This program will be presented by the University of Chicago Library.
Long regarded as one of the Newberry's Latin American treasures is a book of sermons written in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. The result of a collaboration between Franciscan missionaries and Indigenous students, it is one of the earliest surviving examples of Christian writing in an Indigenous language of the Americas. Recently, it revealed a great secret. Scientific analysis revealed that it was written on a very rare paper made of maguey, best known as the plant that yields tequila. In this presentation, an anthropologist, an art historian, and a conservator discuss their work on the Newberry manuscript and the meaning of its once-hidden and now-revealed secret.
Speakers
Barbara E. Mundy is the Donald and Martha Robertson Chair in Latin American Art History, Tulane University. Her scholarship dwells in zones of contact between Native peoples and settler colonists as they forged new visual cultures in the Americas. Mundy’s interest in the social construction of space and its imaginary bore fruit in her first book, The Mapping of New Spain (Chicago, 1996). Most recently, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (Texas, 2015), draws on Mexica texts and representations to counter a colonialist historiography, revealing the city’s nature as an Indigenous city through the sixteenth century.
Ben Leeming is an Independent Scholar whose work uses ethnohistorical and philological methods to interpret early colonial Nahuatl-Christian writings. He is the author of Aztec Antichrist: Performing the Apocalypse in Early Colonial Mexico (Colorado, 2022). His current project is an NEH-funded critical translation of Newberry Library Ayer Ms. 1485, the Nahuatl sermonary of fray Bernardino de Sahagún. Leeming is Chair of History and holds the John B. Jarzavek Teaching Chair at The Rivers School in Weston, MA.
Mary Elizabeth Haude is a paper conservator at the Library of Congress where she performs conservation treatments and materials research on the Library’s collections. She specializes in the materials used in the production of manuscripts created by Indigenous artists during the early colonial period of New Spain. Her recent research has focused on four sixteenth-century Mesoamerican manuscripts in the Library of Congress collections and has culminated in several published articles. She is currently a staff fellow at the Library of Congress Kluge Center where she is researching the history, manufacture, and use of the rare Mesoamerican maguey paper.
Cost and Registration
This program is free and open to all. Advance registration required through the University of Chicago Library.