The Corpus Xolotl Project: Indigenous History and Performance in Aztec and Colonial Texcoco, Mexico
FAIN: RQ-260877-18
University of Massachusetts, Boston (Boston, MA 02125-3300)
Benjamin Daniel Johnson (Project Director: December 2017 to present)
Preparation
for digital and print publication of the Corpus Xolotl, a series of 16th-century Aztec
manuscripts from Tetzcoco, Mexico that depict important developments in the rise of the Aztec empire. (36 months)
The Corpus Xolotl is a set of non-alphabetic texts from a Mexican oral culture (ca. 1200-1431 CE) prompting oral performances of stories of conflicting duties towards kin group and polity. Reflecting perspectives of rivalrous entities within regional polities, the Xolotl challenges Western notions of text, presenting novel challenges for criticism and translation. Although each oral performance was unique, the Xolotl contains hieroglyphs and notational systems that allowed detection of false oral interpretations. It served as historical narrative and instrument of statecraft and moral instruction. The Xolotl project consists of an international group of experts, and has already produced multispectral scans of the entire Corpus. Our main intervention consists in paper and digital editions that correct errors in early editions and make this rich and challenging Corpus accessible to both a broad humanist public, as well as to the modern heirs of the Xolotl’s authors in Mexico and the United States.