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Throughout the course of its history, the Codex Mendoza has been presented as an object of constantly changing form and identity, partly because of its very nature—a manuscript consisting of 71 folios which is impossible to fully understand outright—and partly because of the multiple ways in which it has been analyzed by those who have studied it, seeking to answer diverse questions originating in different historical contexts, as Daniela Bleichmar suggests. In her study on the circulation and transmission of the Codex Mendoza, she observes that the ontology of the codex manifests itself as unstable in time and that it it is created anew with every study and new interpretation, in spite of the fact that it remains static in Oxford (see Chapter 10). Likewise, in his essay for this volume, Todd Olson focuses on the manuscript’s reception and interpretation in the work of Melchisedech Thévenot, identifying a process whereby the contents of the manuscript are gradually sequestered and disbanded, to the point that they basically become unrecognizable within the world of encyclopedic knowledge that took shape over the course of the seventeenth century. The work of these art historians sees beyond the Codex Mendoza as a historical document or primary source, and functions instead as a logical segue to the work of scholars such as H. B. Nicholson, Silvio Zavala, and James Cooper Clark, who, responding to the historicist priorities of their times, sought to bestow upon the manuscript an identity as closely anchored in their documentary research as was possible.