Stephanie Wood begins Transcending Conquest with a twelve-page foreword in which she describes not only her methodology and resource base, but also her motivations for undertaking this project. Perhaps as a preemptive defense—she notes that some might dismiss her as “lacking sufficient authority” to approach the Nahuatl codices as an English-speaking American—Wood spends much of her introduction describing childhood experiences with Mexican migrant workers before turning her attention to on to more technical issues (ix). This decidedly informal introduction seems strangely folksy, and almost jarring, as the reader turns from those pages to Wood’s explanation of her methodology and the intended purpose of her research. She largely limits secondary sources and historiographical information to this preface and her endnotes; little context is given about the conquest itself, except when it is relevant to a specific scene or figure.
Transcending Conquest consisted of six chapters, each moving forward in time to a specific chronological point in which a particular type of codex or manuscript was most likely composed and most prevalent. She includes multiple examples of each type of font and weaves illustrations throughout the text rather than limiting them to an insert somewhere near the middle of the book. Thus, in the chapter describing the codices written closest to the actual date of the conquest, a pictograph of a Spaniard fighting an indigenous warrior appears just before Wood’s analysis of that pictograph. As he states in his preface, Wood looks beyond the more obvious aspects of indigenous representations of the Spanish to note that these representations frequently believe in the traditional assumption that the Aztecs and other indigenous groups regarded the Spanish as returned gods. of the heavens
Wood explicitly states that his intention is not to write a monolithic treatise on indigenous views of the Spanish conquest and colonial period, but rather a series of chapters that function as thematically related essays drawing on a common indigenous source. Perhaps appropriately given the gradual introduction of alphabetic writing to Nahua “artist-authors,” Wood employs only pictorial sources in his opening chapters, incorporating manuscript and other textual sources as the book progresses from the conquest to the colonial period. (2. 3). Selected pictographs and scenes of him come from codices in archives located in both America and France.
Wood carefully reads the fonts he chose (arguing that pictographs can indeed be read, since they largely serve the same function as alphabetic texts) for clues and insights perhaps overlooked by others who might have dismissed or downplayed the importance of pictorial evidence, given the common European preference for word-based materials. He does not categorically exclude textual sources, but in the chapter dealing with titles, written documents that detail a people’s rights to claim certain allotments of land, Wood seems a little less certain than in those of codices and maps, documents that combine textual and pictographic elements to relate local histories and genealogies.
Transcending Conquest is perhaps a bit short, with only 162 pages of text, including the preface; By comparison, Wood’s notes and bibliography are quite heavy, taking up an additional fifty-three pages. Despite his initial stated unease, Wood succeeds in his argument that more clues can be found in indigenous codices and manuscripts, even for those inherently outside the discursive framework of indigeneity.
