Diego Durán

(c. 1537 - 1588)

Fluent in Nahuatl, the Dominican friar Diego Durán wrote Book of the Gods roughly fifty-five years after Hernán Cortés arrived in Mexico; Durán was one of his generation’s few chroniclers to interview first­hand native witnesses to the conflict. “Some persons (and they are not few),” he wrote, “say that my work will revive the ancient customs and rites among the Indians.” Perhaps because of this, his work was largely forgotten until the 1850s, when it was rediscovered in a Madrid library.

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