Romances de los Señores de la Nueva España is a sixteenth-century Nahuatl codex (handwritten manuscript) housed in the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, Austin. Comprising thirty-six song texts, this codex is one of the two principal sources of Aztec song and a key document in the study of Aztec life in the century after the Conquest.
In July 2009, UT Press published a print edition of Ballads of the Lords of New Spain: The Codex Romances de los Señores de la Nueva España, transcribed, translated, and annotated by John Bierhorst. This website, jointly produced by the Press and the University of Texas Libraries, offers an interactive digital adaptation of the Ballads that expands the scholarly content beyond what is possible to publish in book-form.
For instance, the website reproduces the Nahuatl text and English translation as printed in the book, but with "pop-up" excerpts from the Commentary to allow the songs and the explanatory synopses to be read together. Additional features include a normative transcription (searchable), a map showing the "geography" of the Ballads, audio of the two-tone drum cadences accompanying two of the songs, images of related material from codices depicting musicians like those in the Ballads, and scans of the codex itself.
In addition—and with a nod to the expanding field of corpus linguistics—the Ballads website amplifies the "whole corpus" approach to translating and interpreting both the Ballads and the closely related codex Cantares Mexicanos by mounting a single-word extract from the Ballads/Cantares concordance that demonstrates the unity of the diction. To facilitate the interpretation of the Ballads, the website includes the Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs and A Nahuatl-English Dictionary and Concordance to the Cantares Mexicanos, courtesy of Stanford University Press.
The print edition of the Ballads can be ordered through the University of Texas Press at www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/biebal.html. Thanks for your interest in the Ballads, and the University of Texas Press and Libraries.