Script and Glyph: Pre-Hispanic History, Colonial Bookmaking, and the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca (review)
In this scholarly study of the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca, Dana Liebsohn carefully takes the reader through the complex nature of the work, which as she notes uses both the pre-Hispanic tradition of pictographic representation and European alphabetic writing. The Historia, housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, is just one of several pictorial manuscripts produced in the village of Cuauhtinchan in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. It marks an important moment in the process of literary transculturation when two independent writing systems came to interact with one another. Liebsohn looks at the context of the creation of the work, its contents, and even the mechanics of its construction to inform the reader about the complex cultural environment that gave it birth.