Crónica de la Nueva España
Author: Francisco Cervantes de Salazar (1514? -1575) from the library of Zelia Nuttall and George M Foster
Year: 1914
Publisher: Hispanic Society
Place: Madrid
Description:
xxiv+843 pages with plates and index. Quarto (10 3/4" x 7 3/4") rebound in half red leather with gilt lettering to spine. From the library of Zelia Nuttal and George M Foster. Limited to 500 copies. First edition.
Cervantes de Salazar was one of the principal chroniclers who gathered data on the history and ethnography of Mexico. His most important book Cronica de la Nueva Espana (Chronicle of New Spain), written at the command of City Council. The manuscript of this work was sent by the author to Spain in 1567 with a request for the post of royal chronicler. This manuscript was uncovered in the early 1900s uncatalogued in the National Library of Madrid as an anonymous manuscript. the first volume was published in 1914 and the second and third in 1936. The Chronicle is fragmentary since the first part, which was to include the period up to the conquest of Yucatan, either was never written or was lost; and the second part, which was to be a history of the conquest, breaks off with Columbus sending Villafuerte and Sandoval to the Pacific Ocean. Cervantes de Salazar's sources were the Letters of Cortes; the memoirs of Alonso de Ojeda and Andres de Tapia, captains in Cortes' army; the Memoranda of Motilinia; the work of Lopez de Gomara; and the information gathered from others who had taken part in the conquest who were sill living in Mexico City twenty-five years later from whom he received useful information. The Chronicle is valued for its understanding and evaluation of the events it describes.
Zelia Maria Magdalena Nuttall (1857-1933) was an American archaeologist and anthropologist who specialized in pre-Aztec Mexican cultures and pre-Columbian manuscripts. She discovered two forgotten manuscripts of this type in private collections, one of them being the Codex Zouche-Nuttall. She decoded the Aztec calendar stone and was one of the first to identify and recognize artefacts dating back to the pre-Aztec period. Nuttall can also be credited for being first to ever challenge the prevailing theory of a California landing for Francis Drake's circumnavigation in spite of much adversity. She boldly proposed that Drake had sailed further North into the Pacific Northwest. Numerous northern coast researchers reexamined the few available records as a result.
George McClelland Foster, Jr born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on October 9, 1913, died on May 18, 2006, at his home in the hills above the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as a professor from 1953 to his retirement in 1979, when he became professor emeritus. His contributions to anthropological theory and practice still challenge us; in more than 300 publications, his writings encompass a wide diversity of topics, including acculturation, long-term fieldwork, peasant economies, pottery making, public health, social structure, symbolic systems, technological change, theories of illness and wellness, humoral medicine in Latin America, and worldview. The quantity, quality, and long-term value of his scholarly work led to his election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1976. Virtually all of his major publications have been reprinted and/or translated. Provenance from the executor of Foster's library laid in.
Condition:
"With compliments of the Hispanic Society" slip tipped in and slip from the Congresso de los Diputados tipped in to copyright page with Nuttall's name as receiving copy number three which is such labeled of 500 copies. Foster's date of acquiry (10/4/44) on title. Original wrappers bound in and soiled, some wear to edges of title, inner hinge cracked else about very good.
Kemper
