New Philology generally refers to a branch of Mexican ethnohistory and philology that uses colonial-era native language texts written by Indians to construct history from the indigenous point of view. The name New Philology was coined by James Lockhart to describe work that he and his doctoral students and scholarly collaborators in history, anthropology, and linguistics had pursued since the mid-1970s. Lockhart published a great many essays elaborating on the concept and content of the New Philology and Matthew Restall published a description of it in the Latin American Research Review. The techniques of the New Philology has also been applied in other disciplines such as European medieval studies.
Some historians publishing in the New Philology tradition are James Lockhart, S.L. (Sarah) Cline, Susan Schroeder, Rebecca Horn, Stephanie Wood, Robert Haskett, Matthew Restall, Lisa Sousa and Kevin Terraciano. Many of these scholars of the first generation of the field were hired by research universities and have trained their own students in the field's methods and techniques. Kevin Terraciano succeeded Lockhart in the History Department at UCLA, following Lockhart's 1994 retirement. Sarah Cline taught at Harvard before moving to University of California Santa Barbara; Susan Schroeder held the France V. Scholes Chair at Tulane University; Rebecca Horn teaches at University of Utah; Stephanie Wood and Robert Haskett teach at University of Oregon; Lisa Sousa teaches at Occidental College, and Matthew Restall holds an endowed chair at Penn State University.
Historical Development
Lockhart's discusses philology and in particular the new philology in an essay for a collection of essays hosted digitally at University of Oregon. For him, the new philology was built upon the foundation of the old, which focuses on close reading of texts and resulted in collections of printed documentation. An important nineteenth-century Mexican philologist was Joaquín García Icazbalceta. In Mexico and Latin America, nineteenth-century scholars mined the Spanish archives for colonial documentation for their national histories. A feature of the New Philology is that the publication of indigenous texts in the original language with translations with introductions was standard. The translated texts often appeared first, followed by a separate scholarly monograph analyzing the texts. The two should be considered two parts of the same scholarly publication. Many of the scholars working in the New Philology did so before it gained that designation. A particularly valuable online publication are essays where individual scholars discuss the process and product of translating and publishing particular native language documentation.
The New Philology was developed from the 1970s and onwards, building on the work of a previous generation of scholars, most especially historian Charles Gibson, whose Aztecs under Spanish Rule (1964) and his earlier Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century (1952) were major scholarly achievements, placing colonial-era Aztecs (now more commonly called Nahuas) at the center of historical analysis. The leading figure in the establishment of the New Philological historiographical approach was James Lockhart who, in the early 1970s, began learning Nahuatl and studying local level indigenous sources in the Nahuatl language. His magnum opus was published in 1992, The Nahuas After the Conquest., which incorporated and extended his own work and that of others.
An early and important text in this vein was Nahuatl in the Middle Years (1976), published by Lockhart and University of Texas linguist Frances Karttunen. Also important for the early history of the New Philology was the publication of Beyond the Codices (1976), alluding to the existence of native language texts other than the formal ones termed codices. Arthur J. O. Anderson, a leading figure in Mesoamerican ethnohistory for his collaboration with Charles Dibble in publishing an English translation of the Florentine Codex by Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún, participated in this early project of publishing local-level colonial documents.
In the mid-1970s Lockhart began mentoring history doctoral students at UCLA, who learned Nahuatl and began research on particular region documentation in Nahuatl. S. L. (Sarah) Cline was the first to complete a dissertation in 1981, based on these types of local-level sources, a set of 60 testaments from the central Mexican Indian polity or altepetl of Culhuacán. In 1993 Cline also published a set of early local-level Nahuatl censuses from the Cuernavaca, as The Book of Tributes, as well as an analysis of all three volumes, adding to the existing published corpus. In this first generation Robert Haskett, who examined Nahuatl texts on colonial Cuernavaca, later also publishing on primordial titles. Susan Schroeder delved into the rich texts produced by seventeenth-century Nahua historian, Chimalpahin, resulting in several publications The largest number of local-level indigenous documents, such as testaments and bills of sale, are in Nahuatl, resulting in Nahuatl having the largest set of published sets of documents and monographic scholarly analyses. Rebecca Horn's dissertation on Coyoacan and later Stanford University Press monograph showed the multiple connections between Nahuas and Spaniards. Horn also served as associate editor of the UCLA Latin American Center's Nahuatl Studies Series.
Some UCLA later doctoral students of Lockhart, particularly Matthew Restall and Kevin Terraciano, first learned Nahuatl and then other Mesoamerican indigenous languages (Mixtec and Yucatec Maya) that had a significant corpus of documents in the language. Restall's UCLA 1995 dissertation "The World of the Cah: postconquest Yucatec Maya Society" was followed by his 1995 publication of a collection of eighteenth-century wills. and culminating in his Stanford University Press monograph, The Maya World: Yucatec culture and society, 1550-1850. Terraciano's 1994 dissertation on the Mixtecs of Oaxaca was entitled Nudzahui history: Mixtec writing and culture in colonial Oaxaca followed by his 2001 monograph The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: Nudzahui History. Both Terraciano and Restall revised the titles of their dissertations in the published monographs to allow readers better recognition by readers of the subject of the publication; Cline used "Aztec" in the title of her monograph on Culhuacan, rather than "Nahua", which in the 1980s had little recognition value even amongst specialist on Latin American cultures.
Rather than trying to reach knowledge about events in the colonial or pre-colonial period from studying the sources, as was the usual approach, he attempted to achieve understanding about the indigenous societies who produced the sources. This approach made possible the use of sources that had earlier been deemed to be too difficult to understand or too problematic to interpret, e.g. the documents known as primordial titles, colonial legal documents in the Nahuatl language, testaments, and acts of the colonial administration.
Lauren Lambert Jennings explicitly applied techniques from New Philology to the study of European Song texts quoting their "central premise [as] the idea that codex is not merely a neutral container for its texts." She continued by saying that the New Philologists and scholars of "textual cultures" "posit that a work's meaning (literary and cultural) is determined by the entire manuscript matrix — its physical form, contents, scribe(s), readers, and history."