Beyond the Fifth Sun: Nahua Teleologies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Abstract

This dissertation examines the shifts Nahua writers experienced in their conceptualizations of time and the role of human action after the conquest. The author proposes that their ancestral cosmovision, decentered by Catholicism and Spanish colonial administration, led them to propose creative approaches to living well in the unknown years to come. The dissertation provides close readings of three colonial texts -the Florentine Codex, the Anales de Juan Bautista, and the Crónica mexicayotl- that reveal indigenous teleological thinking in the early colonial period in Central Mexico.