Among the most important works of scholarship created in the early modern world was Bernardino de Sahagún's Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (1575–77), also known as the Florentine Codex. In the twelve books of the illustrated manuscript, the Franciscan friar and his team of indigenous intellectuals from the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlateloloc, Mexico, documented the world of the Nahuas, including the Aztec Empire, in extraordinary detail. Like other clerics working in the Americas, Sahagún envisioned his Historia as a guide for the extirpation of idolatry, though he ordered his work as both an encyclopedia of native beliefs and practices and a treatise on the Nahuatl language. And yet, the manuscript that he and his Nahua-Christian partners produced exceeds that aim and, at times, appears to contradict it. The Florentine Codex contains the richest extant accounts of the pre-Hispanic religion, art, science, culture, history, and language of Central Mexico. It is unique in its scope and polyvocality. Most folios are divided into Spanish and Nahuatl texts, to which the tlacuiloque (scribe-painters) added nearly 2,500 images that draw in innovative ways upon European and Mesoamerican visual traditions.

Despite its title, the present volume is not an edition of the Florentine Codex. It is a collection of fourteen essays edited by Peterson and Terraciano, based on a 2015 conference at UCLA and the Getty Center. The authors—mostly US based—are experts in colonial Mexican art history, history, religious studies, and codicology. In his introduction, Terraciano explains the volume's defining focus on the internal dynamics of the three texts—Spanish, Nahuatl, and the images themselves as heir to Mesoamerican picture writing—in colonial context. This is a fruitful approach, but it is not an altogether novel one. Indeed, art historians working on the Florentine Codex have long recognized pictographic aspects of its drawings, which often constitute a form of discourse independent of the alphabetic texts. Most of the authors demonstrate commitment to this key premise, though each pursues it in their own way.

The essays are arranged in four parts: “The Art of Translation,” “Lords: Royal and Sacred,” “Ordering the Cosmos,” and “Social Discourse and Deviance.” The arrangement is somewhat arbitrary, since all of the essays address issues of translation. Furthermore, the subjects of religion, ritual, and morality (both Nahua and Christian) run throughout. Together, the introduction and Peterson's first chapter form an expanded introduction to Sahagún, the creation of the Florentine Codex, the contributions of its Nahua coauthors, and its later itineraries and historiography. Rao's essay is an outlier in not engaging images. Her discussion of the first Italian translation shows that the Florentine Codex arrived at the Medici court earlier than previously thought. Terraciano expands upon his 2010 article on book 12's indigenous accounts of the conquest with new discussion of the Spanish “Ironman” (55) as a personification of tequani (people eater) and the symbolism of feathers. Escalante Gonzalbo centers the visual in his study of the artists’ appropriation of European print iconography.

In part 2, Quiñones Keber revisits her prior scholarship on the depictions and descriptions of gods in the Florentine Codex and the earlier Primeros memoriales; Boone offers an important comparison of the images of Aztec kings (drawn directly from pre-Hispanic sources) and images of the gods (largely improvised from European models); and Olivier argues that the anthropomorphic depictions of the Aztec gods were crafted to diminish their divinity, while the Nahua concept of teotl (deity) was transferred to the Christian God. Part 3 reveals how ritual action and divine presence infused nearly all parts of the Nahua world as described in the Florentine Codex: from elite management of the environment (Mundy), to conceptualizations of nature and its divine equivalences (Bassett), to the creative potency of ancient words, images as embodiments, and the Nahua artists’ appropriation of the power of European text (Magaloni Kerpel). Mundy exemplifies the volume's collective disavowal of simple European-American binaries in her emphasis on “emplacement” (125). In part 4, Peterson discusses the convergence of Nahua and European rhetorical traditions as well as possible “dissonance of reception” (180); Sousa examines Nahua ideas on speech, sexuality, and morality as they were translated into Christian virtues and vices; and Baird offers a fascinating analysis of the seemingly discordant relationship between the illustrated Nahuatl lexicon of human anatomy and Sahagún's lament for the loss of life and the fragmentation of the body politic in the midst of the 1576 plague.

This book is an important contribution to Sahaguntine studies in its collection of insightful essays by established scholars, including revised versions of some now-classic scholarship. The relatively succinct chapters are well suited for university instruction, for both core curricula and specialized courses. It is a beautifully illustrated volume that will appeal to anyone interested in the early modern humanities. More is yet to come. The editors are part of the Getty's digital Florentine Codex Initiative, which promises to generate a new wave of scholarship on this singularly important sixteenth-century work.