The Florentine Codex and Nahuatl Marian Devotion

The Florentine Codex, compiled by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun working with Nahua scholars and informants over decades in the sixteenth century, is the single most comprehensive surviving source for Aztec religion, mythology, ritual and daily life, presented in parallel Nahuatl and Spanish text and covering subjects ranging from the Aztec pantheon and calendar to medicine, natural history and the Spanish conquest itself from an indigenous perspective largely unique among colonial-era sources.

Nahuatl also carries the Huei tlamahuicoltica, a 1649 text containing the Nican Mopohua, the foundational Nahuatl-language account of the reported 1531 apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe to the indigenous convert Juan Diego, a text whose composition in Nahuatl rather than Spanish reflects the deliberate use of indigenous language to root this pivotal devotional tradition within Nahua religious and linguistic identity rather than presenting it as a purely European import. Nahuatl religious vocabulary and concepts continued to shape colonial and later Mexican Catholic devotional practice considerably, particularly around Guadalupan devotion, even as the language itself lost ground to Spanish over subsequent centuries.