In 2000, Elizabeth Hill Boone published Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of Aztecs and Mixtecs. This earlier work organized, categorized, and explained a subset of pictorial documents—specifically, histories—produced by the Nahuas and Mixtecs of pre-Hispanic and colonial Mesoamerica. In 2007, her Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate did the same for pictorial divinatory texts. And now Descendants of Aztec Pictography does a similar service for a third pictorial genre, what Boone has called “cultural encyclopedias.” Together, Boone's three works constitute their own kind of encyclopedia of Mexican manuscript painting by one of the field's foremost scholars.
For Boone, the painted manuscripts examined here form their own special category. These documents are in many ways similar to those examined in her previous two volumes—and, indeed, some of these cultural encyclopedias received attention in her earlier work—but their content and function make them different...
