Jamail Center for Legal Research

Rare Books & Special Collections

 Sources for Aztec Law

One of the best sources on Aztec law is the History of the Things of New Spain (Historia de las cosas de Nueva España) by the Franciscan missionary Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (d. 1590). Sahagún made extensive use of Indian informants to compile a monumental history of Aztec society and culture, an ethnohistory considered to be centuries ahead of its time.

Another is the Codex Mendoza, a report to the Spanish throne about its new possessions, written in pictographs by an Aztec artist and translated by a Spanish priest. The original manuscript never made it back to Spain. It came t Oxford as part of the library of the 17th-century English legal scholar John Selden.

Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (right)(Florentine Codex).

SOURCES FOR ILLUSTRATIONS

Courtesy of the Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin 

Aubin, J. M. A. Memoires sur la peinture didactique et l'écriture figurative des anciens Mexicains. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1885.

Clark, James Cooper, ed. and trans. Codex Mendoza: The Mexican Manuscript Known as the Collection of Mendoza and Preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. 3 v. London: Waterlow & Sons, Limited, 1938.

Codex Ixtlilxochitl, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, ms. mex. 65-71. Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1976.

Landa, Diego de. Landa's Relación de las cosas de Yucatan: A Translation. New York: Kraus, 1966.

Miller, Mary Ellen. The Murals of Bonampak. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Pintura del gobernador, alcaldes y regidores de México; Códice Osuna. Madrid: Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, Dirección General de Archivos y Bibliotecas, 1973.

Sahagún, Bernardino de. General History of the Things of New Spain: Florentine Codex. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research, 1950-1982.

Sahagún, Bernardino de. Historia de las cosas de Nueva España. 5 v. Madrid: Fototípica de Hauser y Menet, 19--.