Friar Francisco Ximénez, a field naturalist

This article analyses the classification criteria and the linguistic processes used by Friar Francisco Ximénez in his Natural History of the Kingdom of Guatemala (1722) to describe the nature of the area. The text is structured as a catalogue of the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdom and is divided into XIII chapters, each dedicated to a specific category: mammals, snakes, birds, insects (bees, ants and vermin), plants (trees and flowers), stones, minerals and elements of the landscape (waters, mountains and volcanoes). After a general description of the text, the analysis focuses on the characteristics, properties and therapeutic uses of natural resources and medicinal plants in the Mayan culture, with the aim of reconstructing, through the descriptions of Father Ximénez, the perception that Europeans had of indigenous phytotherapy