (Graz: 1980).
18 Purchas Samuel, Hakluytus Posthumus: Or, Purchas His Pilgrimes, 5 vols. (London, William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone: 1625-1626) vol. 3, 1066. I have modernized the original spelling throughout. ↩︎

FIGURE 9.3 Codex Mendoza, Mexico City, ca. 1542, fol. 15v. Oxford, The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (Ms. Arch. Selden A. I).
IMAGE © THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY.

FIGURE 9.4 Codex Mendoza, Mexico City, ca. 1542, fol. 46r. Oxford, The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (Ms. Arch. Selden A. I).
IMAGE © THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY.

FIGURE 9.5 Codex Mendoza, Mexico City, ca. 1542, fol. 6or. Oxford, The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (Ms. Arch. Selden A. I).
IMAGE © THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY.

of what the drawings represented, rendering images into spoken words, most likely in Nahuatl. Then, an interpreter turned this Nahuatl speech into spoken Spanish. In a final step, a scribe set it down in written Spanish, producing a lengthy text that translated the images on the page and also annotating every single figure with an explanatory gloss: the name of each ruler or town appears next to the appropriate figure; the banner (pantli) is always annotated as ‘twenty’, the mountain glyph representing a town as pueblo (town), and so on [Figs. 9.2-9.5]. Finally, the manuscript appears to have been reviewed by an additional person who corrected errors in the Spanish text and appended a concluding commentary about the document’s production.

The relation between text and image is not one of primary content and secondary illustration. Rather, the text translates the image, so that they each present information according to one of two separate registers, a Mexica pictorial one and a Spanish alphabetic one. The text has a dual function: first, to translate the content itself, that is, to convey in words the information that the images present; and second, to translate the way in which the system of pictorial writing works. For instance, at the bottom of the first textual portion [Fig. 9.1] there is an explanation of a blue strip of year glyphs whose meaning is deciphered through inscriptions in both Nahuatl and Spanish, with the Nahuatl in red ink above the images and the Spanish in black ink below them. 19{ }^{19} Throughout the codex, the text thus provides information and also an introduction to Nahua pictographic writing. There is a constant back-and-forth between these two functions throughout the codex: the Spanish writing will give a textual rendition of the content of an image, noting for instance that a ruler reigned for so many years, and then explain that the blue squares provide dates, burning temples signify conquest, and so on.

The translation is insistent, indeed, incessant. Glosses repeatedly offer the meaning of every single glyph even if they recur throughout the manuscript, or within a single folio. It is never assumed that a reader already knows that the banner stands for twenty, or that it is unnecessary to provide the individual translation for every single glyph given that the accompanying text on the facing page details every item. In effect each figure is translated twice, once next to the image and again in the textual version.

The codex also shows acts of cultural translation or interpretation, framing Mexica history and culture in the post-conquest context and for European audiences. The first section of the codex, for instance, ends with the reign

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19 The use of black and red ink is highly suggestive, since the Nahua expression in tlilli in tlapalli (‘the black ink, the red ink’) refers to writing and to knowledge more broadly. ↩︎

of Moctezuma Xocoyotzin [Fig. 9.3]. The choice of Moctezuma as the ‘last’ Aztec emperor omits his successors Cuitlahuac and Cuauhtemoc, who ruled between Moctezuma’s death in late June of 1520 and the surrender of the Aztec capital to Cortés and his allies in mid-August of 1521. At the bottom of the page, the presence of uncoloured year glyphs in pen and ink indicates a telling editorial intervention. The original chronology painted by the artists (in blue squares, each representing one year) ends in 1518, but the scribe appears to have extended this year count by adding three lines to the Roman numeral xv to transform it into XVIII, and by drawing three year glyphs. The penultimate glyph is annotated ‘end and death of Moctezuma’, and the last one is labeled ‘pacificación (pacification) and conquest of New Spain’. Thus the Spanish scribe not only rendered images into words but in this case also presented a particular account of history, showing how translation could involve revision and transformation.

Another example of cultural translation involves the celebrated depiction of the palace of Moctezuma [Fig. 9.6]. It includes, on the left, a ‘Council Hall of War’, and, on the right, a ‘Council Hall’ for the hearing of legal cases and the passing of judgment, both of them labeled. This page is well known as the only image in the codex to use a perspectival view, a Europeanized vision of Aztec rule. Equally important is the fact that both image and text describe the Aztecs as an example of a civilized people by celebrating what the narrative terms their ‘order’ and ‘good governance’ (orden, buen gobierno, buen regimiento). These are crucial terms, as they connoted civitas, a critical category for Spanish and indeed European political philosophy that would clearly communicate to a European reader that the Mexica were highly civilized people. 20{ }^{20}

The codex concludes with a page of text that directly addresses translation practices. 21{ }^{21} The scribe begs for the reader’s leniency with ‘the rough style in the interpretation of the drawings’, explaining that indigenous artists provided the material to the interpreter only ten days before the ship that would take the codex to Spain was scheduled to sail. With so little time to work, the scribe explains, the translation was done ‘a uso de proceso’, that is, following legal conventions. This is a most interesting revelation, as it indicates that the procedure used to make this important codex-transforming Nahua pictorial writing and oral testimony into Spanish prose-came directly out of the court system, where indigenous litigants routinely presented pictorial statements

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20 Kagan R., Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493-1793 (New Haven, CT: 2000) 1-44.
21 Codex Mendoza, fol. 71v. ↩︎

FIGURE 9.6 Codex Mendoza, Mexico City, ca. 1542, fol. 6yr. Oxford, The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (Ms. Arch. Selden A. I).
IMAGE © THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY.

as evidence. 22{ }^{22} Thus, the codex’s very last statement indicates that its makers viewed it precisely as evidence produced through translation. 23{ }^{23}

The Codex Mendoza, I have suggested, is the product of a series of translations and mediations: rendering Nahuatl into Spanish, images into words, oral interpretation into alphabetic writing, as well as a hermeneutic movement in the interpretation of Mexica information for European eyes. After this, language translations gave way to physical ones. Apparently completed in haste, the codex travelled by land from Mexico City to the Gulf port of Veracruz, and there boarded a ship that carried it across the Atlantic. Once set in motion, it continued to move for the next hundred years to destinations its makers never imagined.

Physical Translations, or Travels in Space

The Codex Mendoza had an eventful biography, which left its physical mark on the object in the form of multiple annotations. 24{ }^{24} There is no evidence that it ever reached Spain, its intended destination. Instead, it somehow ended up in the hands of André Thevet (1516-1590), a French writer who traveled to Brazil, became an authority on the Americas, and served as royal cosmographer to the Valois court. Thevet signed the manuscript in five separate places [Fig. 9.2, top left), and briefly discussed Mexican pictographic writing in his Cosmographie universelle (Universal cosmography,) and Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (The true portraits and lives of famous men). 25{ }^{25}

By 1587, it appears, the codex belonged to Richard Hakluyt (ca. 1552-1616), an active promoter of English settlement in North America and the author of

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22 Two early examples of codices used as evidence in legal trials are discussed by Cummins T.B.F., “From Lies to Truth: Colonial Ekphrasis and the Act of Crosscultural Translation”, in Farago C. (ed.), Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 14501650 (New Haven, ст: 1995) 152-174, and Herrera Meza M. del C. - Ruiz Medrano E. (eds.), El códice de Tepeucila: El entintado mundo de la fijeza imaginaria (Mexico City: 1997).
23 The statement calls out some mistranslations, noting that it was a mistake for the interpreter to use the Moorish words alfaqui (a Muslim cleric or expert in Islamic law) and mezquitas (mosques) instead of sacerdote (priest) and templos (temples), thus remarking on another act of translation by which New World religiosity was rendered through the vocabulary of Old World idolatry and the Christian Reconquista of Spain.
24 See Nicholson, “The History of the Codex Mendoza”.
25 Thevet André, Cosmographie universelle, 2 vols. (Paris, Guillaume Chaudiere: 1575) and Thevet André, Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres, 2 vols. (Paris, Guillaume Chaudiere: 1584). ↩︎

two important compilations that approached geography and travel from the perspective of English political aspirations toward the New World. The date is provided by a somewhat cryptic English annotation that was written in an early blank folio in the codex. 26{ }^{26} After Hakluyt’s death in 1616, the manuscript went to Samuel Purchas (ca. 1577-1626), an English cleric and the author of an immensely popular travel compilation, which, as I will discuss, was of great importance to the codex’s early modern reception. After Purchas’s death ten years later, John Selden (1584-1654), the English jurist, politician, Orientalist, and author, acquired the manuscript and inscribed his motto on the first folio of the text. Five years after Selden’s death, in 1659, the Bodleian Library at Oxford received his extensive collection of books and manuscripts, which in addition to the Codex Mendoza included two other Mexican pictorial manuscripts, the Selden Codex and the Selden Roll. 27{ }^{27} This marks the end of the Mendoza’s physical translations, with the Bodleian as its final resting place.

For about one hundred years after it was first made, the Codex Mendoza lived a life of constant travel. It changed hands at least five times, and was a prized possession of some of the most noted European collectors and writers about travel and the New World. These highly contingent physical translations indicate the great interest that this kind of manuscript awakened among early modern European collectors and authors, who left their mark on the codex through multiple inscriptions.

The Codex Mendoza was not alone in its physical translations. Over the course of the early modern period, Mexican pictorial manuscripts-pre-Columbian and colonial—could be found in collections in Madrid, Rome, Florence, Bologna, London, Oxford, Reims, Paris, and many other cities. 28{ }^{28}

26 Hakluyt Richard, Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America (London, Thomas Dawson: 1582) and Hakluyt Richard, The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation (London, George Bishop - Ralph Newberrie - Robert Barker: 1589-1600). The inscription reads: ‘D[ue]: yourselfe in gold rydinge to London ye7\mathrm{y}^{\mathrm{e}} 7 th of september 1587/V11587 / \mathrm{V}^{1} [£5].’ The exact date and means of Hakluyt’s acquisition are debated in the scholarship. On Hakluyt, see Mancall P.C., Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (New Haven, CT: 2007).
27 Toomer G.J.,John Selden: A Life in Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford: 2009) vol. 2, 793-799.
28 See Glass J.B., “A Census of the Native Middle American Pictorial Manuscripts”, in Wauchope R. (ed.), Handbook of Middle American Indians, 16 vols. (Austin, TX: 1964-1976) vol. 14/15, 81-252. Their trajectories tended to be complex and are often quite difficult to document with detail or certainty; see, for instance, Toorians L., “Some Light in the Dark Century of Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus 1”, Codices manuscripti 9 (1983) 26-29 and “Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus 1, its History Completed”, Codices manuscripti 10 (1984) 87−9787-97.

European scholars were fascinated and mystified by what they termed ‘Mexican hieroglyphs’, which they avidly reproduced in their publications as examples of exotic non-European writing. 29{ }^{29} However, they found Mesoamerican pictorial writing impossible to decipher. The catalogue of Ferdinando Cospi’s Bolognese Wunderkammer, published in 1667, describes the pre-Columbian Codex Cospi as a book of 'Mexican hieroglyphs, which are most extravagant figures and for the most part depict men and animals that are strangely monstrous. 30{ }^{30} The publication reproduced some of this figures [Fig. 9.7], but the author had no idea what to make of them. ‘What these [symbols] mean’, he noted, ‘I do not know, nor do I know of others in Europe who know it’. He considered these ‘hieroglyphs’ both fascinating and inscrutable, a ‘literary mystery, not yet explained’, and their eventual decipherment 'a beautiful and curious undertaking. 31{ }^{31}

The inability of early modern Europeans to make sense of pre-Columbian codices, which did not include alphabetic writing, helps to explain why the Codex Mendoza gained such a privileged and unique place in the European study of Mesoamerica. It was the only known codex that offered a translation of both Nahua pictorial writing and Nahua history, economics, and cultural information into alphabetic glosses in Spanish, which could in turn be translated into other European languages. The final section of this essay turns to the Codex Mendoza’s paper travels, tracking its various translations and interpretations in early modern publications.

Paper Translations, or Travels in Print

Although the Codex Mendoza ended its physical travels when it entered the Bodleian Library in 1659, it continued to move through publication, with physical translations giving way to media translations. Its paper travels began with the publication of Samuel Purchas’s widely read Hakluytus Posthumus: Or, Purchas his Pilgrimes. The third volume includes a fifty-two-page chapter with woodcuts that reproduce almost the entire pictorial content of the Mendoza, as

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29 See, for instance, Worm Ole, Museum Wormianum (Leiden, Iohannes Elzevier: 1655) 383−384383-384.
30 ‘Contiene questo libro non altro che GEROGLIFICI del MESSICO, i quali sono figure stravagantissime, e per la Maggio parte esprimono huomini, et animali stranamente monstruosi’, Legati Lorenzo, Museo Cospiano (Bologna, Giacomo Monti: 1677) 191.
31 ‘Che cosa significhino, non m’è noto, nè sò che sia noto ad altri nell’Europa […] Sò che s’accingerebbe ad una bella, e curiosa impresa, chi prendesse ad illustrare le tenebre di questi misterii letterarii, non per anco spiegati nell’Europa’, Legati, Museo Cospiano 192. ↩︎

FIGURE 9.7 Lorenzo Legati, Museo Cospiano (Bologna, Giacomo Monti: 1677) 192. Los Angeles, CA, Getty Research Institute.
IMAGE © THE GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE.

well as an English translation of the Spanish text, augmented with additional commentary [Fig. 9.8]. 32{ }^{32} Purchas explained that although his book introduced the letters of other modern and ancient nations, including Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Arabic, and Persian, as well as Egyptian and Ethiopian hieroglyphs, this precious Mexican manuscript was the only known full-fledged history of and by a foreign nation, addressing their rulers, economics, religion, and customs. 33{ }^{33} For him, the Codex Mendoza represented much more than a collectible example of exotic writing: it constituted a unique indigenous source about the Aztec world. The fact that the manuscript was a history-a highly regarded genre at the time-mattered greatly to Purchas’s assessment of the codex, helping to prove Aztec governance and civility and to establish the Aztecs as a sophisticated civilization rather than ‘barbarians’ or ‘savages’. 34{ }^{34}

Purchas memorably called the codex ‘the choicest of my jewels’, musing that ‘perhaps, there is not any one History of this kind in the world comparable to this, so fully expressing so much without letters, hardly gotten, and easily lost’. 35{ }^{35} Purchas’s high esteem for the manuscript is evidenced by the decision to reproduce it almost in its entirety, which involved having the Spanish text translated into English and also commissioning a large number of woodcut reproductions of the figures, a laborious and costly choice. No other document in the four volumes of the text received comparable treatment, in length or illustrations.

Purchas’s version of the Codex Mendoza had enormous impact. Over the following two hundred years, it provided the source material for no fewer than six other titles in nine different editions, many of them influential and widely read works (Table 9.1). Thanks to Purchas, the Mendoza may well be the single most reproduced non-western manuscript in early modern publications.

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32 Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus vol. 3, 1065-1117. Purchas briefly alluded to what he called a ‘Mexican historie’ and ‘Mexican picture historie’ in an earlier publication, but did not reproduce the codex; see Purchas his Pilgrimage, or, Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in all Ages and Places Discovered, from the Creation unto this Present […] (2nd rev. ed. London, William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone: 1614) 803-804 and 811. Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus vol. 3, 1065.
On the importance of history as a genre, see Pomata G. - Siraisi N.G. (eds.), Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: 2005). Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus vol. 3, 1066, 1065. ↩︎

FIGURE 9.8 Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus: Or, Purchas his Pilgrimes […], 5 vols. (London, William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone: 1625-1626) vol. 3, 1068. San Marino, CA, The Huntington Library.
IMAGE © THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY.

Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus: Or, Purchas His Pilgrimes, 5 vols. (London, William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone: 1625-1626).
Johannes de Laet, Nieuwe Wereldt ofte Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien (2nd ed. Leiden, Abraham Elzevier: 1630).
Johannes de Laet, Novus Orbis seu descriptionis Indiae Occidentalis (Iohannes Elzevier: 1633).
Johannes de Laet, L’Histoire du Nouveau Monde ou description des Indes (Leiden: Bonaventure and Abraham Elzevier: 1640).
Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus (Rome, Vitale Mascardi: 1652−16541652-1654 ).
Melchisédech Thévenot, Relations des divers voyages curieux (Paris, André Cramoisy: 1663-1696).
William Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (London, Fletcher Gyles: 1738-1741).
William Warburton, Essai sur les hieroglyphs des Egyptiens (Paris, Hippolyte-Luis Guerin: 1744).
Francisco Javier Clavijero, Storia antica del Messico (Cesena, Gregorio Biasini: 1780-1781).
Alexander von Humboldt, Vues des Cordillères, et monuments des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (Paris, J. Smith: 1810-1813).

Print not only gave the Codex Mendoza legs, it also made it enormously malleable. Authors’ particular interpretations of the material and its significance created multiple versions of the codex as they used it to pursue their own interests in history, religion, pictographic writing, the civility of New World populations, the history of languages, and other topics. While a full analysis of the multiple versions of the Mendoza produced by the printed travels of the codex is beyond the scope of this chapter, some examples will illustrate the interpretive mobility that publication yielded.

The first print translation that the codex underwent was the initial one for Purchas’s publication, which had tremendous impact as it was the only version produced from the manuscript itself until the publication of Lord Kingsborough’s monumental nine-volume Antiquities of Mexico (London: 1830-1848). 36{ }^{36} For two centuries, the numerous authors who wrote about the

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36 It is not known whether anyone consulted the original codex between Purchas and Kingsborough, who gave the Mendoza pride of place as the very first item in his Antiquities ↩︎

Mendoza based their information and images on Purchas’s edition, and at times on later versions based on Purchas. As a result, they encountered the work as mediated by Purchas: they knew the pictographs as black-and-white woodcuts rather than vividly coloured drawings, and could not fully access the particularities of the Spanish textual presence.

Purchas’s most significant intervention was to alter the relationship between image and text in the manuscript. In Purchas’s publication, the Spanish glosses that appear next to each single image in the manuscript vanished. The woodcuts replaced these annotations with uppercase letters in alphabetical order, keyed to a textual commentary set in italics below or next to the image [see Fig. 9.8]. While this was a standard mechanism for linking image to text in European publications of the time, in this particular case image became distanced from text, obscuring the Spanish presence within the manuscript itself. This separation of the pictorial and textual elements is emphasized by the running header for the chapter, in which Purchas portrays the Mendoza as a ‘Mexican picture historie. Chronicle without writing’, despite the abundant presence of words throughout the codex. 37{ }^{37} Purchas’s editorial interventions yielded a new version of the manuscript, one that emphasized image over word, and the notion of a ‘pure’, pre-contact indigenous culture over the mixing and transformation of the colonial era. This was not a facsimile but a translation.

Indeed, Purchas was keenly aware of the centrality of translation to his work, as the title for his lengthy chapter on the codex indicates: ‘The History of the Mexican Nation, described in pictures by the Mexican Author explained in the Mexican language, which exposition translated into Spanish, and thence into English, together with the said Picture-historie, are here presented’. The

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of Mexico. Edward Bernard did mention it in his published catalogue of manuscripts in British collections, see Bernard E., Catalogi librorum manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae in unum collecti, cum indice alphabetico (Oxford, E Theatrum Sheldoniano: 1697) tom. 1, part 1, 157, item number 3134: ‘Historia Mexicana Hispanice cum Figuris et Iconibus et explicatione Lingua Mexicana partim, partimque Hispanica’ (A Spanish Mexican history with figures and icons and explanations partly in the Mexican language, partly in Spanish). My thanks to Bruce Barker-Benfield for this reference.
37 This is an important intervention, given early modern European debates about the correlation between alphabetic language and civility. On the colonial role of the written word, see Boone - Mignolo, Writing Without Words and Mignolo W., The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor, M1:1995) esp. parts 1 and 2. ↩︎

title presents the codex as the product of multiple translations and mediations, from pictures to words, from oral narrative to written prose, and from Nahuatl to Spanish to English.

Throughout the chapter, Purchas refers often to the difficulties of translation. In one passage, he reveals that the woodcutter used a letter to label a figure for which there was no Spanish text, forcing him to provide his own tentative interpretation of what that image might mean. 38{ }^{38} Elsewhere, he appears completely at a loss as to what to make of the pictographs that provide the names of rulers and towns, not realizing that the proper name in alphabetic writing is a translation of those images-that is, that the combined glyphs of a stone (tetl) and a prickly-pear cactus (nochtli) signify the name ‘Tenoch’, much like alphabetic writing does [Fig. 9.2]. Purchas imagines that these figures must function in the manner of European arms, and leaves the task of making sense of them entirely up to the reader. 'You see this king and every other both king and town distinguished by special arms or escutcheons, with other particulars, which here and in all the rest I leave to each reader’s own industry and search. 39{ }^{39} But no early modern European reader, however industrious, could access Mesoamerican images if they had not been translated into written words in a European language. Even text could pose difficulties, and Purchas’s translator failed to provide English versions for some words in both Nahuatl and Spanish, leaving his readers to their own devices when faced with terms like xicara (a mug or cup), copal (a Mesoamerican aromatic tree resin), frijoles (beans), huipiles (Mesoamerican tunics) or naguas (enaguas, petticoats, surely also a translation of indigenous garb into European categories).

Later authors used Purchas’s rendering of the Mendoza to create new versions through processes of translation, interpretation, and selection. Johannes de Laet (1581-1649), the Dutch geographer, author, and founding member of the Dutch West India Company, drew on Purchas for the second and subsequent editions of his widely read Nieuwe Wereldt ofte Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien (New World, or Description of the West Indies). 40{ }^{40} De Laet selected portions of the manuscript for use in two chapters (out of thirty in total) in

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38 Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus vol. 3, 1070-1071, figure E on 1070.
39 Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus vol. 3, 1071, end of the italicized textual interpretation of the figures.
40 Laet Johannes de, Nieuwe Wereldt ofte Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien (1st ed. Leiden, Isaac Elzevier: 1625; 2nd ed. Leiden, Abraham Elzevier: 1630; Latin ed. Leiden, Iohannes Elzevier: 1633; French ed. Leiden: Bonaventure and Abraham Elzevier: 1640). ↩︎

the fifth book, which discusses New Spain. Chapter ten focuses on language, counting, timekeeping, and the recording of history. It begins with a vocabulary offering Nahuatl terms for parts of the human body, colours, various ‘natural things’, familiar relations, and numbers, along with their equivalents in a European language, reiterating the primacy of translation for the study of the New World.

Unlike Purchas’s great attention to Nahua pictographs, however, De Laet privileged words over images. He noted that Aztecs lacked ‘the art of writing’, though they managed to record their history ‘by certain pictures, which are like hieroglyphs’, and as an example reproduced five small woodcuts representing dates and quantities-only five small figures, out of the hundreds in Purchas. 41{ }^{41} Giving only a cursory glance to pictorial writing, De Laet focused instead on the information that the codex provided about Nahua dynastic history. His thirteenth chapter addressed 'The succession of Mexican kings, according to their painted annals. 42{ }^{42} Here, De Laet carefully compared the text and images in Purchas’s Mendoza, noting discrepancies among them. He then contrasted the chronology of rulers offered by the ‘painted annals’ with those offered in two important publications by Spanish authors, Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia general de las Indias (General history of the Indies) and José de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Natural and moral history of the Indies). 43{ }^{43} Thus De Laet shared Purchas’s interest in the manuscript as a historical source, and credited it with the same authority as Spanish published accounts. However, his selective use of material from Purchas’s Mendoza as information spread through various chapters lost the sense of the codex as a document. For him, it was one more source for the study of Nahua rule, rather than the unique indigenous document that Purchas had considered it to be.

The French Orientalist Melchisédech Thévenot (ca. 1620-1692) followed a rather different strategy when he used Purchas as the source for an Histoire de l’empire Mexicain, representée par figures (History of the Mexican Empire represented in pictures), a fascicle in his Relations des divers voyages curieux (Reports

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41 ‘L’art descrire’, ‘par certaines peintures, qui estoyent comme hieroglyphiques’, see Laet Johannes de, L’Histoire du Nouveau Monde ou description des Indes (Leiden, Bonaventure and Abraham Elzevier: 1640) book 5, ch. 10, 154.
42 ‘Succession des Rois de Mexique selon leurs Annales peintes’, see Laet, L’Histoire book 5, ch. 13,160−16213,160-162.
43 Gómara Francisco López de, Historia general de las Indias (Antwerp, Martin Nucio: 1552); Acosta José de, Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Sevilla, Juan de Leon: 1590). ↩︎

of various curious voyages, Paris, Thomas Moette: 1672-1696). 44{ }^{44} Thévenot commissioned copies of every single one of Purchas’s numerous woodcuts, and his chapter opens with forty-seven pages of printed images, without any words. Only after the full suite of woodcuts does the text commence-a French translation of Purchas’s English translation of the original Spanish interpretation of the Nahua oral and pictorial account. In Thévenot’s version, the image receives primacy and is also presented as formally dissociated from the text, giving the impression of two separate documents, one pictorial and one textual, as opposed to a single manuscript that brings image and word into dialogue on every single page. It is also worth noting that Thévenot promoted the view of Moctezuma’s palace to the position of frontispiece [Fig. 9.9], rather than the historical view of Tenochtitlan [Figs. 9.2, 9.8] that Purchas made iconic-it was this woodcut more than any other that later authors reproduced. By focusing on the depiction of royal authority as a representation of Aztec imperial history rather than on the calendrical or numerical glyphs that so interested other interpreters as instances of hieroglyphic writing, Thévenot’s frontispiece suggests a shift in the interpretation of the similarities and differences between European and Mexica traditions.

A third example is provided by the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), who turned to Purchas’s Mendoza for comparative material in his Oedipus Aegyptiacus (Rome, Vitalis Mascardi: 1652-1654). In this characteristically complex work, Kircher attempted to recover the secrets of ancient Egyptian religion and science by deciphering their hieroglyphic writing. To that end, he examined almost all of the hieroglyphic inscriptions known to Europeans at that time, as well as comparative material from around the globe. Kircher took the widespread European notion that Mexican pictographs were hieroglyphs-another act of cultural translation-to its extreme conclusion, considering them a testament to the spread of Egyptian culture throughout the world. 45{ }^{45}

Confined in the library, the Mendoza continued to move in print. It was included in travel collections as a source on Amerindian civilization. It provided material for the comparative study of cultures, religions, languages, and

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44 Dew N., “Reading Travels in the Culture of Curiosity: Thévenot’s Collection of Voyages”, Journal of Early Modern History 10 (2006) 39-59.
45 Stolzenberg D., Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity (Chicago, IL: 2013). See also Curran B., The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy (Chicago, IL: 2007) and Hamann B.E., “How Maya Hieroglyphs Got Their Name: Egypt, Mexico, and China in Western Grammatology Since the Fifteenth Century”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 152 (2008) 1-68. ↩︎

HISTOIRE DE L’EMPIRE MEXICAINreprefentée par figures. RELATION DV MEXIQUE, OV DE LA NOUVELLE ESPAGNE, Par Thomas Gages.

FIGURE 9.9 Title page to Thomas Gage, Histoire de l’empire mexicain, representée par figures (Paris, André Cramoisy: 1673). Published in Melchisédec Thévenot, Relations des diverses voyages curieux (Paris, André Cramoisy: 1663-1696). San Marino, CA, The Huntington Library.
IMAGE © THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY.

writing systems. It was recruited into discussions about European colonial and commercial expansion and competition. It served antiquarians and collectors. It allowed for evolutionary arguments about the relative civility or primitivism of various cultures. And so on and on, multiplying with astonishing interpretive malleability. For almost two hundred years, printed translations of the codex produced numerous distinct versions, multiplying the object through interpretations while the manuscript itself remained for the most part out of sight, confined to the library.

Conclusion

This chapter has examined the ways in which translation mediated the production and circulation of cross-cultural knowledge in the early modern world. Like many other rarities and curiosities from non-European lands, the Codex Mendoza was valued both in its place of origin and in many other locations, and this interest is reflected in its multiple owners and many travels from Mexico City across the Atlantic to Europe, and then to Paris, London, and Oxford-and it continues to travel today as a regular presence in high-profile exhibitions. 46{ }^{46} But while many, if not most, early modern objects that moved across distances and cultures left tenuous traces in the documentary record, making it hard for scholars who value them today to reconstruct what historical actors made of them at the time, the Codex Mendoza produced a stunning wealth of documented reactions. From the mid-sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century (and beyond), the codex evoked descriptions, comments, questions, and numerous reproductions that, in their selective rendition of the material, created different versions of the document itself. The Codex Mendoza thus moved across languages, cultural categories, space, media, time, and interpretive horizons.

An analysis of early modern interpretations of this codex corroborates the heuristic potential of the category of ‘sites of mediation’. The one constant in the codex’s life was translation, as a form of mediation. The manuscript was created through processes of linguistic and cultural mediation, 'translated’that is, moved-across space and media, and then refashioned again and again

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46 For example, Treasures of the Bodleian, Bodleian Library, Oxford, 30 September to 23 December 2011, http://treasures.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ (accessed: 02.08.2016) and Marks of Genius: Treasures from the Bodleian Library, The Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY, 6 June to 28 September 2014, http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/marks-of-genius (accessed: 02.08.2016). ↩︎

through interpretations. Translation was a mechanism not for duplication or reproduction, but rather for multiplication and re-production; it created versions, impressions, approximations, and rough equivalences rather than copies. Translation as mediation implied above all transformation.

Tracing the trajectories and transformations of the codex calls into question its ontological stability. Mobility was not a physical accident that befell an object that remained stable and immutable despite its travels, but rather a series of transformative and constitutive acts of mediation, translation, selection, and interpretation that produced multiple versions of the object itself. Mobility made the Codex Mendoza flexible, unstable, and prone to mutability-as was the case with other early modern objects that moved across space and culture. 47{ }^{47} This changeling object could be used to ask numerous different questions and to provide numerous different answers. In various places and moments, viewers turned the pages and poured over the images and the words, creating their own Codex Mendoza.

Beyond its focus on the Codex Mendoza as a case study, this chapter has probed some of the ways in which the idea of ‘sites of mediation’ might open up new approaches and provide new insights into early modern histories. The chapter suggests the value of exploring the many potential meanings of the idea of a ‘site’ to encompass not just physical locations-such as the Wunderkammer, the library, the garden, the marketplace, or the ship-but also other types of settings. In this period, books could function as sites, providing access to distant locales and new cultural horizons. Early modern books often functioned as collections, especially those that dealt with travel or with cumulative and comparative approaches to the cultures and regions of the world: the age of the rise of the Wunderkammer also saw the invention of the geographical atlas and the print collection, and the explosion of the travel anthology. And authors often turned to books and reading as metaphors for knowledge making, as when they spoke of 'reading the book of nature. 48{ }^{48} The book, I suggest, played a key role in both the situatedness and the mobility of knowledge in this period. Books operated as much in the realm of libraries as in the realm of ships. Furthermore, the chapter suggests that books were neither static nor stable, often moving across places, cultures, and media. They functioned not only as textual objects but as visual and material ones as well, and often

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47 This is in opposition to Bruno Latour’s influential idea of ‘immutable mobiles’. See, for instance, Latour B., Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: 1987) 215-257.
48 See, for instance, Kusukawa S., Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (Chicago, IL: 2012). ↩︎

demonstrated a heightened awareness of questions of media. It might thus be more appropriate to consider ‘mediations’ rather than ‘mediation’, bringing the various types of movements and negotiations that the word suggests into interplay. Such a multi-layered approach puts into sharp relief both the connectedness and the disconnectedness of early modern histories.

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