Aztec Latin
Renaissance Learning and Nahuatl Traditions in Early Colonial Mexico
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc
Published:29th Aug '24
Should be back in stock very soon
In 1536, only fifteen years after the fall of the Aztec empire, Franciscan missionaries began teaching Latin, classical rhetoric, and Aristotelian philosophy to native youths in central Mexico. The remarkable linguistic and cultural exchanges that would result from that initiative are the subject of this book. Aztec Latin highlights the importance of Renaissance humanist education for early colonial indigenous history, showing how practices central to humanism — the cultivation of eloquence, the training of leaders, scholarly translation, and antiquarian research — were transformed in New Spain to serve Indian elites as well as the Spanish authorities and religious orders. While Franciscan friars, inspired by Erasmus' ideal of a common tongue, applied principles of Latin grammar to Amerindian languages, native scholars translated the Gospels, a range of devotional literature, and even Aesop's fables into the Mexican language of Nahuatl. They also produced significant new writings in Latin and Nahuatl, adorning accounts of their ancestral past with parallels from Greek and Roman history and importing themes from classical and Christian sources to interpret pre-Hispanic customs and beliefs. Aztec Latin reveals the full extent to which the first Mexican authors mastered and made use of European learning and provides a timely reassessment of what those indigenous authors really achieved.
The encounter of the Nahua with Latin and the literate culture of the Renaissance is masterfully explored in this book. Medical treatises, vocabularies, grammars, biblical translations, pedagogical manuals, and edifying dialogues—some created to spread Christianity and others to account for the pre-Hispanic past—all pass under the careful gaze of the author, who manages to reconstruct the humanistic environment in which they were produced. With an unusual mix of directness and erudition, Andrew Laird changes our perspective and sheds new light on some of the most important works and personalities of sixteenth-century Mexico. * Berenice Alcántara Rojas, Institute of Historical Research, UNAM, Mexico *
In Aztec Latin, Andrew Laird transforms the intellectual history of the early modern Atlantic world. His learned and lucid book reveals the deep impact of Renaissance humanism on Europeans and Nahua alike. As Franciscans set out to form a cultivated indigenous elite, Latin and Nahuatl, classical texts and myths, and indigenous traditions and practices fused in novel and fascinating ways. These exchanges, made possible by force and disease, were highly unequal. Nonetheless, Mexican authors mastered classical rhetoric and Latin style, and used them to create innovative texts and advance favorable interpretations of their society and its past. * Anthony Grafton, Princeton University *
Aztec Latin is important for several reasons. It explains how and why alphabetic writing, Latin, and humanism spread among indigenous elites in colonial Mexico; it uncovers the work of Amerindian scholars who mastered classical and biblical legacies which today are little known; and it revisits the politics of Spanish colonization in the Americas. Andrew Laird's book means that the contribution native Mexicans made to early modern intellectual history can no longer be ignored. * Serge Gruzinski, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris *
ISBN: 9780197586358
Dimensions: 226mm x 155mm x 38mm
Weight: 862g
488 pages