The arrival of Franciscan missionaries in the Valley of Mexico in the decades following the fall of the Aztec Empire in 1519 introduced Renaissance humanist learning to the indigenous elites of New Spain under the mandate of Christian evangelization and in the interest of preparing a generation of indigenous leaders who could participate in the transformation of Mexico Tenochtitlan into a fitting center of Spanish empire in the Americas. Andrew Laird’s Aztec Latin is a magisterial investigation into the intellectual production resulting from the spread of humanist learning in mid-1500s colonial Mexico and its encounter with Nahuatl traditions that highlights the contributions to early colonial history of the indigenous figures who acquired a mastery in Latin, historically overshadowed by the more visible Franciscan missionaries who served as its vectors, such as Fray Bernardino de Sahagún.
For a readership of classicists, the clearest points of reference for this scholarly conversation are likely to be David Lupher’s 2003 Romans in a New World[1] and Sabine MacCormack’s 2007 On the Wings of Time[2], but the real achievement represented by Aztec Latin must be understood as exceeding far beyond the narrow limits of the classical conversation: Laird’s study re-envisions the intellectual history of colonial Mexico with a major step forward that presents an intervention across several disciplines, generally siloed (to their own detriment, as Laird’s discussion deftly demonstrates). The sum totality of primary materials and documentary testimony brought to light and engaged with in this weighty tome, drawn from several different libraries and archives across the Americas and Europe, is already impressive, evidencing the fact that this meticulously argued and detailed study is the culmination of at least a decade of dedicated research. Together with Laird’s insights and lucid analyses, these represent a significant advancement to the scholarly discussion on New Spain. Laird’s monographic scope allows for a truly interdisciplinary and holistic overview of this important stage in Mexican colonial history, illuminating with greater vividity what has been up to this point an investigation conducted only intermittently and by scholars scattered across disciplines.
The nine substantive chapters present interrelated case studies in the intellectual engagements of colonial Mexico over a wide range of print and manuscript sources. For the reader who takes interest in one or another individual topic, each chapter is legible in its own right and has much to offer. Taken together, they make a compelling case for a hybridized cultural production resulting from the entanglement of cultures and identities, exposing the inadequacy of Manichean categories of ‘indigenous’ and ‘European’ for capturing the cultural production resulting from the colonial encounter. Laird’s balanced and incisive readings throughout demonstrate that what emerges at the interface between Latin, Spanish, and Nahuatl at the landmark point of imperial nascency is a literature of especial complexity that is almost sui generis.
For those with little familiarity with the general history of the Franciscan presence in colonial Mexico, Chapter 1 (‘Faith, Politics, and the Pursuit of Humanity: The First Scholars in New Spain’), in which Laird offers a brief history of the development of European humanism and profiles the first Franciscan missionaries to arrive in the Americas, enumerating their accomplishments and contribution to contemporary ideological debates, and Chapter 4 (‘Education of the Indigenous Nobility: The Imperial College of Santa Cruz at Santiago Tlatelolco’), on the initial context and motivations for the foundation of the College of Santa Cruz, the first European institution of higher learning in the Americas where indigenous students received an education in Latin, rhetoric, and logic, ostensibly in preparation for the priesthood, should be considered required reading. The remaining chapters consider a broad-sweeping range of texts that are sure to be of interest to scholars across a variety of disciplines. The astonishing array includes rhetorical treatises (Ch. 2, ‘Persuasion for a Pagan Audience: Rhetoric, Memory, and Action in Missionary Writing’), grammars of Amerindian languages (Ch. 3, ‘Between Babel and Utopia: Renaissance Grammar and Indigenous Languages’), translations of a variety of Latin and Spanish texts into Nahuatl, and the influence of the former on the production of original texts in Nahuatl (Ch. 5, ‘From the Epistolae et Evangelia to the Huehuetlahtolli: Indian Latinists and the Creation of Nahuatl Literature’), letters written in Latin from indigenous nobles to European sovereigns (Ch. 6, ‘Humanism and Ethnohistory: Petitions in Latin from Tlacopan and Azcapotzalco’), Nahuatl translations of Aesop’s fables (Ch. 7, ‘A Mirror for Mexican Princes: The Nahuatl Translations of Aesop’s Fables’), Sahagún’s Florentine Codex (Ch. 8, ‘Aztec Gods and Orators: Classical Learning and Indigenous Agency in the Florentine Codex’), and chronicles and universal histories (Ch. 9, ‘Universal Histories for Posterity: Native Chroniclers and Their European Sources’), each contributing to a comprehensive picture of the time period with a window onto some of the most pressing topics of the day, such as the debate on the status of the indigene, the consolidation and mechanisms of imperial power, and the construction of authority through a written corpus. Laird’s individual analyses are full of gratifying insights, both at the level of overview and among the specific cases (the clarification of a previously unidentified common Latin source text for several of the Nahuatl translations of Aesop’s fables stands out as one such example). The text is accompanied by 16 appealing color plates in high resolution and figures and images throughout.
After offering a succinct review of the achievements of the preceding chapters, the greater part of the closing chapter (Chapter 10, ‘General Conclusions and Envoi’) is devoted to identifying areas of further inquiry, offering attractive concrete suggestions ranging from more broad-sweeping studies to discretely delineated cases (one can imagine a generation of graduate students eager to enter this field of study and in search of dissertation topics readily taking up the more circumscribed and feasible of these). Together with the appendices, where Laird does the great service of synthesizing archival data and providing editions of texts with their translations, and the clarity and diligence with which he indicates his primary sources throughout the book, the promise articulated in the preface that his study will facilitate further enquiry is shown to be hardly an empty one, on the contrary, it is fulfilled in certain terms.
The avenues of study encouraged in this closing chapter provide particular paths forward, but one set of directives is worth highlighting for its especial urgency and its contribution to an ongoing critical turn. Laird confronts in explicit terms the imbrication of the spread of humanist learning with imperial expansion by which European systems of learning were deployed among indigenous populations as “instruments of control” (p. 321) in service of ideological aims, in order to convey the importance of a clear-eyed consideration of the socio-historical reality of mid-1500s New Spain as the aftermath of colonial suppression, the context out of which the cultural production which is the subject of Aztec Latin emerged. This is a conversation already pressing for Aztec Latin, since the weightiness of this condition surfaces periodically while acting as a subtext close beneath the surface throughout: the observation that closes the fourth chapter, for example, that indigenous students at the College of Santa Cruz were separated from their families from infancy to be brought up as Christians and denied direct knowledge of pre-Hispanic society is one of several such moments in which the reader is made to grapple with the inherent violence of this history, and where a more direct narrativization of this history would be welcome (as a chapter close, for some readers it will land with a thud). Laird is right to identify the implications of the history of colonialism on the conditions of subsequent intellectual production as calling for an especially “careful reflection” (p. 321) in consideration of future scholarship, reiterating the caveat included in his introduction against an overly rosy view of the indigenous position in New Spain through a recognition of the “upheaval and suffering caused by the Spanish invasion and its aftermath” (p. 6), with an appeal to Walter Benjamin’s familiar adage on the “monuments of civilization” constituting “monuments of barbarism.”
This discussion brings Laird to the next directive of particular interest to classicists (and even those without an interest in Mexican colonial history per se will want to sit up and pay attention): the call to rethink the implications of ‘classical reception’ as a hermeneutic construct (p. 321). Beyond the interventions outlined above, one of the more impactful arguments for which the monograph as a whole makes the case is its call to rethink the framework of classical reception studies generally. It is clear that Laird has sought to consciously avoid categorizing his monograph under the umbrella of ‘classical reception studies’, terms he assiduously avoids, but an audience of classicists who come to this text are likely to do so through this framework, and for this reason, Laird’s apparent resistance to the status of his monograph as such itself constitutes an argumentative position that ought to be engaged seriously. Scholars have already begun to sound the call for theorizing a critical classical reception studies that can take stock of what the subdiscipline of classical reception studies has achieved and what it continues to perpetrate. Laird’s monograph participates in this conversation, and his rejection of prevailing classical reception frameworks is borne out in his remarkable restraint, where classical texts and authors are concerned, in the granular analyses of texts that he proposes. To state it otherwise, he does not oversell his position as a classicist, the capacity in which he will be known to many BMCR readers, by centering the classical world. Laird’s balanced approach to a variety of literary and intellectual influences takes a broader view that avoids the solipsism into which classical reception studies can myopically drift, presuming the importance of antiquity to its master narrative. The position is one which Laird has consistently advocated, given that he has elsewhere already warned against classical reception studies that “presuppose[s] the centrality of classics even as [it] seek[s] to affirm it” (Laird and Miller 2018: 10).[3] To be sure, Laird’s unimpeachable proficiency as a Latinist is made to good use in his textual analyses, and some of the most sublime moments in the monograph, at least for this reader, were those moments when, for example, a Virgilian intertext offered an elegant clarification of an otherwise opaque anomaly in a Nahuatl text (p. 263). At such moments, Laird’s intellectual genealogy as a philologist of exceptional caliber cannot help but be on display; all of Laird’s classical erudition is brought to bear on the corpus which is his object of study, with citations ranging from Tacitus and Cicero to Plato and Herodotus, Ovid and Virgil, among many others. Nonetheless, the thesis of the monograph as a whole is conscientiously not framed in terms of the ‘afterlife of antiquity’, but rather the impact of the Franciscans in New Spain, a position of weighted significance given the author and the current conversation being had in the subfield of classical reception studies more broadly. Laird’s monograph should be commended for its commitment to such principles, and it can serve as a model for classicists towards rethinking how we engage with textual traditions and time periods beyond the traditionally circumscribed bounds of ‘classics’, most conservatively defined.
Notes
[1] Lupher, D. 2003. Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-century Spanish America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
[2] MacCormack, S. 2007. On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[3] Laird, A. 2018. “Introduction.” In A. Laird and N. Miller (eds), Antiquities and Classical Traditions in Latin America, 1–10. London: Wiley.