Book of the Gods and Rites and The Ancient Calendar

Diego Duran was a sixteenth century Dominican friar in colonial Mexico who wrote this account of Aztec gods, rites and the calendar based on interviews with indigenous informants and access to now lost native pictorial sources, translated into English by Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden and published by University of Oklahoma Press. Its enormous value is that Duran preserved detailed indigenous religious information that would otherwise be entirely lost, using native sources close in time to the conquest. Its limit, like other colonial missionary chroniclers, is that Duran wrote as a friar seeking to document practices partly in order to help suppress them, so his selection and moral framing of the material reflects that missionary purpose, and modern readers treat his detail as valuable but filtered through a colonial religious lens.