Thinking with the Inquisition: Heretical Science and Popular Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Mexico

Abstract

Digo, que entre los libros de mi uso matematico, filologos, humanistas y otros diferentes, hay algunos que necesitan de alguna expurgacion asi en elogios de herejes, como en errores que incidentemente traen y no de proposito controvertidos ni asumptados ... --Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora In his influential genealogy of the Latin American intellectual, La ciudad letrada [The Lettered City] (1984), Angel Rama interprets the relationship between colonial erudite and popular culture as an antagonistic competition between two linguistic registers. One of these registers that of public pomp and ostentation and was strongly impregnated by peninsular courtly norms [fue la publica y de aparato, que resulto fuertemente impregnada por la norma cortesana procedente de la peninsula], while the other popular and everyday, used by Hispano and Lusophone speakers in their private lives and in their social relations within the same lower class [fue la popular y cotidiana utilizada por los hispano y lusohablantes en su vida privada y en sus relaciones sociales dentro del mismo estrato bajo] (Rama 43-44). (1) In Rama's analysis, writing and orality are coextensive with social categories: encircling the colonial writerly city [ciudad escriturarial was the real city [ciudad real] composed of urban and rural subjects, collectively associated with the plebe or vulgo. To illustrate the attitude of the colonial elite toward the urban lower class, Rama cites a passage from the Mexican Creole scholar Siguenza y Gongora's 1692 letter to his friend the Admiral Pez, at the time a resident in the Spanish court in Madrid. In his letter Siguenza describes the massive riot that occurred in Mexico City the same year, blaming the disturbances on the resentment and ingratitude of the urban plebe. As Rama notes, Siguenza describes Mexico City's plebeian subjects in a cascade of racial epithets after declaring that they were extremely plebeian plebeians that they can only be known as the most wretched [plebe tan en extremo plebe, que solo ella lo puede ser de la que se reputare por la mas infame] (Siguenza y Gongora, Seis obras 113; Rama 46). Yet although he is correct in assigning language a central place in the articulation of the social relationships among colonial subjects, Rama's absolute division between high and low societies obfuscates the extensive areas of their mutual interaction as well as the particular ways in which the writings of colonial letrados invested social categories with meaning. The works of Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora are a case in point. While Siguenza's 1692 letter to which Rama refers clearly reflects elite anxieties about social and ethnic mixture, as he says the condemnable folly with which we live amid so many plebeians at the same time that we consider ourselves to be formidable [culpabilisimo descuidado con que vivimos entre tanta plebe al mismo tiempo que presumimos de formidables] (Siguenza y Gongora, Seis obras 119-20), the Creole scholar's invocation of terms such as plebe and vulgo is also part of his larger project to imagine a local public sphere. Without contradicting the political and theological models that underpinned Spanish absolutism and orthodox Catholicism, Siguenza's works anticipate a public arena in which what Rama calls the letrado would communicate directly with local citizens. This imagined public was the recipient of his most impassioned projects. In what some scholars have interpreted as an anticipation of Enlightenment values, Siguenza was one of the earliest examples of Creole antiquarianism and scientific modernity in a colonial context dominated by elite displays of loyalty to peninsular administration and scholastic orthodoxy in the Church and University. (2) Yet it is not often noted that both history and science were integral to Siguenza's vision of a Mexican patria, an expansive local homeland that demanded a concept of both patrimony (material documents of a local tradition) and citizenship (the interpellated subject of the love of patria), and thus are only fully explicable in reference to the political context in which they appeared. …