Content area
Full text
The Allure of Nezahualcoyotl: Pre-Hispanic History, Religion, and Nahua Poetics. By Jongsoo Lee. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. Pp. xii, 282. Map. Illustrations. Notes. Glossary. References. Index. $34.95 cloth.
Jongsoo Lee has presented a meritorious work. Certain sections are particularly worth reading. Among these is the introduction, in which he asserts that the cherished image of Nezahualcoyotl as a powerful fifteenth-century Mexican monarch who devised the region's first rationalistic legal code, wrote poetry, and abhorred human sacrifice was "invented by a European colonial ideology after the conquest" (p. 1). Here, Lee succinctly shows that the friars who wrote of him were invested in believing in a culture advanced by European standards in need only of Christianity; that certain Spanish-educated men partially descended of the Texcocan nobility, specifically Juan Bautista Pomar and Don Fernando de Alva Ixtiilxochitl, were defending their own interests in circulating ideas pleasing to the clergy; and that post-independence intellectuals were later only too delighted to maintain the idea of New World antecedents that rivaled the classical world. These ideas are not entirely new, but we have long needed to have them presented coherendy in one place.
In part 1,...