Aztecs: An Interpretation

by Inga Clendinnen

• ISBN13: 9780521485852
• ISBN10: 0521485851
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-02-24
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In 1521, the city of Tenochtitlan, magnificent centre of the Aztec empire, fell to the Spaniards and their Indian allies. Inga Clendinnen's account of the Aztecs recreates the culture of that city in its last unthreatened years. It provides a vividly dramatic analysis of Aztec ceremony as performance art, binding the key experiences and concerns of social existence in the late imperial city to the mannnered violence of their ritual killings. 'Inga Clendinnen's vivid study Aztecs begins and ends with the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, the glistening lake city which rose like a dream to the Spaniards who first saw it ... It takes us deep into the heart of Mexican or Aztec society.' The Times Literary Supplement '... a fascinating, thought-provoking book.Aztecs offers a gripping account of an alien society and thus enlarges our apprehension of the sheer diversity of human culture.' London Review of Books 'This is an outstanding book, as rich in its reconstruction of social details as in its lucid analyses of the 'interior architecture' of the Aztec world.' The Times Higher Education Supplement

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	ix	(2)
Acknowledgements	xi
Introduction	1	(14)
PART I. THE CITY	15	(72)
1 Tenochtitlan: The Public Image	15	(30)
2 Local Perspectives	45	(42)
PART II. ROLES	87	(126)
3 Victims	87	(24)
4 Warriors, Priests and Merchants	111	(30)
5 The Masculine Self Discovered	141	(12)
6 Wives	153	(21)
7 Mothers	174	(32)
8 The Female Being Revealed	206	(7)
PART III. THE SACRED	213	(54)
9 Aesthetics	213	(23)
10 Ritual: The World Transformed, the World Revealed	236	(31)
PART IV. THE CITY DESTROYED	267	(8)
11 Defeat	267	(8)
Epilogue	275	(2)
A Question of Sources	277	(18)
Monthy Ceremonies of the Seasonal Calendar	295	(3)
The Mexica Pantheon	298	(3)
Notes	301	(64)
Select Bibliography	365	(24)
Index	389