![[Header Image] Digital scan of folio from Ayer ms 1515](https://www.johnwoodruff.com/wp-content/uploads/digital-scan-of-folio-from-ayer-ms-1515.jpg)
Published Translation. Sixteenth-century Franciscan mendicant friar Juan de Torquemada describes the Indian practice of erecting a “flying mast” at major festivals and the missionary attempts to end its practice. (Copy of the published English translation of “Del palo volador de que usaban estos indios en sus fiestas principales.”)more ›
Digital Humanities for the Lone Scholar
Position Paper. Digital Humanities (sometimes stated as Humanities Computing) has long been a walled garden and generally misidentified as the mere use of computer or information technology. This has led many humanists to mistakenly believe themselves to engage the discipline and many other humanists to regard it as inaccessible. My definition seeks to cure both ills.more ›
(Re)writing (Hi)story
Invited Panelist. The end of the Fifth Great Cycle in Maya cosmology (12-21-2012) is nebulous and poorly characterized. This is almost entirely the consequence of exclusive reliance upon the inadequate writings of epistemologically-conflicted Europeans.more ›
Ma(r)king Popol Vuh
Refereed Journal. Joe Bray, Miriam Handley, and Anne C. Henry have argued that “to mark a text is also to make it; [and] features such as punctuation, footnotes, epigraphs, white space and marginalia, marks that traditionally have been ignored in literary criticism, can be examined for their contribution to a text’s meaning.” In 2007 The Newberry Library disbound the oldest surviving text of Popol Vuh for conservation. That process made it possible to examine a number of paratextual markers calling into question popular perspectives of Popol Vuh as Indian auto-ethnography. This refereed article published at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill seeks to raise modern awareness of the manuscript’s paratext and its meaning for traditional assumptions of Popol Vuh’s survival and its narrative/textual boundaries.more ›
Poetics and Antipoetics of Discourse in the New World
Call For Papers. The Chair and Executive Committee of Spanish-American Literature (1492 – 1800) invite submissions for the 2011 South-Atlantic Modern Language Association conference.more ›
Disparities of Discourse in Popol Vuh
Conference Paper. Francisco Ximénez’s transcription and translation of Popol Vuh is not as straightforward and sterile as is generally presumed. The task requires intricate management of the textual and semiotic grids, both in the the Quiché transcription and in the Spanish translation.more ›
Rethinking the Context of Popol Vuh
Doctoral Dissertation. Although seventeenth-century Dominican priest Francisco Ximénez is credited for conservation of Popol Vuh, no critical attention is given to his personal agency and his ecclesiastical agenda. The oversight is particularly disconcerting where he plainly states in his prologue, “Esta mi obra, y trabaxo discurro q’ avra muchos q’ la tengan por la mas futil y vana de las q’ he trabaxado, asi lo pensaran muchos; y yo lo discurro al contrario, porq’ entiendo ser la mas util, y neçesaria.” My investigation is founded on answering the question: Why did Father Ximénez believe conservation of this text to be his crowning achievement? I answer this question by examining the four prologues of the Ayer manuscript to uncover Ximénez’s significant interaction with the text.more ›
Citations & Attributions
Citations & Attributions
Hall, Matthew. The Imagination of Plants: A Book of Botanical Mythology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019. Print.
Graper, Julianne Laurel. Bat people: multispecies ethnomusicology in Austin, TX and Chiapas, MX. The University of Texas at Austin, 2019. Diss.
Rodriguez, Teresa Jeannette. Lady Blood: An Intuitive Inquiry into the Transformative Effects of Remembering my Ancestors. Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2018. Diss.
Mazariegos, Oswaldo C. Art and Myth of the Ancient Maya. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2017. Print.
Chen, Ning. “The Morphological Reading of the Mesoamerican Myth Popol Vuh.” Studies in Literature and Language. 13:3. 2016. 42-47.
Zolov, Eric, Ed. Iconic Mexico: An Encyclopedia from Acapulco to Zócalo. Vol. 2. Santa Barbara, USA: ABC-CLIO, 2015. 664-666. Print.
“The Popol Vuh and the Globalization of Chocolate.” https://chocolateclass.wordpress.com/2014/02/21/the-popol-vuh-and-the-globalization-of-chocolate/ 21 Feb 2014. Web
Andrews, Nicholas Jared. Texts of Protest: Perspectives on Suffering in the Book of Job and the Popol Vuh. California State University, Fresno, 2013. Thesis.
Kramer, Wendy, W. George Lovell, and Christopher H. Lutz. “Pillage in the Archives: The Whereabouts of Guatemalan Documentary Treasures”. Latin American Research Review. Latin American Studies Association. 48:3. 2013. 153-167. Print.
Thornton, John K. A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2012: 429. Print.