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To understand the manuscript creation process practiced by Indigenous intellectuals in the Americas this essay examines the work of the Nahua scholars who, along with Bernardino de Sahagún, created the Florentine Codex (1575–1577). Now fundamental to studies of the Codex is an evaluation of its three 'texts': the Nahuatl-language alphabetic text, the Spanish-language annotations including loose translations, and its bountiful images. Two sources served as iterative kinds of drafts for the Codex project: the Primeros memoriales (1558–1561) and the Manuscrito de Tlatelolco (1561–1566). Each of the manuscripts contains its own three texts, thus they are threefold, that enable an examination of nine separate but interrelated source texts. In considering the differences among the cumulative nine texts, this article uncovers new insights into an unstudied process of negotiation between the Nahua scholars, the elders whom they consulted, and their Spanish colleagues. As sites of mediation among colonial actors, the threefold manuscripts manifest on their folios the competing interests and agendas that shaped the production of knowledge in New Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Tercer abecedario espiritual (1527) was the most influential work of Franciscan friar and widely read spiritual author Francisco de Osuna (c.1492-c.1540). This essay focuses on descriptions of the soul in his treatise in order to highlight a series of correspondences between Nahua and Franciscan metaphysics. It argues that these correspondences, based on sensorial experiences of the material world and inductive reasoning, aided the success of the Franciscan project of evangelization during the early decades of the colonization of Mexico through the 1570s. Moreover, it contends they led to changes in the concept of the soul in the Nahua/Spanish contact zone. Because Nahua terms for animating forces ihiyotl, -yolia, and tonalli—which signify winds, heart, and heat—have been studied in close detail, this essay uses them as a framework to interrogate Osuna's representations. Such an approach demonstrates that scholarship comparing Mesoamerican metaphysics with that of colonizing missionaries requires reciprocal scrutiny of European concepts at the time of contact. Finally, this analysis explores Bruno Latour's 'compositionism' as a model for approaching the premodern qualities of meditative recollection and for examining the intersections between Nahua and Franciscan aesthetics of interiority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]