It is the middle of a plague — “a pestilence so great and universal, that already it has been three months since it started, and many have died and many more continue to die.”
This does little to stop a group of scholars who have sealed themselves off from the world in a Mexico City convent, where they toil on a series of volumes devoted to indigenous knowledge.
If before the plague their goal was to create a historical record, it’s now become a race against time and disease: The pandemic is claiming lives outside of their walls. They continue to work even as they run out of pigments to color the illustrations that will accompany their text. It is simply too risky to leave the safety of their cloister to go looking for supplies.
“I don’t know how long it will last or how much harm it will do,” writes Bernardino de Sahagún, the Franciscan friar in charge of the endeavor. “I don’t know what will be of this pestilence.”
He wrote those words in 1576.
Read more at the Los Angeles Times.