Abstract

Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, best known as the most important source for information on precolonial and colonial Nahuas (Aztecs), is generally recognized as an anthropologist, a humanist, and a practitioner of modern scientific methods. In Sahagun and the Transition to Modernity, Walden Browne paints a strikingly different picture of the sixteenth-century Franciscan Fray Sahagun -- as a product of his times rather than as a precursor of the modern era. Browne argues that Sahagun's work actually signals the disintegration of medieval ways of knowing in the crisis-ridden missionary environment of New Spain more than four hundred years ago. Responding to the dilemmas within the mission in New Spain, Sahagun used the tools of medieval scholasticism to place Nahua culture within a unified Christian worldview. In the face of certain Nahua traits, however, that scholasticism fell short. Browne argues that Sahagun's unsuccessful struggle to redefine Nahuas according to medieval ideals exemplifies the transition from the medieval period to modernity.