LING 215: The Structure of Colonial Valley Zapotec (HC): Colonial Philology

This volume seeks to address key aspects of indigenous perspectives of the conquest and Spanish colonialism by examining what they themselves recorded and why they did so.

Demonstrates in exciting & varied ways the importance of wills as ethnohistorical sources & gives voice to individual Mayans & Incas.

This book reveals the workings of a culture that cherished death, and invested its resources in the pursuit of heaven. This is the first full-length study of Spanish attitudes toward death and the afterlife in the peak years of the Counter-Reformation. It contains an analysis of the death rituals requested in hundreds of sixteenth-century Madrid testaments, as well as a detailed account of the ways in which the "good" deaths of King Philip II and Saint Teresa of Avila were interpreted by contemporaries.

A set of Nahuatl-language annals by a Native American writer of Puebla, Mexico, reporting on his people's local history from the coming of the Christian faith down to his own day. These records were part of a corpus of such annals produced in the Tlaxcala-Puebla region during this period. Here in This Year for the first time brings two sets of Nahuatl annals: the other one being from a more provincial locale to the English-speaking world, presenting the original Nahuatl with facing, readable translations.

Presents a collection of indigenous-language writings from the colonial period, translated into English. The texts were written from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries by Nahuas from central Mexico, Mixtecs from Oaxaca, Maya from Yucatan, and other groups from Mexico and Guatemala. Addresses a variety of topics, including conquest, government, land, household, society, gender, religion, writing, law, crime, and morality.

Presumes no previous knowledge of the language. Treating all essential features of Nahuatl, it is organized on purely pedagogical principles. The book is in large format, almost like a workbook, with a great abundance of examples that serve as exercises. The orthography and vocabulary are those found in texts of the time, and the last several of the twenty lessons give the student training in working with texts as they were actually written. An Epilogue surveys many of the published Nahuatl texts and an Appendix presents substantial selections from ten different texts.

Presents a large body of Nahuatl wills (98) from 1652 to 1783 from an important valley not much studied, thus greatly enlarging our perspective on the evolution of indigenous society and culture in central Mexico. Each testament is transcribed, translated, and accompanied by a commentary on the testator’s situation and on interesting terminology. A substantial introductory study fully analyzes the testamentary genre as seen in this corpus (a first) and summarizes the content of the documents in realms such as gender, kinship, household, and land.