Nahua Confraternities in Early Colonial Mexico: The 1552 Ordinances of Fray Alonso de Molina, OFM

Abstract

This bilingual critical edition of Fray Alonso de Molina’s little-known confraternity regulations is a valuable addition to the growing corpus of colonial Nahuatl texts in available in English. Molina, brought to Mexico as a small child, was the Franciscans’ premier expert in Nahuatl and is a key figure in the early period of colonial Mexican history. He is best known as the author of the bilingual dictionary in Spanish and Nahuatl (1555 and 1571), a text crucial for friars’ evangelization efforts and still used as a key resource for modern scholars and translators. Molina also produced a bilingual confessional manual that went through multiple editions. This critical edition of his confraternity ordinances makes available another significant text. However, although the ordinances were important, editor-translator Barry Sell’s claim that they are the “most important” of Molina’s oeuvre (p. 50) is an exaggeration. However, Sell’s assertion that their “ultimate value lies precisely in challenging students of early modern central Mexico to use native and intrusive sources to study Nahuas and Spaniards, both on their own terms and their complex and fascinating interaction” (p. 63) is amply supported by the volume’s introductory articles and careful transcription and translation.The introductory essays, short and incisive, provide evidence and insight on early colonial processes. The contribution of Europeanist Larissa Taylor compares the Nahuatl regulations to ones found in Europe, concluding that Molina’s “is a set of rules that does not differ significantly from what one would find in the ‘Old World’ ” (p. 18). This might not be surprising, but the explicit comparison by an expert is valuable information. Distinguished colonial historian Asunción Lavrin gives an overview of confraternities in Spanish America, drawing on her considerable scholarly expertise in religious history. She points out that the Molina regulations emerge in a formative period of colonial history when, as she puts it, “the classic seed from which a mighty oak developed, and illustrate a relationship of subordination of the indigenous to the religious tenets of Christianity” (p. 37). Barry Sell’s two essays on the 1552 manuscript provide information on other known Nahuatl sodality regulations and offer keen insights into the extant copies of Molina’s regulations. As scholars attempt to establish the pace and depth of Christianization in Mexico and the effect of religious institutions on indigenous organization, the growth in the number and size of confraternities is a useful indicator. Although some have placed the true flowering of confraternities in the early seventeenth century, Sell argues persuasively that the existence of Molina’s regulations dating from the mid – sixteenth century, as well as Nahuatl confraternity records from Tula in the 1570s, point to an earlier florescence. Sell has studied the Tula records in detail and compares that community-based information with the Molina text.Three copies of Molina’s regulations are known to exist, residing in the collections of the University of California, Berkeley, Tulane University, and the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología in Mexico. The existence of several copies of this early colonial text is of importance in itself, given the labor-intensive nature of hand copying and the small number of literate Nahuatl speakers available to perform it. According to Sell, the task of copying probably fell to literate Nahua men. He has examined all three copies carefully and found textual evidence to support his contention that the manuscripts are consistent with Nahua writing practices. Some of the meticulous and persuasive explication of this point is of greater interest to linguists and philologists than to the historian or general reader, but Sell’s discussion of how these texts were produced gives insight into early sixteenth-century processes of cultural interaction. Molina and his fellow Nahuatl-speaking Franciscan, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, relied extensively on literate Nahua men both as translation consultants and as copyists. Although Molina’s name appears as the author of the confraternity regulations, Sell points out he was not a lone writer working in isolation but rather part of an extensive network of fellow friars and their Nahua consultants.Sell has transcribed and translated the copy located in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley. With the Nahuatl and English translation on facing pages, the volume will be useful both for those who wish to compare the texts and for those who wish to consult only the translation. Footnotes compare the Berkeley manuscript with the other extant copies. Sell also includes full transcriptions of those two manuscripts.This critical edition will prove useful to those interested in indigenous peoples, comparative religious history, and philology. For scholars focused on the history of early colonial Mexico, this volume is an indispensable primary source. The supporting scholarly material in the introductory essays and the textual transcription, translation, and commentary itself make this volume a valuable contribution to the field.