Motolinia (MH812v)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Motolinia (“He is Poor,” or "He is Afflicted," attested here as a man’s name) shows the profile of a man's head, looking toward the viewer's right. He has tears running down his visible cheek. His eye is also open.
Stephanie Wood
Motolinia may have been a name that existed in the autonomous era, but it is probably best known as the name taken by Toribio de Benavente, a Franciscan friar who, when walking through Tlaxcala, heard people remarking on his tattered robes, feeling sorry for him for being poor, and asked what the word "motolinia" meant that they kept using to describe him. Feeling it was appropriate for a friar, he embraced the name for himself. Even if it has not existed prior to 1519, here it is the name of an Indigenous man in Huexotzinco more than three decades after the famous Franciscan (one of Los Doce, the first Twelve) took the name.
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
poor, pobre, afflicted, afligido, suffering, sufrimiento, emoción, lágrimas, nombres de hombres
motolinia, poor, afflicted, humble, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/motolinia
El Pobre, El Aflijido
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 812v, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=699&st=image.
This manuscript is hosted by the Library of Congress and the World Digital Library; used here with the Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SAq 3.0).
