ABSTRACT
The traditional account from Spanish sources contended that the Aztecs themselves had stoned Moctezuma to death. The story that follows demonstrates the problematic nature of such an approach. The age of Enlightenment, when it came to new ideas on how to write the history of the New World, there is as much intellectual creativity in the colonial peripheries as in the metropolitan core. The hundreds of symbols and obscure references to celestial phenomena and deities, sources such as Tonalamtl Aubin demanded from the intended audience complete command of theological subtleties and astronomy. Radically different historiographical techniques seemed to have developes in each of the three areas of the Atlantic world discusses each paradoxically “modern” in own way. The skeptical “age of reason,” non–Iberian authors creates new and sophisticated forms of reading and invented the genre of conjectural history, Spanish writers anticipated the great insights of nineteenth–century German scholarship as went about creating archives and histories based solely on primary sources.
