The Florentine Codex is a magnificent illuminated manuscript produced by a team of Nahua (Aztec) scholars, scribes and artists who collaborated with a Franciscan friar, Bernardino de Sahagún, working in the first European-style college founded in the Americas (1536). Modeled after European encyclopedias, the manuscript's twelve books, organized into 2500 pages of parallel Nahuatl- and Spanish-language text, with hundreds of hand-painted images made by Indigenous artists, address a stunning range of topics on Aztec life, from religious beliefs and ceremonies to social and gender relations, flora and fauna, rhetoric and moral discourse, ancient and conquest history, and much more. Completed in the final years of the 1570s, during a major epidemic, the codex was not only a product of intercultural dialogue but was intended for mixed audiences in New Spain (colonial Mexico) and Europe.

The Getty Research Institute (GRI) in Los Angeles, California has partnered with the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, which owns the manuscript, to create high-resolution photographs of the codex and to make it accessible to an international audience on a new open-access, interactive website. After several years of planning and labor, the Digital Florentine Codex (DFC) is scheduled to be launched at the end of 2023, permitting both scholars and the general public alike to see and read the Nahuatl and Spanish texts of the codex (translated into English), to hear the Nahuatl spoken by native speakers of the language, to view more than 2,000 images, and to examine the relationship between the texts and images. Our objective is to stimulate new avenues of research on the linguistic, cultural and historical significance of the manuscript.

This panel displays some of the collaborative, international, interdisciplinary work that the DFC initiative has sponsored, while highlighting a few of the breakthroughs it has made in our understanding of the codex. Two of the project's leaders from the GRI will outline the new website's design, content and capabilities in the first presentation. Three other scholars will present new findings on the codex: one focuses on the sounds and silences of Book 12, which is the lengthiest Indigenous narrative of the Conquest of Mexico; another examines some of the visual strategies that native artists employed in the manuscript; a third analyzes the Spanish translation of the Nahuatl that was overseen by Sahagún the friar, and the curious influence of Nahuatl on Spanish in this period. One of the project's co-founders and contributors will chair the session and comment on the presentations. This joint AHA/CLAH panel proposal requires audio-visual services for the Getty web-based presentation and other presentations that feature Nahua images from the codex.

The audience for this session will include those interested in Colonial Latin America (especially New Spain or Mexico), Ethnohistory and Indigenous histories of the Americas, the Atlantic World and early modern Iberian World, Visual culture, Linguistics and language (Spanish and Nahuatl), the Conquest of Mexico, the Digital Humanities, Art History, Colonial studies, Writing systems.