Читать книгу The Codex Mendoza: new insights онлайн

47 страница из 150

Thus, the bibliography for Clavijero’s Storia functions as a mirror in which textual sources are organized following a chronological progression from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, while pictographic manuscripts are organized in reverse chronological order. In this way, the Codex Mendoza, a colonial document that incorporated textual and pictographic materials and which was commissioned by the first viceroy of New Spain, acts as the bibliographical equivalent of a hinge between European and pre-Columbian histories. The how of this presentation is important. In the same way that Purchas had presented the manuscript a century earlier as an anonymous, but immensely valuable source (“the choicest of my Jewels”), Clavijero also sets the manuscript apart from the group to which he assigns it by ignoring the order he had already established for the presentation of his sources and by attributing it to Antonio de Mendoza. For the purposes of nominally considering the inclusion of this manuscript in the Storia’s bibliography, the order in which it appears is irrelevant. However, when considered in conjunction with the name bestowed upon the manuscript, the historical context in which Clavijero’s work appears, and the function Clavijero assigns it in his Storia (as a vehicle for his nation-building project), the gesture cannot be ignored.