New Philology Totally Explained

Everything about New Philology totally explained

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 Woods 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 began studying sources in the Nahuatl language that had previously not been studied by historians in the early seventies. 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 so difficult to understand or too problematic to interpret, for example 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

Further Information

Get more info on 'New Philology'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://new_philology.totallyexplained.com">New Philology Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.