Nahua Women and Embodied Knowledge in Sixteenth Century Mexico

The dissertation examines portrayals of Nahua women as producers and circulators of knowledge in sixteenth and early seventeenth-century documents. These women artisans—associated with the Nahuatl term tlaixmatini (those who know through perception and experience)—applied forms of embodied expertise to create animated things. My analysis of surviving documents about those women shows that gendered spaces, such as weaving, midwifery, and the kitchen, shaped how knowledge was made, valued, and represented in colonial Nahua society.

By examining Nahuatl-language and pictographic materials, such as the Florentine Codex, the Codex Mendoza, and the Codex Tudela, alongside judicial records, I identify four notions at the center of the portrayal of Nahua women’s embodied knowledge. These notions are: maimati (to know breathily with the hands), ixtlamati (to know sensorially through experience), imati (to know breathily or to be skilled), and yolteotl (to be circumspect). I interpret these notions in the sources using an interdisciplinary method that combines close reading of written works and paintings in their contexts of production with insights from contemporary ethnography. By foregrounding women’s expertise as intellectual or cognitive labor in my analysis, the dissertation challenges assumptions that Indigenous women were marginal or largely absent from spaces of knowledge creation. Instead, it shows their central role in shaping Nahua knowledge, artistic concepts, and everyday practices in colonial Mexico.