Funded Projects Query Form
One match

My project concerns the translation and analysis of a late eighteenth-century manuscript written in Maya from the Yucatecan town of Teabo that I discovered in the archives of Brigham Young University. This previously unknown, forty-four page manuscript, that I refer to as the Teabo Manuscript, has many features that associate it with the Maya Books of Chilam Balam. However, because it is essentially a collection of Christian texts redacted and translated by the Maya, it falls into a separate and little-studied category of Maya Christian copybooks. My project translates the manuscript and provides an extensive analysis of each of its sections. This analysis not only compares the manuscript with the existing Books of Chilam Balam and the only other translated Maya religious copybook, the Morley Manuscript, but also presents new insights into how the Mayas negotiated their precontact intellectual traditions within a Spanish and Catholic colonial world.