Frances Berdan

Patricia Rieff Anawalt

Consists of v. 2 and 4 of Berdan and Anawalt's The Codex Mendoza (4 v. -- Berkeley : University of California Press, c1992).

The Essential Codex Mendoza

"Brilliantly tracing influences from culture to culture, this tour-de-force journey across the globe includes descriptions of each region's population, geography and climate, allowing the reader to understand the development of an area's clothing customs. Complete with an extensive reference section, this treasure trove of information is a glorious celebration of ethnographic clothing and is destined to be the standard reference work on the subject." --BOOK JACKET.

The Worldwide History of Dress

In her book, Patricia Anawalt describes through text and more than 350 illustrations and charts what the Indians of Middle America were wearing when Corts and his conquistadors arrived in the New World in 1519. The costumes reveal a great deal about those who wore them. To the peoples of Middle America, dress was identity; even a god had to don his proper attire. To the Aztecs and their neighbors, for example, the wearing of appropriate clothing was strictly controlled by both custom and law. An individuals attire immediately identified not only culture affiliation but rank and status as well. Since each group dressed in a distinctive and characteristic manner, a great deal of ethnographic and historical information can be gleaned from a study of what those groups wore.

Mesoamerican Costumes from the Codices

Indian Clothing Before Cortes

Frances F. Berdan

"A virtual treasure-trove of ethnographic detail on selected aspects of Aztec culture and society. . . . The new facsimile edition places this important source more directly in the mainstream of ethnohistorical research."--H. R. Harvey, University of Wisconsin-Madison "By far the most complete source on the Mendoza ever published [with] a group of contributors of very high caliber. . . . No work I am aware of comes even close to combining a reproduction of the document with the various commentaries on its production, its historical background, authorship, and social context. These discussions make the work highly accessible to non-specialists."--Richard E. Blanton, Purdue University

The Codex Mendoza

This four-volume hardcover facsimile edition of Codex Mendoza places the most comprehensive, most extensively illustrated document of Aztec civilization within reach of a broad audience. Compiled in Mexico City around 1541 under the supervision of Spanish clerics, the Codex was intended to inform King Charles V about his newly conquered subjects. The manuscript contains pictorial accounts of Aztec emperors' conquests and tribute paid by the conquered, as well as a remarkable ethnographic record of Aztec daily life from cradle to grave. This four-volume publication is an unsurpassed source of information about Aztec history, geography, economy, social and political organization, glyphic writing, costumes, textiles, military attire, and indigenous art styles. Volume 1 contains interpretive essays by the authors and other leading specialists on every aspect of Codex Mendoza. Volume 2 offers a thorough description and discussion of each pictorial page, and Volume 3 is a complete color facsimile of the manuscript itself. Volume 4, a parallel image volume, is the most innovative and in some ways the most useful of the four. It provides an exact duplicate in black and white of the facsimile Volume 3, with the sixteenth-century Spanish text transcribed and then translated into English. In addition, all the glosses are translated and positioned exactly as on the original pictorial pages. The extensive and useful appendices add such things as pictorial charts of costumes and textiles, translations and discussions of all the glyphs in the codex, and a table of comparative chronologies. In making this extraordinary sixteenth-century work accessible (the original manuscript resides in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, England), the authors have performed an invaluable service to Mesoamerican scholars and all those interested in pre-Columbian peoples.

Patricia Rieff Anawalt

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