New Philology

New Philology is a school within ethnohistory that seeks to describe the history of colonized people largely by using the colonized peoples' own written sources to understand their perspective of their own history. The New Philology therefore focuses on the translation and interpretation of sources written in the colonized peoples' own languages - sources that have often been neglected due to their difficult accessibility. Important historians working in the New Philology tradition are James Lockhart, Susan Schroeder, Matthew Restall, Stephanie Wood and Robert Haskett.

Development

The school was developed from the 1970s and onwards, reaching maturity only recently. The leading figure in the early development of the New Philological historiographical approach was James Lockhart who, in the early 1970s, began studying sources in the Nahuatl language that had previously not been studied by historians. Rather than trying to reach knowledge about events in the colonial or pre-colonial period from studying the sources, as was the usual approach, he attempted to achieve understanding about the indigenous societies that produced the sources. This approach made possible the use of sources that had earlier been deemed to be too difficult to understand or too problematic to interpret, e.g. the documents known as Primordial titles, colonial legal documents in the Nahuatl language, testaments and acts of the colonial administration.

Important works

A selection of important works written in the New Philology tradition:

• The Book of Tributes: Early Sixteenth-Century nahuatl Censuses from Morelos. S. L. Cline, (Ed.), 1993, Museo de Antropología e Historia, Archivo Histórico Collección Antigua, vol. 549. UCLA Latin American Center Publications
• Indigenous Rulers: An Ethnohistory of Indian Town Government in Colonial Cuernavaca, Robert Haskett, 1991, University of New Mexico Press.
• Visions of Paradise: Primordial Titles and Mesoamerican History in Cuernavaca, 2005, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
• Nahuatl in the Middle Years: Language contact Phenomena in Texts of the Colonial Period, Frances Karttunen & James Lockhart, 1976, University of California Press, Berkeley, California.
• Nahuas and Spaniards:Postconquest Central Mexican History and Philology, James Lockhart, 1991, Stanford University Press, UCLA Latin American Center Publications
• Transcending conquest: Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico, Stephanie Wood, 2003,University of Oklahoma Press, Norman: USA
• Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, Matthew Restall, 2003 Oxford University Press (2003) ISBN 0-19-516077-0

References

• Restall, Matthew, "A History of the New Philology and the New Philology in History", Latin American Research Review - Volume 38, Number 1, 2003, pp. 113-134
• James Lockhart, Lisa Sousa, and Stephanie Wood (eds.), Sources and Methods for the Study of Postconquest Mesoamerican Ethnohistory, Provisional Version hosted by the Wired Humanities Project at the University of Oregon (2007). [1]