Diego Durn - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Article

Create account

Diego Durn
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear
because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (April
2014)

Diego Durn (c. 15371588) was a Dominican friar best known for his authorship of one of the earliest Western books
on the history and culture of the Aztecs, The History of the Indies of New Spain, a book that was much criticized in his
lifetime for helping the "heathen" maintain their culture.

An excerpt from The History of the Indies of New Spain showing the founding of Tenochtitlan.

Also known as the Durn Codex, The History of the Indies of New Spain was published c. 1581. Durn also wrote Book
of the Gods and Rites (15741576), and Ancient Calendar, (c. 1579) (Heyden, xxviii). He was fluent in Nahuatl, the
Aztec language, and was therefore able to consult natives and Aztec codices as well as work done by earlier friars. His
empathetic nature allowed him to gain the confidence of many native people who would not share their stories with
Europeans, and was able to document many previously unknown folktales and legends that make his work unique.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Durn (1 de 5)22/08/2014 18:19:53

Diego Durn - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents

1 Early life
2 Life within the Church
3 Literary works and influence
4 See also
5 References
6 Further reading
7 External links

Early life[edit]
Durn was born sometime around 1537 in Spain. His family traveled to Mexico when he was very younghe said later
that although I did not acquire my milk teeth in Texcoco, I got my second ones there. (History Ch. I), It was in
Texcoco where he learned Nahuatl. His family was not extravagantly wealthy, and they did not own an encomienda,
but his relatives were fairly well off slave-owners.
When he was still young, his family moved to Mexico City where he attended school and was exposed to Aztec culture
under the colonial rule of Spain, as well as the many Africans brought by the Spanish for slavery. According to Heyden,
Durn was often puzzled by the mix of races and cultures and their significance for social class (Heyden xxv-xxvi).

Life within the Church[edit]

In 1556 he entered the Dominican Order and was sent to Oaxaca in 1561 after being trained in Mexico City. He resided
for a time at a convent, or friary, in Oaxtepec, and there he found many informants within the Church. He is believed to
have been tutored by Fray Francisco de Aguilar, who had been a soldier involved in the siege of Tenochtitlan. Aguilar
later joined the Dominican order, and had much to tell Durn about the Aztecs at first contact. He was cited frequently
by Durn in his History.
Durn later became a vicar at a convent in Hueyapan and it was there that he learned the most from the native Nahuas.
The convents had been issued a decree by Charles V to preach the Christian word to native rural villages and Durn
ventured into the villages frequently to converse with the natives there. The clergy were to also observe native customs
and to search for ancient documents. particularly the lost Holy Scriptures of Saint Thomas (who was believed to have
been the basis for the Aztecs' Quetzalcoatl. (Heyden xxvi-xxvii).
He developed a close association with the people he was attempting to convert, which led him to criticize the clerics
and conquistadors who never learned the natives language, writing they should know the language well and
understand [the people] if they have any pretense of obtaining fruit.. And the clergy should not acquiesce by saying
they know a little bit of the tongue in order to heard confession and that is enough (Book of the Gods and Rites) and
scorns the Spaniards' crude use of the language that made the natives laugh and scoff at them.
Durn was torn between two worlds, that of his people, and that of the Aztec. On one hand, he respected them greatly
and their government organization before conquest, and he grew to admire the people of Mexico, and often said so. On
the other hand, he was repulsed by certain acts of his native informants, particularly human sacrifice. It was, after all,
his duty to evangelize them and his Catholic background gave him a great disdain for such things. Another of his duties
was to document the cultural ways and practices of the native people to serve as a manual to other monks in their
attempt to evangelize the so-called heathens. Although his purpose was to detail the heathen practices as a manual for
other missionaries, he also wanted to make it pleasant to read and useful to others.
In 1585 Friar Diego returned to Mexico City in ill health to live and work in the Convent of St. Dominic there, as a
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Durn (2 de 5)22/08/2014 18:19:53

Diego Durn - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

translator from Nahuatl to Spanish for the Inquisition. He died in 1588 of an unknown illness (Heyden, xxix).

Literary works and influence[edit]

The History of the Indies of New Spain, sometimes referred to as the Durn Codex, contains seventy-eight chapters
spanning from the Aztec creation story until after Spanish conquest of Mexico, and includes a chronology of Aztec
kings.
The friars of the sixteenth century borrowed one anothers material without citation. Some scholars believe that the
Durn Codex formed the basis for the Ramirez Codex although others believe that both Ramirez Codex and the Durn
Codex relied on an earlier unknown work referred to as "Chronicle X". In 1596, Durn was cited as a source by Fray
Agustn Dvila Padilla in his Historia de la fundacin y discurso de la Provinciade Santiago de Mexico (Heyden xxx).
The Durn Codex was unpublished until the 19th century, when it was found in the Library of Madrid by Jos
Fernando Ramrez. In his Ancient Calendar, Durn explains why his work would go so long without being published
by saying some persons (and they are not a few) say that my work will revive ancient customs and rites among the
Indians, to which he replied that the Indians were quite good at secretly preserving their own customs and needed no
outside help.

[1]

Durn's work has become invaluable to archaeologists and others studying Mesoamerica and scholars studying
Mesoamerican ethnohistory. Although there are few surviving Aztec codices written before the Spanish conquest, the
more numerous post-conquest codices and near-contemporary works such as Durn's are invaluable sources for the
interpretation of archaeological theories and evidence, but more importantly for constructing a history of the indigenous
from texts produced by the indigenous themselves, as exemplified in the New Philology.

See also[edit]

Aztec
Nahuatl
Dominican Order

References[edit]
1. ^ [citation needed]

Further reading[edit]

Fray Diego Durns The History of the Indies of New Spain, translated, annotated and with introduction by Doris
Heyden.

External links[edit]

an article analyzing the Aztec Eight Commandments as documented by Durn

Categories:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Durn (3 de 5)22/08/2014 18:19:53

Diego Durn - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Navigation
Talk

Random article

View history

Donate to Wikipedia

This page was last modified on 5 July 2014 at 18:42.

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms

Wikimedia Shop

More

Interaction
Help
Go
Search

Log in

1530s births
1588 deaths
Mainpage
Spanish Dominicans
Spanish historians
Contents
Novohispanic Mesoamericanists
Aztec scholars
Featured
content
Historians of Mesoamerica
Read
16th-century Spanish people
Current
events
16th-century
Spanish writers
Edit
16th-century Mesoamericanists

may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia is a

About Wikipedia

Community portal

Recent changes

Contact page

Tools

What links here

Related changes

Upload file

Special pages

Permanent link

Page information

Wikidata item

Cite this page

registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

Privacy policy

About Wikipedia

Disclaimers

Contact Wikipedia

Developers

Mobile view

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Durn (4 de 5)22/08/2014 18:19:53

Diego Durn - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Print/export

Create a book

Download as PDF

Printable version

Languages

Deutsch

Espaol

Franais

Italiano

Norsk bokml

Polski

Edit links

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Durn (5 de 5)22/08/2014 18:19:53