Truth in Many Tongues: Religious Conversion and the Languages of the Early Spanish Empire

Abstract

Truth in Many Tongues examines the Spanish empire's language policies in the first century of Iberian colonization of the Americas. Daniel Wasserman-Soler compares language policies and practices in Granada and Valencia with those in various regions of New Spain throughout the sixteenth century. He argues that the empire's language policy was not particularly consistent and was much more hands-off compared to other policies related to colonization. He effectively demonstrates that Spanish language policy was much more adaptable than the historiography has tended to describe it.The first chapter examines how the Inquisition dealt with the use of language. Following the rise of Protestantism and the Council of Trent, inquisitors throughout the sixteenth century were leery of exposing the laity to complicated biblical texts and theological content in the vernacular because they believed that the untrained were likely to misinterpret scripture and theological concepts without pastoral guidance. Thus, the Inquisition tended to prohibit the use of vernacular language in Spanish Iberia. Wasserman-Soler states that recent studies have paid attention to inquisitors' individual and often self-serving motivations, and he argues that it is also important to account for more religiously based motivations such as pastoral concerns (p. 37). The remaining chapters outline the official royal language policy in various contexts and then explore how clergy interacted with those official policies, how they thought about language, and, finally, how they implemented language policy on the ground. Applied language policy usually meant that the friars made ad hoc decisions depending on local language factors and the level of language proficiency of the individual friars assigned to specific localities.Chapters 2 and 3 concentrate on language policy in Granada and Valencia. In Spanish Iberia, royal policy tended to be more restrictive toward Arabic, which the clergy were less likely to learn, and the Muslim population was less likely to convert to Catholicism. In Granada, Wasserman-Soler notes, Philip II prohibited Arabic in 1547 because he thought that its use had prevented the Islamic population's full evangelization, yet broad policies prohibiting Arabic were not readily enforced. Wasserman-Soler shows a broader spectrum of attitudes and policies toward Arabic use within the church locally. Wasserman-Soler proves that there was a wider range of attitudes and policies among church leaders and particular regions than has been portrayed in the historiography. He shows that policies were often implemented according to the attitudes and proclivities of individual decision makers in the church. While there was a range of attitudes and policies among the clerical authorities in both Granada and Valencia, Wasserman-Soler reveals a greater propensity to ban Arabic in the latter region.Chapters 4 and 5 provide a rich examination of language attitudes and practices by early Mexican church fathers as they sought to convert the Indigenous populations. While Wasserman-Soler refers to the first three Mexican provincial church councils as sources for official church language policy, the strength of these chapters is their close examination of the language skills, attitudes, and practices of individual clergymen when it came to the relationship between language fluency and effective conversion of the Indigenous populations in various geographic and linguistic regions of New Spain. Chapter 4 lays out the issues that clergy in the early sixteenth century had to grapple with as they began the process of Indigenous conversion. While initially the crown encouraged the clergy to learn Indigenous languages in order to effectively evangelize, there was also an explicit expectation that the Indigenous population would learn to speak Castilian (p. 98). Wasserman-Soler demonstrates that the early friars approached learning Native languages to teach Christian doctrine in a variety of ways. Thus the church councils increasingly encouraged the clergy to learn Native languages to communicate Christianity throughout New Spain and increasingly recognized the merits of those friars who did so effectively. Chapter 5 digs into what language learning looked like for clergy on the ground throughout central Mexico. The chapter closely examines specific religious texts written by friars in order to interpret their attitudes toward Indigenous languages and their usefulness in Indigenous conversion. The chapter also describes the wide variety of clerical bilingualism and how effectively, or not, clergy communicated with the communities that they served.Throughout the book, the more hands-on prohibitive language policy taken by the Castilian crown toward Arabic in Iberia stands in stark contrast with the much more flexible, complex, and adaptive approach toward Native languages in New Spain. While this monograph's focus on the clergy's perspective leaves it open to the potential criticism that it lacks the Indigenous perspective, it does provide a rich reading of theological texts by early Mexican church fathers. It provides a nuanced and welcome interpretation of clerical attitudes toward languages, theology, and indoctrination that enriches the field.