Codex Bodley

John Pohl's MESOAMERICA ANCIENT BOOKS: Mixtec Group Codices CODEX BODLEY History of the Codex The history of Mixteca Codex Bodley is unknown to us before the beginning of the 17th century when it reached the Bodleian library at the University of Oxford, England. British archaeologist J. Eric Thompson proposed to Alfonso Caso that the manuscript had once belonged to Bishop Heronymous Osorius of Faro, Portugal. Thompson suggested that Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, had looted the manuscript during a raid along the coast of Portugal and given it to his friend Thomas Bodley. Whatever the specific circumstances, the basic premise of English seizure seems plausible. It was the time of the "counter-armadas" sent in retaliation for Phillip II's failed invasion of England in 1588. West Indies fleets and their home ports were being looted all along the Continental Atlantic coast, climaxing with the attack on Cadiz, Spain in 1596. The question of when the codex itself was painted is unresolved, but certainly sometime after A.D. 1500, because the persons who marry at the end of each narrative are alive at that time. Page 20 concludes the genealogy of the obverse. It names Lord Four Deer as the last lord of the Tilantongo dynasty. The Relación de Tilantongo confirms that Four Deer was ruling Tilantongo when the Spaniards arrived but states that he was too old to be baptized. Page 21 concludes the genealogy of the reverse pages (40-21). The reknowned Mexican ethnohistorian Wigberto Jiménez Moreno identified the last king on Band III, Lord Eight Grass, as being the famous Lord Malinalli (Nahuatl for "grass") of Tlaxiaco who was killed in a war with the Aztecs during 1503-1504. The style of the codex is a variant of the Mixteca-Puebla style shared with other Mixtec historical manuscripts. The formal composition of the figures, the relative lack of multiple narratives that we find by combining history, legend, and ritual in Codex Zouche-Nuttall for example, and the close affinities Codex Bodley shares with Codex Selden, which was painted nearly forty years after the Spanish invasion, suggest an early Colonial date. Codex Selden and Codex Bodley share a simplified form of historical and genealogical recounting; human figures lack elaborate details of ritual dress, and full page geographical vistas or expansive ritual scenes so characteristic of Codex Zouche-Nuttall or Codex Vindobonensis are entirely absent. This does not mean that Codex Bodley was necessarily Colonial in date however. In her now classic study of Mixtec pictographic writing, Picture Writing from Ancient Southern Mexico, Mary Elizabeth Smith suggests that the Bodley style was wide-spread throughout the Mixteca at the time of the Conquest and that it was then absorbed as a prevalent style for many subsequent genealogies, maps, and lienzos in the Mixteca throughout the Colonial period. Nevertheless, there is also no denying that the Bodley's uniform designs as well as the highly restricted reading pattern would make it appealing to the Spanish audiences in Colonial courts where such documents were presented in land claims. Alfonso Caso described the codex as a long strip of deerskin approximately 22 feet long and 10 inches wide. The skin was then folded to create individual pages. These were painted with a white base coat and then divided with extended horizontal red bands. The obverse is divided into five bands (Figure 1). The reverse is divided into four bands. The numeration of the pages and bands was established by Lord Kingsborough in his 1831 publication of the manuscript and codex scholars continue to use this numeration today even though it creates some confusion as to the beginning and end of the narratives. Figure 1. Basic reading order in Codex Bodley is guided by horizontal red lines that form four Bands on the reverse (Pages 40-21) and five Bands on the obverse (Pages 1-20). Narratives can be followed on four pages simultaneously. The narrative of the obverse of