Florentine Codex - Format and Structure

Format and Structure

The Florentine Codex is a complex document, assembled, edited, and appended over decades. Bernardino’s goals of orientating fellow missionaries to Aztec culture, providing a rich Nahuatl vocabulary, and recording the indigenous cultural heritage at times compete with each other within it. The manuscript pages are generally of two columns, with Nahuatl, written first, on the right and a Spanish translation on the left. There are diverse voices, views, and opinions in these 2,400 pages, and the result is a document which at times can appear contradictory.

Scholars have proposed several classical and medieval worldbook authors that inspired Bernardino, such as Aristotle, Pliny, Isidore of Seville, and Bartholomew the Englishman. These shaped the late medieval approach to the organization of knowledge. The twelve books of the Florentine Codex are organized in the following way:

1. Gods, religious beliefs and rituals, cosmology, and moral philosophy,
2. Humanity (society, politics, economics, including anatomy and disease),
3. Natural history.

The story of the conquest of Mexico is appended to the end of this presentation.

This follows the organizational flow of logic found in medieval encyclopedias, in particular the 19-volume De proprietatibus rerum of his fellow Franciscan Friar Bartholomew the Englishman. One scholar has argued that Bartholomew’s work served as a conceptual model for Bernardino, although evidence is circumstantial. With more confidence one can assert that both of these present the cosmos, society and nature of the late medieval paradigm.