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Old Words and the New World: Liberal Education and the Franciscans in New Spain, 1536-1601 the Whitfield Prize Winner
Abstract
The Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, established in 1536, liberally educated the sons of Nahua (Aztec) leaders in New Spain. Its Franciscan pedagogues, including Bernardino de Sahagún ( c . 1499–1590), Andrés de Olmos (1491–1571) and Juan Bautista ( c . 1555–1606/13), worked with indigenous students and alumni to collect, edit and circulate Nahuatl huehuetlahtolli , or ‘speech of the ancients’. This paper examines the largest collection of these orations printed in pre-modern Mexico, the Huehuetlahtolli [1601] edited by Juan Bautista and indigenous intellectuals from the college. It argues that the Tlatelolcans adapted Nahuatl ‘old words’ for the New World of colonial society. They ornamented the speeches with rhetorical techniques derived from Santa Cruz's Erasmian curriculum. They interpolated biblical sentences, particularly from Proverbs and Sirach, to enhance the evangelising potential of the discourses. Finally, they drew on Erasmus's theory of speech, as expressed in his pedagogical and spiritual writings, to explicate Nahuatl los difrasismos concerning eloquence and good counsel. Contextualising the Huehuetlahtolli [1601] in Santa Cruz's Erasmian schoolroom reveals the contours of its argument for vernacular evangelisation, the liberal education of indigenous youth and for the elegance of the Nahuatl tongue.
... Furthermore, Santa Cruz was renowned for its Latinists, who were initially schooled by the French Franciscan Arnaldo de Basacio, and who frequently displayed their prowess in their petitions to the Spanish crown. We have impressive Latin letters authored by don Antonio Cortés Totoquihuatzin, don Pablo Nazareo, don Antonio Valeriano, as well as those written on behalf of don Pedro Moteuczoma (see Laird 2016;Osorio Romero 1990;Pérez-Rocha and Tena 2000:218-222;Pollnitz 2017). Some Nahua writers had precise knowledge of celebrated classical authors; for instance, Nazareo cited a passage from Ovid's Ars amatoria in a letter to Philip II (Gruzinski 2002:94). ...
This chapter sketches two distinct modes of engagement pursued jointly by Franciscans and Nahua scholars as they produced a printed and manuscript corpus that spans the decades between the 1550s and the 1620s, which was impacted by censure and increasingly orthodox evangelization policies. It plumbs into the Nahua-Franciscan confidential mode to reveal a previously unknown work: a Nahuatl-language adaptation, by the Franciscan Alonso de Molina and one or more Nahua co-authors, of ‘On the Government of a Polity,’ a political treatise by the fifteenth-century theologian Denys the Carthusian. The chapter argues this translation was part of several attempts to test the boundaries of what Counter-Reformation policies allowed not only to be printed, but also to be circulated in manuscript form among indigenous colonial subjects.
Este trabajo analiza cómo un grupo de intelectuales indígenas plasmó, a partir del trasvase a la lengua náhuatl de varias obras en latín y castellano, sus impresiones sobre la guerra espiritual que debe librar todo cristiano en su paso por el mundo y, en particular, sobre la guerra que entablan los gobernantes contra sí mismos, al aspirar y luchar por el poder. Se explora también cómo estos textos, hasta ahora inéditos, conservados dentro de un volumen manuscrito compuesto hacia finales del siglo XVI y principios del XVII, conforman un gran «espejo de príncipes» dispuesto para la educación de la nobleza nahua novohispana.
El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo explorar las múltiples significaciones que revistió el concepto «usos y costumbres» indígenas en el contexto de reorganización cultural y política que el centro de México y Yucatán sufrieron en el siglo XVI. Para ello, se analiza un amplio abanico de fuentes, como diccionarios coloniales, manuales pastorales y de adoctrinamiento misionero, juicios y ordenanzas para el gobierno de tales pueblos de indios. Se concluye que el alto grado de flexibilidad conceptual y práctica de esta figura jurídica contribuiría tanto a consolidar el dominio colonial como a refrendar algunas reivindicaciones de las autoridades nativas.
In 1536, fifteen years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the Imperial College of Santa Cruz was founded in Santiago Tlatelolco, an Indian enclave to the north of Mexico City. The students at the college, who were drawn from native elites, received an advanced education in Latin from Franciscan missionaries. The present discussion will explain why such a training was provided to those indigenous youths, and clarify the nature of their accomplishments (1). A discussion of the translations of biblical texts into Nahuatl made at the College of Santa Cruz (2) will be followed by a survey of original religious texts produced there in the Mexican language, many of which had identifiable Latin precedents (3). The concluding section then offers some tentative general reflections on the part played by Latin Christian humanism in shaping early Nahuatl literature, arguing that it bears some comparison to the way Latin had already underscored the development of vernacular literature in early modern Europe (4).
The Tercer abecedario espiritual (1527) was the most influential work of Franciscan friar and widely read spiritual author Francisco de Osuna (c.1492–c.1540). This essay focuses on descriptions of the soul in his treatise in order to highlight a series of correspondences between Nahua and Franciscan metaphysics. It argues that these correspondences, based on sensorial experiences of the material world and inductive reasoning, aided the success of the Franciscan project of evangelization during the early decades of the colonization of Mexico through the 1570s. Moreover, it contends they led to changes in the concept of the soul in the Nahua/Spanish contact zone. Because Nahua terms for animating forces ihiyotl, -yolia, and tonalli—which signify winds, heart, and heat—have been studied in close detail, this essay uses them as a framework to interrogate Osuna's representations. Such an approach demonstrates that scholarship comparing Mesoamerican metaphysics with that of colonizing missionaries requires reciprocal scrutiny of European concepts at the time of contact. Finally, this analysis explores Bruno Latour's ‘compositionism’ as a model for approaching the premodern qualities of meditative recollection and for examining the intersections between Nahua and Franciscan aesthetics of interiority.
The epistemic assumptions, methods, and rhetoric employed by colonial indigenous intellectuals in Latin America were based on preconquest intellectual labor and literacy systems. These practices were deeply impacted by collaborative projects and historical scholarship undertaken in the sixteenth century, as indigenous elites embraced European literacy and scholarly models. This merging of diverse traditions led to a "golden age" of indigenous intellectual achievements in the seventeenth century, and to a diversity of genres cultivated by native scholars in late colonial times. Indigenous historical actors were intellectuals not only because they recorded and disseminated historical, religious, or political knowledge, but also because they were inserted in culturally hybrid social networks through which collective knowledge circulated. While the works of Chimalpahin, Guaman Poma, Garcilaso de la Vega, and don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl are relatively well known, this small sample of native and mestizo intellectuals must be expanded considerably to examine works produced through co-authorship arrangements with friars and priest, and to address clandestine works composed exclusively for native audiencies by less known, or even anonymous, indigenous scholars.
The present article incorporates an edition and translation of an extraordinary Latin poem by Fray Cristóbal Cabrera, a humanist scholar and Franciscan missionary who worked in New Spain from the early 1530s until 1546–1547. The Ecstasis, the longest acrostic composition in western literature, is a first-person fiction, reminiscent of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, in which the poet describes an apocalyptic vision of judgement and his slide into madness after an earlier premonition that God’s wrath would fall upon Mexico City. The poet professes to reject pagan literature but his sustained engagement with several classical authors, especially Catullus, Virgil and Cicero, provides a key to the interpretation of this enigmatic work.
In 1570, the Franciscan friar Jerónimo de Mendieta bestowed a rare gift on Juan de Ovando, then president of the Council of Indies. Mendieta placed in Ovando's hands a small manuscript volume in superb Gothic script with illuminated initials and color illustrations, one of several important manuscripts he had brought to Spain for various prominent recipients. Were it not for its contents, one could have thought it a meticulous version of a breviary or a book of hours, but its contents were unprecedented. This tome contained a scholarly Nahuatl translation of the most popular devotional work in Western Europe in the previous century. It was Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ, which caught Iberian Christians under its spell between the 1460s and the early sixteenth century by means of multiple Latin editions and translations into Portuguese, Catalan, and Spanish, including a version in aljamiado (Spanish in Arabic characters). Indeed, a decisive turning point in the Iberian reception of this work had taken place three decades earlier, through the 1536 publication of Juan de Ávila's influential Spanish-language adaptation.
In this paper, Miguel León-Portilla presents a letter that Antonio Valeriano, one of the indigenous assistants of Sahagun, sent to King Felipe II. The publication of this document is significant to understand the cultural and social role that these characters in XVI Century.
This volume provides a unique overview of the broad historical, geographical and social range of Latin and Greek as second languages. It elucidates the techniques of Latin and Greek instruction across time and place, and the contrasting socio-political circumstances that contributed to and resulted from this remarkably enduring field of study. Providing a counterweight to previous studies that have focused only on the experience of elite learners, the chapters explore dialogues between center and periphery, between pedagogical conservatism and societal change, between government and the governed. In addition, a number of chapters address the experience of female learners, who have often been excluded from or marginalized by earlier scholarship.
This article aims to demonstrate the relationship between diagrammatic glossing and the interpretation of the text of the Rhetorica ad Herennium in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Using four manuscripts containing marginal diagrammatic notations to the text, the article shows how the pseudo-Ciceronian manual was first read through the lens of De inventione, with cross-referencing between the two texts common, while in the later period the diagrams tended to summarise the text as given, using mnemonic techniques such as division and enumeration to prompt and formulate the diagrams. In so doing, the article shows how diagrammatic glossing is a valuable alternative to textual glossing, and an important knowledge management device.
In this article, I explore the parallel responses of two groups of colonial subjects who were confronted with the institutional changes that occurred in the context of Enlightenment ideas in eighteenth-century Mexico: creole clerics headed by the Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero; and native religious men who petitioned to colonial authorities and the Crown for additional spaces for the education of indigenous men. I explore some of the interactions between creole clerics—often referred to as creole patriots—and native elites in the schools of central Mexico, and efforts by indigenous noble men to broaden the opportunities for natives to join the ranks of the Church and to receive a higher education. To this end, I build on the scholarship that has made evident how the hegemonic program of Bourbon reforms, which was inspired by the Enlightenment, was not a top-down plan implemented successfully and equally across the continent but rather a series of contested interpretations. This article contributes to the recent shift in the scholarship on the Enlightenment that acknowledges cross-cultural global exchanges by arguing that certain groups of natives in central Mexico, and a particular group of American-born clerics, participated actively in building a pragmatic version of the Enlightenment that responded to their local realities and contributed to a globalized understanding of enlightened ideas.
In the summer of 1527, the Spanish Inquisition summoned some thirty-three of Iberia's most prominent theologians to the Castilian city of Valladolid in order to judge a variety of suspicious passages culled from Erasmus's works. The theologians met, argued, and disbanded without ever reaching a decision on the orthodoxy of the excerpts or even debating the whole inventory under review, for when plague struck the area in early August, Inquisitor General Alonso Manrique sent them home and never reconvened them. The place of the Valladolid assembly in the scholarly record is nearly minimal, for if a few academics have detailed Erasmus's response to it, no one has sufficiently explored its implications for Spanish history. The reason for such neglect lies not only in the conference's failure to pronounce, but in the modern argument that diagrams it in terms of Erasmus's impact on sixteenth-century Spanish culture.
The Crown and Church theories and decrees regarding sixteenth-century New Spain found in the copious administrative and legal documentation demonstrate the attempts to reduce the status and economic, political, and social power of the indigenous population. The Dominican order found the Indians to be perpetual neophytes, incapable of fully learning Christian doctrine; therefore they were more hesitant to baptize them. Having no intention of establishing an Indian clergy, the Dominicans found higher education for Indians to be unnecessary. The Jesuits, while latecomers, responded to Philip II's challenge with vigor, and rapidly established their own niche by adding to their ranks three priests, including the gifted nahuatlato Juan de Tovar, and eight native-speaker students to their cause, one being Antonio del Rincón. In 1524 the famous twelve Franciscans arrived in New Spain and, following the example of Pedro de Gante who had arrived one year earlier, began the process of evangelization.
The Work of Sahagún; citation_author=Sullivan, Thelma D.; citation_author=Edmonson, Munro S
- Century Mexico
General History of the Things of New Spain; citation_author=de Sahagún, Bernardino; citation_author=Dibble, Charles E.; citation_author=Anderson
- Codex
A Nahua Drama from Early Colonial Mexico; citation_author=Burkhart
- Wednesday
Tractatus omnium fere qu[a]e Grammatices studiosis tradi solent; citation_author=Gilberti, Maturino; citation_author=González
- Maturini
The Preaching of the Christian Doctrine in Mexico, Based on Franciscan Sermons of the Sixteenth Century Written in Nahuatl; citation_author=Klaus, Susanne
- Christianity
Writings from an Inquisitional Theorist, a Heretic, and an Inquisitional Deputy; citation_author=Nesvig
- Franciscans
Josefina García Quintana; citation_author=Bañuls, Ruiz; citation_publication_date=1974; citation_journal_title=Estudios de cultura Náhuatl
- Huehuetlatolli
25 'na sin añadir, ni q[ui]tar cosa q[ue] fuesse de substa[n]cia: saca[n]do sentido de sentido, y no palabra de palabra': Huehuetlahtolli, ed. Bautista, fo. 77r. Cf. Cicero, De optimo genere oratorum, IV.13-V.15, and Erasmus, Capita argumentorum contra morosos quosdam ac indoctos
- Ruiz Bañuls
- El Huehuetlatolli
Ruiz Bañuls, El huehuetlatolli,
239-43; 'Exhortación de un padre a su hijo. Texto recogido por Andrés de Olmos', ed.
Josefina García Quintana, Estudios de cultura Náhuatl, 11 (1974), 137-82.
25 'na sin añadir, ni q[ui]tar cosa q[ue] fuesse de substa[n]cia: saca[n]do sentido de
sentido, y no palabra de palabra': Huehuetlahtolli, ed. Bautista, fo. 77r. Cf. Cicero, De optimo
genere oratorum, IV.13-V.15, and Erasmus, Capita argumentorum contra morosos quosdam ac indoctos,
in Opera omnia, ed. Jean le Clerc (Leiden: Van der Aa, 1706), VI. sig. * * v. See also * * * r.
Latin Translation in the Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Leonardo Bruni
- See Paul Botley
See Paul Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Leonardo
Bruni, Giannozzo Manetti and Desiderius Erasmus (Cambridge, 2004);
Erasmus' certe grammatica cum lingua Hispana quae commodius praelegi possunt a quibusdam nostri qui sermonem Latinum perinde ac Hispani saepe sunt professi': Alcaldes and regidores of Azcapotzalco to Philip II
- Erika Rummel
Erika Rummel, Erasmus'
certe grammatica cum lingua Hispana quae commodius praelegi possunt a quibusdam
nostri qui sermonem Latinum perinde ac Hispani saepe sunt professi': Alcaldes and
regidores of Azcapotzalco to Philip II, 10 Feb. 1561, in La nobleza indígena del centro de México
despues de la conquista, ed. Emma Pérez-Rocha and Rafael Tena (Mexico, 2000), 218, 222;
Porque los más dellos no eran lenguas, y algunos que lo eran sabían poco y no predicaban a los naturales': Don Antonio Valeriano, letter to Philip II, 1578, in Miguel León-Portilla, 'Una carta inédita de don Antonio Valeriano, 1578
- Andrew Laird
- Nahuas
Andrew Laird, 'Nahuas and Caesars: Classical Learning and Bilingualism in Post-Conquest
Mexico; An Inventory of Latin Writings by Authors of the Native Nobility', Classical Philology,
109 (2014), 150-69, 157-60. On native governors, see Peter Villella, Indigenous Elites and Creole
Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 2016), 37-9, 85-6.
69 'Porque los más dellos no eran lenguas, y algunos que lo eran sabían poco y no
predicaban a los naturales': Don Antonio Valeriano, letter to Philip II, 1578, in Miguel
León-Portilla, 'Una carta inédita de don Antonio Valeriano, 1578', Estudios de cultura Náhuatl,
49 (2015), 199-207. For Valeriano's attempts to protect the convent, see Archivo General de
Indias, Seville, Mexico 283, fos. 20v, 30v-36r.
The Right Way of Speaking Latin and Greek, trans. Maurice Pope
- O 'malley
- Cwe Xxvi
O'Malley (Toronto, 1977), 40-7, and CWE, XXVI: The Right Way of Speaking Latin and Greek,
trans. Maurice Pope, ed. J. K. Sowards (Toronto, 1985), 369. Cf. Cicero, De Inventione, I.ii,
2-3.
104 'in nihuehue, in nilama, in nitlacazcaltiani, in nitlacahuapahuani': Huehuetlahtolli, ed.
Ángel María Garibay Kintana (Mexico, 1965), 23. 24 The speech survives in the following manuscripts of the Arte de la lengua Mexicana: Library of Congress
- Jeronimo Lopez
Jeronimo Lopez, letter to Charles V, 1541, in Colección de documentos para la historia de México
(Mexico, 1866), II, 148-50.
23 'por dicho de los señores y principalesá quien se enseñaba la ley y criaban en los
templos para que la deprendiesen': [Anon. poss. Olmos], 'Historia de los mexicanos por
sus pinturas', in Teogonia e historia de los Mexicanos: tres opúsculos del siglo XVI, ed.Ángel María
Garibay Kintana (Mexico, 1965), 23.
24 The speech survives in the following manuscripts of the Arte de la lengua Mexicana: Library
of Congress, Washington, DC, Miscellaneous Manuscript Collection, box 183 (old number
L.A. Misc. 11I-48-C, 4) Ac. 8 (1898);
Small Collections of Nahuatl Manuscripts in the United States
- See John
- F Schwaller
See John F. Schwaller, 'Small Collections of Nahuatl Manuscripts in the United States',
Estudios de cultura Náhuatl, 25 (1995), 377-416, at 414-15;
Erasmus' 65 'hablaua ex tempore . . . con tanta propriedad, y elegancia, que parecia un Ciceron
- Erika Rummel
Erika Rummel, Erasmus'
65 'hablaua ex tempore... con tanta propriedad, y elegancia, que parecia un Ciceron, o
Quintiliano': Bautista, 'Prologo', Sermonario, sig. * VIIIr-v;
Commentaria in Ludovici Vives, fo. 276r; Bautista
- Salazar Cervantes De
Cervantes de Salazar, Commentaria in Ludovici Vives, fo. 276r; Bautista, 'Prologo',
Sermonario, sig. * VIIIr-v;
I, 83-4, and idem, Coloquios y doctrina cristiana: con que los doce frailes de San Francisco, enviados por el papa Adriano VI y por el emperador Carlos V, convirtieron a los indios de la Nueva España
- Florentine Sahagún
- Codex
Sahagún, Florentine Codex, I, 83-4, and idem, Coloquios y doctrina
cristiana: con que los doce frailes de San Francisco, enviados por el papa Adriano VI y por el emperador
Carlos V, convirtieron a los indios de la Nueva España, ed. Miguel León-Portilla (Mexico, 1986), 75;
Historia de una casa real: origen y ocaso del linaje gobernante en México-Tenochtitlan
- Crónica Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc
- Mexicáyotl
Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc, Crónica mexicáyotl, ed. Adrián León (Mexico,
1975), 176; María Castañeda de la Paz, 'Historia de una casa real: origen y ocaso
del linaje gobernante en México-Tenochtitlan', Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos (2011),
http://nuevomundo.revues.org/60624;
55, 60. 68 'antiquitate et nobilitate', 'iudicamus nos etiam musarum domo donari debere . . . at certe grammatica cum lingua Hispana quae commodius praelegi possunt a quibusdam nostri qui sermonem Latinum perinde ac Hispani saepe sunt professi': Alcaldes and regidores of Azcapotzalco to Philip II
- William F Connell
William F. Connell, After Moctezuma: Indigenous Politics
and Self-Government in Mexico City, 1524-1730 (Norman, OK, 2011), 55, 60.
68 'antiquitate et nobilitate', 'iudicamus nos etiam musarum domo donari debere... at
certe grammatica cum lingua Hispana quae commodius praelegi possunt a quibusdam
nostri qui sermonem Latinum perinde ac Hispani saepe sunt professi': Alcaldes and
regidores of Azcapotzalco to Philip II, 10 Feb. 1561, in La nobleza indígena del centro de México
despues de la conquista, ed. Emma Pérez-Rocha and Rafael Tena (Mexico, 2000), 218, 222;
I, 82-4, 92; Códice de Tlatelolco in Códice Mendieta
- Florentine Sahagún
- Codex
Sahagún, Florentine Codex, I, 82-4, 92; Códice de Tlatelolco in Códice Mendieta, II, 250-1.
IV:15, 418; Torquemada
- Historia Mendieta
Mendieta, Historia, IV:15, 418; Torquemada, Monarquía Indiana, V (15:43), 176-7;
The Imperial College of Tlatelolco
- Silvermoon
SilverMoon, 'The Imperial College of Tlatelolco', 93-8;
The Slippery Earth, 184-94. 95 'yhuan in ycnotlacatl, in nentlacatl, in ahmo ahuiya
- Burkhart
Burkhart, The Slippery Earth, 184-94.
95 'yhuan in ycnotlacatl, in nentlacatl, in ahmo ahuiya, in ahmo paqui': 'Exhortación',
ed. García Quintana, 152-4; with the variation described in Huehuetlahtolli, ed. Bautista, fo.
2v.
El huehuetlatolli – antigua palabra – como fuente para la historia sociocultural de los nahuas
- Quintana
El huehuetlatolli, 239–43; ‘Exhortación de un padre a su hijo. Texto recogido por Andrés de Olmos’, ed. Josefina García Quintana
- Bañuls
Nahuatl Proverbs, Conundrums, and Metaphors, Collected by Sahagún
- Sullivan
Humanism and the Humanity of the Peoples of the New World: De habilitate et capacitate gentium (1537)’, ed. and trans. Andrew Laird
- Garcés
Luther's Ghost and Erasmus’ Masks in Spain
- Nieto
Huehuetlatolli, documento A: nota introductoria
- Kintana
- Villella