Aztec Latin

Abstract

Abstract This book calls attention to the importance of Renaissance humanism for indigenous history in early colonial Mexico. It shows how humanism’s most pervasive disciplines and practices—the study of grammar, the cultivation of eloquence, the training of leaders, scholarly translation, and antiquarian research—were transformed in New Spain to serve the interests of native elites as well as those of the Spanish authorities and religious orders. Recognition of the extent to which the first Mexican authors mastered and made use of European learning is bound to challenge some long-held assumptions, but this carefully documented study brings together the history of scholarship and early colonial history to offer a fresh assessment of what those indigenous authors really achieved. A detailed account of the Franciscans’ initiative to provide youths from the native nobility with an advanced Latin education provides the basis for examination of various kinds of writing produced by the friars and their native students over the course of the 1500s: manuals and vocabularies of Mesoamerican languages; translations of the Gospels, of a wide range of devotional literature, and of Aesop’s fables into the Mexican language of Nahuatl; and original writing in Latin and Nahuatl. Several testimonies about Aztec history and belief, ranging from the Florentine Codex to indigenous testimonies and chronicles, are also introduced or reassessed. Aztec Latin will be of interest to historians of Aztec and colonial Mexico, Renaissance humanism, classical reception, Latin, and Nahuatl.