Testaments of Toluca [Hardcover]

Testaments written in their own language, Nahuatl, have been crucial for reconstructing the everyday life of the indigenous people of central Mexico after Spanish contact. Those published to date have largely been from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.Testaments of Tolucapresents 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. Wills are very human documents, and the apparatus draws out this aspect, telling us much of local indigenous life in central Mexico in the third century after Spanish contact, so that the book is of potential interest to a broad spectrum of readers.

Testaments of Tolucadoes for the eighteenth century in central Mexico whatThe Testaments of Culhuacandid earlier for the sixteenth: provide a basis for studying everyday indigenous life at the household level. Pizzigoni's edition is an important contribution to the study of the corpus of Nahuatl-language wills, and it suggest new directions for the future study of Nahuatl language and culture. The author's contribution is fundamental to what has been until today a neglected research topic in Nahuatl studies. The result is a specialized reference tool that will help to redefine socio-historical studies on the Nahuatl language and culture by guiding the research toward issues of material culture in Mexican colonial society. The transcribed and translated primary documents are highly significant in their own right, but the extensive commentary transformsTestaments ol#