Scholars and researchers of late Mesoamerican and early colonial periods are often familiar with the main archives and libraries in Mexico, Spain, and Paris. Poland, however, is not a location that one normally thinks of as a go-to place to conduct research on sixteenth-century Nahuatl documents. Beyond the rarity of the physical location of the fragments of the Nahuatl census, the scholarly research in Fragments of the Sixteenth-Century Nahuatl Census from the Jegiellonian Library: A Lost Manuscript, by Julia Madajczak, Katarzyna Granicka, Szymon Gruda, Monika Jaglarz, and José Luis de Rojas, is a high-quality contribution to our understanding of the pre-contact and early colonial Nahuatl societies of central Mexico.
The relevance of the fragments studied lies in their role of more clearly defining our understanding of the land and the Indigenous people that Hernán Cortés assigned to himself as Marqués del Valle shortly after the defeat of Mexico-Tenochtitlan in 1521. The census is perhaps one of the earliest nonreligious texts written in alphabetic Nahuatl that provide us with information into the socioeconomic and daily life of the Indigenous people in the early part of the colonial period, which remains relatively unknown.
Divided into three main sections, Fragments's approach to the Nahuatl manuscript encompasses a broad and well-curated selection of essays that address, in section 1, the manuscript and its associated provenance and relationships to other portions of the Marquesado Census, and the manuscript's scribes and the history of its creation. In section 2, the Census is discussed as a document that can help reveal not only statistics on commerce, land use, tribute, and population, but also familial and household relations and their associated social structures. Lastly, section 3 focuses on the transcription and translation of the Census, including a glossary of key terms and a discussion on the conventions and editorial criteria used for this project.
One of the great assets provided by Fragments is the publication of a previously unknown—and somewhat difficult to access—manuscript and how it contributes to our understanding of Mesoamerican Indigenous societies. Scholars interested in paleography and translation studies, for example, will find a well-informed, meticulous, and refreshing approach to the census in Gruda's discussion on the scribes involved in the creation of the Nahuatl document, and Madajczak and Rojas's critical apparatus and conventions used for their transcription and translation. More specifically, Gruda's chapter, “Mss. Amer. 3, 8, and 10: The Scribes” discusses in a concise and approachable way how the various hands (nine total) contributed to the creation of the Nahuatl text, thus pointing to a highly structured administrative apparatus in early colonial Mexico. This vision is then supported by the exceptional transcription and translation of the Census (that makes up the bulk of this volume), which allows the reader to visualize the nuances of the Nahuatl text, which are then well rendered into an excellent English translation.
Those interested in social and material cultures will find a sharper picture of early colonial Mexico in part 2 of the book, shown through statistical analysis of the census data (chapter 7) as well as several discussions on the social, familial, and power structures among the Nahuatl people informed by the census. Granicka's contribution in chapter 7, “Family Relations in Tepoztlan,” increases our understanding of the mosaic that constituted early colonial Nahuatl societies. Additionally, researchers can also find illuminating discussions on the characteristics of Nahuatl households and wealth distribution in terms of land and tribute in chapters 8 (“Administrative Structure and Social Groups in Tepoztlan”) and 9 (“Land Tribute in the Jagiellonian Library Census Fragments”), which further contribute to describing the heterogenous socioeconomic conditions existing within colonial power structures.
Lastly, researchers seeking to have a more accurate map of the various fragments that make up the larger corpus of the Marquesado Census will find a series of concise studies on the history of the Berlinka collection (chapter 1), the provenance of the fragment studied in the volume and its relationship to other pieces of the Marquesado Census found Mexico and Paris (chapter 3), and a description of the various collections within the Manuscripta Americana, some of which are yet to be studied (chapter 2).
There is no doubt that Fragments is a significant contribution to Mesoamerican studies, and the work that the authors have put together is a well-researched and meticulously documented piece that deserves serious consideration by scholars and students alike.
