The Digital Florentine Codex: From the Archive to the Global Classroom

The Florentine Codex is a singular sixteenth-century Mexican manuscript and a key primary source on central Mexican culture. Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and a team of Nahua scholars, scribes, and artists created this encyclopedia of Nahua knowledge, which also features a history of the conquest of Mexico told from the Mexica (Aztec) perspective. The codex is divided into twelve books and modeled after European encyclopedias. Its content is presented in three complementary narratives—a primary Nahuatl text, a Spanish interpretation, and some 2,000 images.

In 2016, the Getty Research Institute initiated a major collaborative project, including with the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana where the manuscript has been safekept for centuries, to transform it into an enhanced digital critical edition. Launching in late 2023, the Digital Florentine Codex (DFC) presents the newly digitized codex alongside its bilingual transcriptions and translations. Texts and images will be searchable, achieved by tagging images with multilingual keywords drawn from the codex’s linguistic content. This image metadata is produced in four languages—Classical Nahuatl, Eastern Huasteca Nahuatl, Spanish, and English—and is generated following a rigorous research process that involves the interdisciplinary collaboration of scholars, some of whom are native Nahuatl speakers. The DFC will give unprecedented access to this manuscript of human cultural heritage.

This workshop will detail the process involved in producing the DFC and introduce participants to its functionalities. We will explore how the DFC facilitates research and serves as a teaching resource by allowing users to dive deep into its unique content.