历史小径·世界史英语精读30篇（4）
13 / 30
正在校验访问权限...
The Codex Mendoza and Colonial Epistemology in Sixteenth-Century New Spain
《门多萨手抄本》与十六世纪新西班牙的殖民知识体系
-
Commissioned in 1541 by Antonio de Mendoza, the first viceroy of New Spain, the Codex Mendoza synthesized Aztec pictography with Spanish glosses to serve imperial administration.
-
Its three sections documented tribute obligations, dynastic history, and daily life—each revealing how indigenous knowledge was selectively translated and instrumentalized.
-
Spanish friars and Nahua scribes collaborated under asymmetrical power, producing a hybrid artifact neither fully native nor wholly colonial.
-
The manuscript’s survival in Oxford underscores Europe’s archival appropriation of Mesoamerican memory as administrative intelligence.
-
Unlike pre-conquest codices, it prioritized legibility for Iberian bureaucrats over ritual or cosmological continuity.
-
Its standardized layout and alphabetic annotations reflect early modern state-building’s demand for quantifiable, transferable data.
-
Scholars now recognize it not as neutral record but as a site of epistemic negotiation shaped by coercion and adaptation.
-
The Codex exemplifies how colonial rule reconfigured historiography itself—turning oral genealogies into taxable lineages.
-
Its materiality—a European binding housing indigenous pigments—embodies the layered violence of cultural translation.
-
Even today, digital repatriation efforts confront its dual status as evidence of erasure and irreplaceable cultural testimony.
-
Modern reinterpretations emphasize Nahua agency within constraint, challenging older narratives of passive documentation.
-
Ultimately, the Codex Mendoza reveals empire not only as territorial control but as systematic reordering of meaning and memory.