Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs

Elizabeth Boone has written a book that is remarkable in many ways, a work that historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians will realize they have been in need of once they have delved into it. In an unparalleled effort, she takes the reader through dozens of central Mexican and Oaxacan manuscripts, broadly speaking, 'the pictorial histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs,' according to her subtitle; most of them were made just before the Spanish invasion of Mexico in 1519, or in …