Overview

The Popol Vuh Manuscript, catalogued at the Newberry Library as Ayer MS 1515, is the oldest surviving text of the Popol Vuh, the Kiche Maya book of creation. It preserves the Kiche narrative in parallel columns of Kiche and Spanish in the hand of the Dominican friar Francisco Ximenez, who copied and translated it while serving as parish priest at Chichicastenango in highland Guatemala around 1701 to 1703. The pre-conquest original from which he worked has never been found.

The earliest surviving text of the Popol Vuh, the Kʼicheʼ Maya sacred narrative, exists only as a copy made around 1701 to 1703 by the Dominican friar Francisco Ximenez at Chichicastenango, Guatemala, who transcribed a now-lost earlier Kʼicheʼ-language manuscript in parallel Kʼicheʼ and Spanish columns; no pre-Ximenez original survives. Ximenez was not merely a passive copyist: he also produced a separate theological commentary responding to the Popol Vuh's content from his own Dominican perspective, a document that survives alongside the transcription itself and gives historians some insight into how an eighteenth-century missionary friar understood, and sought to contextualise for a Catholic readership, the Kʼicheʼ narrative he was preserving.