The Madrid Codex is one of three surviving pre-Columbian Maya books dating to the Postclassic period of Mesoamerican chronology. The Madrid Codex is held by the Museo de América in Madrid and is considered to be the most important piece in its collection. However, the original is not on display due to its fragility; an accurate reproduction is displayed in its stead. At one point in time the codex was split into two pieces, given the names "Codex Troano" and "Codex Cortesianus". In the 1880s, Leon de Rosny, an ethnologist, realised that the two pieces belonged together, and helped combine them into a single text. This text was subsequently brought to Madrid, and given the name "Madrid Codex", which remains its most common name today.

Until the discovery that Maya stelae depicted kings instead of high priests, the Maya priesthood and their preoccupations had been a main scholarly concern. In the course of the 1960s and over the following decades, however, dynastic research came to dominate interest in the subject. A concept of royal ʼshamanismʼ, chiefly propounded by Linda Schele and Freidel, came to occupy the forefront instead. Yet, Classic Maya civilization, being highly ritualistic, would have been unthinkable without a developed priesthood. Like other Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican priesthoods, the early Maya priesthood consisted of a hierarchy of professional priests serving as intermediaries between the population and the deities. Their basic skill was the art of reading and writing. The priesthood as a whole was the keeper of knowledge concerning the deities and their cult, including calendrics, astrology, divination, and prophecy. In addition, they were experts in historiography and genealogy. Priests were usually male and could marry. Most of our knowledge concerns Yucatán in the Late Postclassic, with additional data stemming from the contemporaneous Guatemalan Highlands.