 | Drawn by indigenous artists, the Codex Reese is one of the earliest surviving depictions of land tenure and political relationships in colonial Mexico. |
A unique 16th-century Mexican land map in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library provides the starting point for a conference being held there Friday-Saturday, Sept. 15-16.
"Mapping the Worlds of 16th-Century Mexico" will bring together scholars from the United States, Mexico and Europe to discuss a broad range of topics concerning the early colonial period in Central Mexico, including the politics of land use, the role of women in society and the place of religious institutions in the Nahua-Christian World. The conference was organized by Mary Miller, the Vincent Scully Professor of History of Art, and Dennis Carr, a graduate student in the history of art.
The manuscript map, known as the Codex Reese, was drawn by indigenous artists, probably in response to a commission by Spanish colonial authorities, in about 1565. One of the earliest surviving depictions of land tenure and political relationships in colonial New Spain, the Codex Reese portrays a Spanish viceroy, probably Don Luis de Valesco, and a succession of native governors of Mexico City from about 1536 through 1565. The map delineates individual tracts of agricultural land along a waterfront in Tenochtitlan (Mexico City), associating named individuals and particular kinds of crops with each tract. Purchased by the Beinecke in 1975 with the help of a gift from William S. Reese '77, the map is now part of the Yale Collection of Western Americana.
The conference opens at 5:30 p.m. on Friday with a keynote address by Rolena Adorno, the Reuben Halleck Professor of Spanish at Yale University. "The Friar and the Native Lord" will explore what manuscript artifacts reveal about the collaboration of their makers. Saturday's program will include talks about the nature and significance of the Codex Reese, and its relationship to other maps of colonial Mexico, among other topics.
The conference is free and open to the public, but advance registration is requested. For further information, including a complete program, consult the conference website at: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/MappingMexico.
In conjunction with the conference, the Beinecke Library will open "Taking Possession: Imperial Encounters and Re-encounters with Native Meso-America," an exhibition looking at 16th-century encounters among Europeans and the indigenous peoples of Meso-America as well as the 19th-century emergence of popular and scholarly interest in understanding the culture and history of Aztec, Olmec and Mayan communities.
The exhibition, which will feature the Codex Reese, will include maps, books, prints and photographs drawn from the collections of the Beinecke Library and the Yale Map Collection, housed in Sterling Memorial Library. In addition to a variety of early maps of Mexico including those based on indigenous as well as European practices, the exhibition will include the Yale Library's large collection of early works by Spanish missionaries in and about the Nahuatl language. To complement the early books and manuscripts that document the initial colonial conquest of Mexico, the exhibit will include illustrated books from the 19th century by such figures as Alexander Humboldt, Edward King (Viscount Kingsborough), Frédérick Waldeck, Carl Nebel, Frederick Catherwood, John Stephens, Désiré Charnay and Alfred Maudslay.
"Mapping the Worlds of 16th-Century Mexico" is sponsored by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies of The Macmillan Center and the Department of the History of Art.
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, located at 121 Wall St., is open for exhibition viewing 8:30 a.m.-8 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday; and 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday. Admission is free. For further information, call (203) 432-2977 or visit the website at www.library.yale.edu/beinecke.
T H I S
Map created in Mexico's early colonial period is highlighted in Beinecke conference and exhibit
"Taking Possession" exhibit
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