earlier drafts in their archives. A scholarly community of historians, anthropologists, art historians, and linguists has since been investigating Sahagún's work, its subtleties and mysteries, for more than 200 years. Evolution, format, and structure The Florentine Codex is a complex document, assembled, edited, and appended over decades. Essentially it is three integral texts: (1) in Nahuatl; (2) a Spanish text; (3) pictorials. The final version of the Florentine Codex was completed in 1569. Sahagún's goals of orienting fellow missionaries to Aztec culture, providing a rich Nahuatl vocabulary, and recording the indigenous cultural heritage are at times in competition within the work. The manuscript pages are generally arranged in two columns, with Nahuatl, written first, on the right and a Spanish gloss or translation on the left. Diverse voices, views, and opinions are expressed in these 2,400 pages, and the result is a document that is sometimes contradictory. Scholars have proposed several classical and medieval worldbook authors who inspired Sahagún, such as Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, Isidore of Seville, and Bartholomeus Anglicus. These shaped the late medieval approach to the organization of knowledge. The twelve books of the Florentine Codex are organized in the following way: Gods, religious beliefs and rituals, cosmology, and moral philosophy, Humanity (society, politics, economics, including anatomy and disease), Natural history. Book 12, the account of the conquest of the Aztec Empire from the point of view of the conquered of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco is the only strictly historical book of the Historia General. This work follows the organizational logic found in medieval encyclopedias, in particular the 19-volume De proprietatibus rerum of Sahagún's fellow Franciscan Friar Bartholomew the Englishman. One scholar has argued that Bartholomew's work served as a conceptual model for Sahagún, although evidence is circumstantial. Both men present descriptions of the cosmos, society and nature of the late medieval paradigm. Additionally, in one of the prologues, Sahagún assumes full responsibility for dividing the Nahuatl text into books and chapters, quite late into the evolution of the Codex (approximately 1566-1568). “Very likely,” historian James Lockhart notes, “Sahagún himself devised the chapter titles, in Spanish, and the Nahuatl chapter titles may well be a translation of them, reversing the usual process.” Images within the Florentine Codex After the facsimile edition became available generally in 1979, the illustrations of the Florentine Codex could be analyzed in detail. Previously, the images were known mainly through the black-and-white drawings found in various