Companion to Empire: A Genealogy of the Written Word in Spain and New Spain, c.550 - 1550. (Foro Hispanico)

Companion to Empire

FORO HISPÁNICO 37 COLECCIÓN HISPÁNICA DE FLANDES Y PAÍSES BAJOS Consejo de dirección: Nicole Delbecque, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Lovaina, Bélgica) Rita De Maeseneer, Universiteit Antwerpen (Amberes, Bélgica) Hub. Hermans, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (Groninga, Países Bajos) Sonja Herpoel, Universiteit Utrecht (Países Bajos) Ilse Logie, Universiteit Gent (Gante, Bélgica) Luz Rodríguez Carranza, Universiteit Leiden (Países Bajos) Maarten Steenmeijer, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen (Nimega, Países Bajos) Secretaria de redacción: María Eugenia Ocampo y Vilas Toda correspondencia relacionada con la redacción de la colección debe dirigirse a: María Eugenia Ocampo y Vilas – Foro Hispánico Universiteit Antwerpen CST – Departement Letterkunde (Gebouw D – 113) Grote Kauwenberg 13 B – 2000 Antwerpen Bélgica Administración: Editions Rodopi B.V. Toda correspondencia administrativa debe dirigirse a: Tijnmuiden 7 1046 AK Amsterdam Países Bajos Tel. +31-20-6114821 Fax +31-20-4472979 Diseño y maqueta: Editions Rodopi ISSN: 0925-8620

Companion to Empire A Genealogy of the Written Word in Spain and New Spain, c.550 – 1550

David Rojinsky

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010

Cover image: Patricia Álvarez, “Cartas de relación, 1” appeared in the catalogue Alfabetos. Mexico City: Galería de Arte Mexicano (GAM): October 2002. Cartas de relación, 2001, Bolsas de té, lino e hilo sobre papel japonés, 56 x 86 cm. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2866-1 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2867-8 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents Acknowledgements

7

Introduction

9

1. Generating the Origins of Letters and Kingdoms

31

2. The Vernacular Letter of the Law in the Siete Partidas

59

3. The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

93

4. Age of Iron, Age of Writing

137

5. The Task of Translators Past and Present

177

6. The Violence of the letrados

223

Postscript

261

Bibliography

267

Index

287

Acknowledgements Many people have contributed directly to the writing of this book, others have influenced me through their teaching or their conversation, and yet others have supported me in ways, which, while certainly less academic, have been equally valuable during the writing process. My appreciation and gratitude goes out to all of them and I would like to acknowledge at least some of them here: Nadia Altschul, Paty Álvarez, Frances Aparicio, Steve Bishop, Josiah Blackmore, Catherine Brown, James F. Burke, Miguel Castro Leñero, Carlos Chimal, Santiago Colás, Simon R. Doubleday, Steven N. Dworkin, Jason Dyke, Erik Ekman, María Luisa Escalante Spicer, Sylvia Figueroa, Tanya Fitzgerald, Jorge Carlos Guerrero, Ivan Kalmar, Walter Loiacono, Carmen Landa Aguilar, Gloria Lauri Lucente, Frank Lestringant, (the late) Greg Lucente, Marta Marín Domine, Laura Martins, Vincent Masse, Shaylih Muehlmann, Ken Mills, Andreas Motsch, Sonia Piccoli, Helena Pielichaty, José Rabasa, Mark Rojinsky, Benita Sampedro Vizcaya, Jeanette Sánchez Naranjo, Larissa Sánchez Pineda, Roberto Viereck Salinas, Carina Yervasi, Harry Zeit, and Juan Zevallos Aguilar. I am very grateful to the University of Michigan for the financial awards that I enjoyed both as an international graduate student and as a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the innovative Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. I also wish to express my appreciation to Dickinson College and the University of Toronto for the generous research funding and excellent resources, which have allowed me to progress with this project. I would like to acknowledge the fact that the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies of the University of Liverpool Press has kindly granted me permission to publish a revised version of an article published in BHS 80, 3 (July 2003). The article, which appears here in Chapter 2, was

originally entitled: ‘The Rule of Law and the Written Word in Alfonsine Castile: Demystifying a Consecrated Vernacular’. Warm thanks to Paty Álvarez for the cover illustration Cartas de relación 1, 2001. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Esther Roth of Rodopi Press for her patient guidance during the many months working together. This book is dedicated to my mother and father, Joyce and Boris Rojinsky.

Introduction Even by returning endlessly to the oldest primary sources, by scrutinizing the experience that linguistic and historical systems mask as they develop themselves, historians never apprehend origins, but only the successive stages of their loss. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (1975) The origin makes possible a field of knowledge whose function is to recover it […] The veneration of monuments becomes parody; the respect for ancient continuities becomes systematic dissociation; the critique of the injustices of the past by a truth held by men in the present becomes the destruction of the man who maintains knowledge by the injustice proper to the will to knowledge. Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (1971)

The year 1931 was a significant one for the history of the Romance Languages. It was, for example, in that year that the Spanish Republic decreed that Castilian was the nation’s official language for the first time in its history. It was also the year in which the French medieval historian, Ferdinand Lot, posed the question for which he has since then become best-known and most often cited amongst Romance linguists, “A quelle époque a-t-on cessé de parler latin?” Given the economic misery that Europe was suffering at the time, and the imminent depravity that was about to befall the continent, and not least of all in Spain, Lot’s concern with the origins of the Romance Languages might, quite justifiably, strike one as irrelevant, decadent and even bizarre. Yet, perhaps the reason such a question was posed in that year reflected the need to escape an uncertain present and to comfort oneself with the contemplation of the equally uncertain, but, nevertheless, distant and mythical past of a very different Europe.

10

Companion to Empire

Lot’s question had of course been posed in different forms over and over again for centuries and indeed, continues to be asked, albeit in a more nuanced and sophisticated fashion, by contemporary Romance linguists (Wright 1982; Banniard 1992; Herman 2000). Even amongst the most able scholars, however, a single answer, which would potentially establish once and for all when the Romance languages ‘began’ to be consciously spoken as languages distinct from Latin, continues to remain evasive. Nowadays, it must be said, the posing of such a question, though deserving of admiration or, at least, of some curiosity, is still more likely to bring to mind the nightmarish vision of a Borgean library: labyrinthine and, unfortunately, with no exit in sight. Nevertheless, the fact that the question is posed suggests that, in the aftermath of post-structuralism and its purported challenge to western logocentrism, the nostalgic search for authentic origins does apparently still go on. In this respect, it is also worth remembering that Romance Linguistics as we know it today is an area of study which evolved from that most archetypal of nineteenth century disciplines: Romance philology. I say archetypal in the sense that the teleological character of positivistic historiography with its easily identifiable primordial moments, its epochal zeniths, and its progressive march towards a predictable future, appears stripped down to a microcosmic template in the art of the nineteenth-century Romance philologist, and especially in the art of those philologists of the neo-grammarian persuasion (Iordan-Orr 1970). The application of phonetic laws to a single Latin word (the ‘parental’ language) allowed the neogrammarians to trace, plot and predict the corresponding modern Romance word (the ‘offspring’) in a sleight of hand which underscored a perfectly explicable and linear relationship between past and present, and, by extension, an affirmation of the belief in an identifiable continuity between origin and outcome. In effect, the art of etymologizing isolated Romance words constituted an allegorical assertion of a given Romance-speaking nation’s origins and the reproducible traditions that made its destiny predictable. Not surprisingly, in the case of my principle focus here, the Spanish language, the acknowledged masterpiece in the field was Menéndez Pidal’s Orígenes del español: estado lingüístico de la península ibérica hasta el siglo XI (1926).1 The Orígenes and Menéndez Pidal’s later meditations on the benefits of linguistic unity

Introduction

11

and uniformity demonstrated how language histories might symbolically avow the nation’s mythical origins, assert the notion of cultural unity and, in the process, establish the conditions of possibility for a glorious national destiny. In the aftermath of 1898 and the cultural identity crisis which followed, Menéndez Pidal’s work of the early to mid-twentieth century was driven by the desire to propagate a language ideology which, not only promoted the linguistic hegemony of Castile within the political frontiers of the Peninsula, but also sought to promote the Castilian language and culture as unifying forces for maintaining a ‘postcolonial’ transatlantic Hispanic community in the future (Del Valle 2002: 96-7). Such an ideological conception of language demonstrates how Romance philology continued to perform the role of companion to meta-narratives, which championed national and imperial continuity well into the twentieth century. ‘Post-Philology’ How then, does one go about writing a history of the Spanish language at the beginning of the twenty-first century when such metanarratives have – in many quarters - been discredited and when the search for authentic, easily-identifiable national origins has, in large part, been replaced by other historiographical methodologies and concerns? How, moreover, as Michelle R. Warren has asked, “can a discipline fostered in the midst of nineteenth-century European colonialisms engage critiques of that history and its legacies?” (Warren 2003: 19). In answering these questions, which, in Warren’s case, refer to ‘philology’ as a disciplinary practice that covers “historical linguistics, textual editing, literary analysis, and the study of national cultures” (Warren 20), Warren coins the term ‘PostPhilology’ as a potential methodological strategy. However, Warren first explains why she prefers this term over the ‘New Philology’ which had emerged in the 1990’s: While claiming to be engaging postmodern aesthetics as an instrument of critique for pre-modern cultural practices, this new philology had in fact revealed a ‘modern’ underbelly by continuing to privilege the authenticity of ‘original’ textual artifacts (Warren 26). Post-philology, meanwhile, would strive for “a dispersal of the originary moment and the displacement of the privilege accorded by modernism to both originality and authenticity”

12

Companion to Empire

(ibid.). Warren goes on to explain that while traditional philology had asserted the impossibility of historical rupture and supported ideologies of (national, historical and linguistic) continuity, an engagement with postmodern aesthetics would allow post-philology to do just the opposite: to tell, for example, linguistic histories which do not assume the coherence of language systems and which instead underscore dispersal, rupture and discontinuity in accounting for language change and history. Post-philology would also entail an engagement with postcolonial theory in the sense that, in the specific case of historical linguistics, “the relationship between language change and colonial maneuvers” (Warren 33) would be a primary concern for the historian since, in the equally specific case of the Romance languages, “Roman imperial history and subsequent European expansionisms shape linguistic histories embedded in coercive bilingualism and diglossic power relations” (ibid.). Ultimately, the post in post-philology is an indication of the debt that Warren’s proposed methodology would have to this combination of postmodern aesthetics and postcolonial theory because that methodology would, in short, be: a philology informed by the aesthetic order of postmodernity as concerns originality, and the political order of postcoloniality as concerns figures of domination. The postmodern gesture of philology lies in removing the idea of a privileged center from conceptions of critical practice and in analyzing the symptoms of desires for original artifacts – desires that permeate philology, modernist aesthetics, and colonial power relations alike. (Warren 36)

‘Post-philology’ is hence a useful terminological point of departure for describing my own methodology here. For, rather than privileging one mode of critical practice, or supporting an ideology of continuity, this book is a history of [the] language, which, more than anything, stresses the role of territorial expansion (Warren’s “figures of domination”) in fomenting the growth of certain kinds of textual culture. Indeed, while traditional philology championed the literary standard as the zenith of a language identified with a homogenous national community, I focus almost exclusively on ‘textual’ communities envisioned in historical and legal discourse. I am hence able to argue that such discourse was used to promote ideologies of unified territorial polities within conquered lands on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, Warren’s persistent reminder that post-philology be concerned not with a search for origins, but on the contrary, with a

Introduction

13

dispersal and displacement of supposed origins, is reflected by the fact that I have chosen to approach this history as a genealogy of the written word in pre-modern and early-modern Hispanic culture rather than as an excavation of the ‘birth’ of the Spanish language in medieval Cantabria. ‘Genealogy’ A genealogical approach to the writing of history gained currency during the last century because of Foucault’s re-interpretation of Nietzsche’s wirkliche Historie (‘effective’ or ‘real’ history). While Nietzsche himself was, ironically, a classical philologist by training, he had opposed himself to a nineteenth century philosophical tradition predicated on dialectics and he also vigorously opposed himself to the dominant (Hegelian) historiographical tradition which promoted the notion of a transcendental subject of historical consciousness. In the same way, Foucault’s early critiques of totalizing histories and his promotion of notions of rupture and discontinuity in historical analysis appeared to echo Nietzsche’s sentiments (Foucault 1972 [1969]). Most significantly in this respect, Foucault proposed that the sacrosanct place of the document as the unequivocal, primordial evidence, and hence monumental memory of the past would be replaced by its analysis as just one element within a nexus of discursive traces (Foucault 1972 [1969]: 7). The task of the historian would not now resemble that of the philologist deciphering “inert material[s]” from the past, but that of the archaeologist. For the historian’s task would be to excavate these documental traces and organize them into “series” or “unities” which might ultimately reveal another monument: the discursive limitations and horizons of knowledge production in any given age (ibid.). In a later essay from 1971, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy and History’, Foucault shifts decisively from an archaeological to a genealogical approach to the writing of history. If Foucault continued to emphasize discontinuity, dispersion and rupture as the primary focal points for a genealogical methodology, he also now outlined other characteristics of such an approach which he had derived directly from Nietzsche: for instance, the genealogist would celebrate the impossibility of objectivity through the use of irony and the parodic imitation of totalizing histories. Meanwhile, the historian’s search for Ursprung (‘origin’) would become superseded by the examination of the past in

14

Companion to Empire

terms of Herkunft (‘descent’) and Enstehung (‘emergence’) and hence, a search for multiple ‘origins’. And, by laying great stress on the shifting meanings of concepts and values, rather than on transhistorical continuities and eternal essences, the genealogist’s method would reflect both a striving for the dissolution of the absolute Subject (Logos) and of the unified individual subject of history, and, ultimately, of an equally unified ‘total’ history. Of course, such a methodology for the writing of history cannot be accepted as a universally applicable paradigm. A historiography designed to undermine seamless grand narratives, singular origins, and the untroubled agency of historical actors/subjects, is obviously of limited strategic use, for instance, in those post-colonial communities striving to assert their ancient territorial rights in former colonial possessions (Sánchez Prado 2005). What I intend here in particular are the histories of Latin America’s indigenous populations who were effectively reduced to the status of peoples without history within the colonial discourses of the Renaissance. To this day, the struggle continues for the recognition of aboriginal communal memories, which obviously pre-date the advent of a European colonial presence, and, by extension, the advent of culturally specific conceptions of History. Indeed, some would argue that if the affirmation of ancient origins would enhance indigenous political agency in the present, or would foster a sense of collective memory at the local level, then the mere gesture of recovering such origins should be welcomed, however subordinate to national ideologies and a dominant historical discourse they might eventually become (Klor de Alva in Sánchez Prado 2005: 49). Clearly, then, the origin-telos paradigm for the writing of such histories remains a valid, efficacious and ethical option for the assertion of a collective indigenous memory. Having said that, the genealogical paradigm of historical rupture and the dispersal of mythic origins remains equally valid when embarking upon an extended critique of (imperial) Euro-Christian historical and legal discourse of pre-modern and early-modern Hispanic cultures. I have therefore opted for this latter paradigm, and hence, for the basic principles of post-philology as the most appropriate methodological strategies for the task at hand here.

Introduction

15

A History of Latin and Spanish Letters In the same way that more recent histories of the language have dismissed the lay conception of an uncomplicated linear transition from a homogenous ‘Latin’ to an equally standard ‘Spanish’ (Penny 2000), each of the individual analyses that I present here are designed to disrupt any grand narrative suggested by the apparently totalizing structure of the book. For instance, I trace the mutually influential histories of both Latin and Spanish, rather than underscoring the ‘transitional’ relationship between the two languages. This makes prefect sense when we recognize that there was obviously no dramatic, irreversible transition from, or complete eclipse of Latin as a written language at any time before the modern period. Indeed, Latin enjoyed its own ‘renaissances’ in the form of (Carolingian) medieval Latin, and the classical form ‘recovered’ by early modern humanists. While their functions may have varied, the histories of both Latin and Castilian are inextricably linked even after the initial codification of vernacular script in the early thirteenth century. In effect, I displace the Spanish language from its customary hegemonic role and replace it with the more fundamental question of the development and expansion of writing as a tool for the exercising of power. The displacement of Spanish in favor of a more general consideration of writing in any language is particularly apparent in the chapters devoted to colonial history when the history of vernacular writing is embedded within a wider consideration of the introduction of alphabetic writing into the Americas. In particular, I briefly consider the early history of alphabetic Nahuatl as a manifestation of the fact that alphabetization might not simply function as a tool of empire, but also as a tool for negotiating post-conquest subjectivities. Moreover, despite the fact that I structure the first three chapters around those monumental figures associated precisely with the premodern transition from Latin to Spanish, I do not celebrate Isidore of Seville, Alfonso X el Sabio and Antonio de Nebrija, as ‘real’ figures of flesh and blood whom I intend to ‘resuscitate’ in my own writings. Instead, I treat each of these figures as discursive labels or principles around which certain kinds of textual culture were validated at distinct historical junctures in an attempt to solidify an alliance between letters and imperium. In other words, I organize my narrative around these legendary names on the understanding that I am more interested in the

16

Companion to Empire

larger ideological formations that they inhabit and reflect as writing subjects than in the lives of any one of them. My focus is thus more on how their scriptural production demonstrates the material impact of textual culture in their respective ages than on what it reveals about the ‘authors’’ “most profound” selves (Foucault 1977 [1969]: 138). While the later chapters (4, 5, 6) are not devoted to any single historical figure associated with the evolution of standard Spanish from Latin, they do include analyses of seminal figures and foundational texts associated most closely with the colonial importation of lettered culture into the Americas in the sixteenth century: the ‘first’ Renaissance history of the conquest in the form of Martyr D’Anghiera’s (Latinate) De Orbe Novo, Decades (1516); the Anales de Tlatelolco (1545 [1528?]), the ‘first’ indigenous account of the conquest in alphabetic Nahuatl; and Nuño de Guzmán’s transcription of the Proceso del Cazonci (1530), the symbolic beginning of the wars of conquest in western Mexico and of the bureaucratic conquest of Mexico by the Crown’s letrados. All six chapters of the book, therefore, deal to varying degrees, with the mythical origin(al)s of Hispanic letters and constitute a challenge to those same claims for origin and originality. In embracing the history of the Spanish language as an organizational framework for this book, I have therefore seen my task as one of excavating a relatively antiquated and unfashionable area of study to offer fresh vantage points from which to consider Hispanic history of the medieval and early modern periods. Like most histories of [the] language, the vast temporal scope of the book reaches almost one thousand years (7th to 16th centuries) and thus brings into even greater relief the ‘totalizing’ nature of such histories. Yet, by configuring the book as a ‘total’ history, and hence, imitating monumental and antiquarian historiography, I am drawing attention precisely to the implausibility of producing vast seamless continuities.2 While any emphasis on the imitation of a historiographical paradigm identified most immediately with transcendental (national) essences might appear incongruous with the writing of a revisionist history, we can simply note that, despite the nationalistic excesses of early twentieth century philology in Spain, historical linguistics in its broadest sense need not necessarily presuppose the reproduction of reactionary forms of scholarship anyway. Indeed, we might underscore this point further by pondering the fact that the two most

Introduction

17

fundamental concepts of contemporary cultural studies, hegemony (originally employed to refer to dominant languages with privileged linguistic registers) and subalternity (originally employed in reference to non-standardized languages enjoying no such dominance or privileged register) can in fact be traced back to Gramsci’s own early studies as a student of historical (neo) linguistics in early twentieth century Italy (Ives 2004). What this surprising connection between Gramscian radical thought and historical linguistics also encourages us to remember is that the study of the history of the language can serve as a point of departure for examining the relationship between conscious language planning policies and the creation of both national and imperial cultures. Indeed, a fundamental premise of this book is that Hispanic textual cultures were promoted and languages standardized and codified with a view to the exercising of proto-national and then, colonial power over conquered territories. In this same respect, we might note the parallel promotion of a ‘literate mentality’ during both the repopulation of Alfonso X el Sabio’s Castile and the alphabetization of Amerindian languages during the early colonization of the Americas. As Clanchy’s study (1979) of pre-modern England demonstrated some years ago, the emergence of a so-called ‘literate mentality’ was not a spontaneous development arising from the early spread of literacy, but was consciously constructed and promoted in response to the need for political centralization.3 ‘Writing’ Having said that, this book does not represent an attempt to present a panoramic overview of the parallel development of that same literate mentality in pre-modern and early modern Hispanic cultures. For what I intend by ‘a genealogy of the written word’ is obviously not the equivalent of a ‘history of writing’ and hence, an analysis of the putative transition from a ‘pre-history’ associated with oral traditions to ‘History’ associated with alphabetic literacy. Instead, we might recall that a fundamental characteristic of a genealogical method is that of stressing that apparently transcendental values and concepts have their own history of shifting meanings and functions which, in their turn, are inextricably linked to the contingency of shifting power relations. The case of writing is no exception in this respect. This

18

Companion to Empire

book, then, is the history of the mutable social functions and conceptualizations of writing in pre-modern and early-modern Hispanic cultures. Indeed, the singularity of the textual cultures dealt with in each of the six chapters is reinforced by the fact that the written word, especially in terms of its role as an instrument of power, undergoes its own series of transformations of social meaning and purpose. While the ‘protagonist’ of each chapter is the written word, it is not a continuous, unified and homogeneous protagonist, but a heterogeneous ‘character’ like the fragmented subject of history exposed by Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche.4 The conception of writing as historically variable also reveals a certain debt to the re-assessment of pre-modern and early-modern literacy proposed by Michel de Certeau (1975; 1984). De Certeau’s understanding of the transition from the pre-modern to the modern age is not presented as a shift from ‘orality’ to ‘literacy’ or from ‘manuscript culture’ to ‘print culture’, but instead, is conceptualized in terms of the different values attributed to the writing practice in each of the two periods.5 As far as de Certeau is concerned, the two periods might instead be distinguished in terms of well-known scriptural metaphors: the pre-modern world as a text (the Book of Nature) requiring interpretation and the modern world simply as a blank page on which reality (the social text) is to be inscribed by an expansionist imperial Europe. While the depiction of colonized territories as ‘blank pages’ on which Europe might inscribe its will has been dismissed as a negation of the presence of other (indigenous) ‘scripts’ prior to the advent of modern colonialism, de Certeau’s approach to historical periodization in terms of the emergence of a regulatory and productive writing practice in the modern period is still a useful point of departure for understanding this modern writing as both an analogy of and a metonym for territorial expansion. Similarly, my own approach here dovetails with the work of those historians, literary scholars, historical linguists and art historians who, in the wake of post-structuralism, have striven to debunk our understanding of the pre-modern era exclusively in terms of an ‘oral’, ‘earminded’ mentality and the modern era in terms of a ‘literate’ mentality, which privileges vision as the master sense, and which promotes cognitive processes associated with logico-empiricism (Carruthers 1992).6 Building upon Curtius’s (1953 [1948]) precedent, and stimulated by Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976 [1967]), medie-

Introduction

19

valists are now more likely to argue in favor of the concept of a scriptocentric rather than oral Christian Middle Ages and hence, a period in which the written word, despite the particularly low levels of literacy (in the modern sense), was a constant presence in the form of scriptural metaphors and symbols.7 As far as language theories and philosophy of language are concerned, medievalists now have more of a tendency to stress that the Christian Middle Ages, might also better be understood as an era in which sign theories, and speculation about language, both written and spoken, was fundamental to medieval consciousness with a degree of sophistication and complexity that is only comparable to our own contemporary (academic) concern with representation and semiotics.8 Finally, if we also take into consideration non-Christian scriptural traditions, we might ponder the scriptocentrism of medieval Spain’s Jews as another striking reason why the notion of an oral Middle Ages is no longer tenable: The Book of Formation, a central text of the influential Jewish Kabbalistic tradition, illustrates how for Kabbalistic scholars, the twenty two letters which made up the Hebrew alphabet were no less than the building blocks with which the universe was created (Drucker 1995; Scholem 1996; Eco 1997).9 The conception, therefore, of the pre-modern period in terms of its attitudes towards the written word rather than in terms of its low levels of literacy, is central to my own approach to pre-modern Castile. As my analysis progresses, I examine notions of writing as varied as the ancient notion of grammatica or in its Latin form litteratura as the study of individual letters and, by extension, of all that that has been written; writing as isomorphic with Latin in Romance speaking cultures where evolved proto-Romance pronunciation precluded a phoneme/grapheme equivalence between writing and speech and thus created the need for the invention of vernacular alphabets; alphabetic writing as a symbol of Christian civilization and vehicle of western logocentrism when confronted with Amerindian writing systems in the sixteenth century; writing as a convention of the scriptural bureaucracy which administered the expansion of material conquest; and, finally, writing in the more abstract form of bodily inscriptions (torture and execution) and their dependence on a ‘secondary’ inscription (juridical documentation) for their legitimation as acts of colonial ‘law-enforcement’.

20

Companion to Empire

Compañera del imperio The single thematic thread, which connects these multiple uses, functions and notions of writing, is the question of another historically variable concept: that of imperium. For this reason, I have chosen to use Nebrija’s assertion in the prologue to his Gramática castellana (1492) of the Renaissance cliché that ‘language was always a companion to empire’ (siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio) as the main title for the book. In this regard, my consideration of the relationship between writing and imperium in both the pre-modern and colonial periods is primarily indebted to Maravall’s studies of Hispanic imperium during the 1950’s. It also reflects Fuchs’ (2003) more contemporary notion of an ‘Imperium Studies’ and her argument that, by embracing the study of both pre-modern and early modern forms of imperium from a transatlantic perspective, postcolonial critics can be alerted “to the continuities and interdependence between the formation of early modern nations and their imperial aspirations” (Fuchs 2003: 73). Particularly relevant in the case of Spain is the fact that such an approach allows an analysis of early modern metropolitan centers in terms of ‘tentative’ nation forms which are also marked by conquests, migrations and internal tensions rather than as uniform loci of political power (Fuchs: 74). Fuchs contends that it is precisely the fissures inherent to the mythology of the nation as a continuous, unitary subject that studies of imperium should seek to reveal so as to avoid the trap of ‘domesticating’ the study of empire. Any methodology self-designated as ‘transatlantic’, simply because it takes into account both Spain and its colonies, should also be predicated on the obvious historical fact that medieval and early modern Spain was not an achieved whole confronting its ‘already achieved’ overseas territories, but a precarious construct striving for its very consolidation through overseas conquest (Fuchs: 78). My own analysis of imperium as a historically variable concept and polysemous term in early Hispanic textual cultures responds to this notion that maritime expansion combined the striving for the forging of an early modern state with the struggle to formulate modern conceptions of empire. Indeed, the fact that alphabetic letters, in both Latin and Spanish, rather than the spoken Castilian vernacular, would emerge as the earliest linguistic tool of empire, serves to symbolize that colonial expansion was carried out by a fledgling nation-state that

Introduction

21

had not yet become totally identified with a single national language, which might also represent imperial aspirations. Moreover, it also makes sense to trace the history of Hispanic imperium from its Late Imperial roots to the early modern era of transatlantic expansion simply because Renaissance colonial expansion would (initially) be depicted in terms of a medieval universal Christian empire derived (ultimately) from the imperial imagery of ancient Rome. Similarly, by analyzing both the pre-modern and early modern periods, we can obtain a more panoramic appreciation of the semantic mutability of the term imperium over the centuries. Williams (1989) reminds us that ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’, in their modern sense of political, economic and cultural administration of overseas territories from a metropolitan center, at least in the English-speaking world, date back only to the eighteenth century. In Renaissance Spain, as we shall see, the case is the same in the sense that, while transatlantic expansion might be mythologized using the imperial-imagery associated with the Holy Roman Empire, it was not customary for Spain’s maritime possessions to be referred to as a ‘Spanish Empire’ nor for the Kings of Castile to be referred to as ‘Emperors of the Americas’ before the end of the sixteenth century. In a similar vein, Klor de Alva (1992) and Mazzotti (2000) have underscored the fact that to use the term ‘colonialism’, (now more than ever conflated with ‘imperialism’, but strictly-speaking, a description of the settlement and internal administration of overseas territories by a foreign power), is a misnomer when used in respect to pre-Independence Latin America. Again, this is quite simply because the term was not employed with any frequency to identify Spanish overseas possessions before the nineteenth century. Yet, in underscoring the semantic mutability of the word imperium, I am not merely striving to avoid anachronism, but once again to bring a genealogical method to bear on the concept and practice of ‘imperial’ power. In the same way, therefore, that this book is a genealogy of the written word, it is also a cultural history of the different manifestations of imperium narrated and sustained by the written word. Alternative Literacies and Language Histories In the field of Colonial Latin American Studies of the last two decades, the pioneering scholarship dealing with the relationship

22

Companion to Empire

between Hispanic imperial expansion and alphabetic literacy is best illustrated by Walter D. Mignolo’s groundbreaking The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995). Mignolo’s identification of alphabetization as a form of colonial acculturation, and his concomitant interest in nonalphabetic forms of writing were of course preceded and have been succeeded over the years by other Latin American colonial studies devoted to similar themes (amongst the most notable of these we might include: Adorno 1986; Brotherston 1992; Galarza 1992; Gruzinski 1988, 1992; Klor de Alva 1988, 1989; Leinhard 1992; León Portilla 1959, 1961, 1996, 2003; Lockhart 1992, 1993; Mundy 1996; Quiñones Keiber 2002; Hill Boone 1994, 2000; Salomon 1999; Stone 2004). The majority of these studies, like Mignolo’s, were predicated on the post-structuralist debunking of western logocentrism by demythologizing alphabetic writing and revealing the constructed (ideological) nature of the historically variable categories of ‘literacy’ and ‘orality’. A central feature of these studies was to dismiss an ethnocentric conception of writing as a form of material inscription restricted exclusively to alphabetic systems, and to adopt a more culturally pluralistic definition of writing in the form of a whole series of material sign-carriers. These studies have thus reflected the resurgence of interest in non-alphabetic writing systems - particularly Mesoamerican pictographic codices and Inca quipus - as vehicles of equally alternative knowledges. Needless to say, one of my primary aims here is to complement such work in the field, principally by following Fuch’s prescription for an Imperium Studies, which would lay an equal amount of emphasis on the pre-modern antecedents of colonialism as on its development in the Renaissance. Indeed, my inclusion of a chapter on Alfonso X’s role in the development of vernacular writing responds directly to the neglect of this important episode in previous histories of the pre-modern antecedents to alphabetic colonialism in the Americas. Another of my primary influences has been the more purely archival research of historical linguists concerned with the external history of language change. In particular, I am thinking of the conclusions of historical linguists like Roger Wright (1982, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2002), who, albeit in an understated fashion at times, indicate the political rather than ‘internal’ nature of language change and the correspondence between language planning, ideology and political power. For example, Wright stresses that the decision to

Introduction

23

invent vernacular writing was political rather than linguistic, and attributes the proliferation of vernacular textuality in thirteenth century Castile to proto-nationalism. Other comparable medievalists whose works have been influential in this same respect include Clanchy (1979), Stock (1983), Irvine (1994), and Muldoon (1999). All of these studies would support a general thesis that there is a clear correspondence between the emergence of Western European textual cultures, the codification of ‘national’ laws according to Roman models, the thirteenth-century development of vernacular orthographic systems, and the expansion of kingdoms requiring more centralized methods of government to maintain their power base. Given the temporal scope of this study, and the fact that I focus almost exclusively on Christian narratives of pre-modern and early colonial history, there is no doubt that the written word of my title is hardly meant to be inclusive of all scriptural cultures existing within the Peninsula or the Americas from the early medieval period to the mid-sixteenth century. On the contrary, I have purposefully chosen to work with a series of textualities and foundational figures identified most closely with the ‘neo-Gothic’ tradition of pre-modern Hispanic history and the mythic conceptions of early colonial history. In this respect, we should also remember that the more antiquated histories of the language also tended to make only minimal allusions to the impact of non-Christian cultures on the evolution of Castilian. Such acknowledgement of the influence of other linguistic traditions was invariably subordinated to a master narrative dominated by the passage from Latin to Castilian. It is precisely this master narrative that I imitate and demystify here. Imperial Languages Past and Present Having said that, my aim is not to condemn the nationalistic excesses of twentieth century Hispanic Philology as a singular phenomenon, nor, by the same token, do I seek to perpetuate a scholarly Leyenda negra and to revel in denouncing, quite self-righteously, the exceptionalism of Hispanic colonial violence. Quite the contrary. While the focus of this study is obviously Hispanic textual cultures, readers should extrapolate from my arguments a more general meditation on the relationship between the written word and power, which might be imagined to have existed or to exist in other temporal and cultural

24

Companion to Empire

spaces, and other linguistic traditions. What I intend here in particular is reflected in the overt ‘presentism’ characterizing my historical method. For, if a seminal aspect of Nietzsche’s genealogy would be a self-conscious declaration of the impossibility of objectivity through the use of parody, it is also relevant to underscore the fact that the writer of history is her/himself also a product of the epistemological structures and limits of the present – the very site of her/his production of the past. In other words, the ‘injustices’ of the past should not be condemned from the “lofty heights” of an uncontaminated present where the historian might regard her/his own subjectivity as exempt from historical scrutiny (Foucault 1971). Rather than underscoring such a facile rupture between (colonial) past and (decolonized) present, and understanding the historian’s task as one of simply recuperating an unchanged past for the reading public of the present era, I instead embrace a conception of history which would posit the residual presence of the past in the present. We are thus once again reminded of de Certeau’s having combined the historical ‘operation’ with the most basic principles of a classic (Freudian) psychoanalytic method: just as the repressed memory might manifest itself repeatedly in consciousness in a superficially unrecognizable form, so the past might be understood as returning to the present in a disguised form (de Certeau 1986: 3-4). The past, then, for de Certeau, “re-bites” or “haunts” the present (ibid.). Consequently, while this book excavates the history of the relationship between the evolution of textual cultures and early manifestations of a specifically Hispanic imperium, it can also be read as an invitation to dwell upon germane relationships in our own contemporary world. Finally, it only remains for me to present a brief summary of the contents of each of the six chapters which follow: In Chapter 1, I analyze aspects of Isidore of Seville’s own ‘genealogical’ approach to history as manifested in the monumental Etymologiae sive Origines and the Historia de Regibus Gothorum which he composed during the seventh century. I go on to scrutinize the various uses of the term imperium in the latter work, to examine how his writing was intended to suture the historical rupture with Hispania’s imperial past. In stark contrast, I examine how the history was also intended to reflect a definitive rejection of the equally imperial claims of the Eastern Empire over Hispania. My overall argument is that, while grammatica was employed to promote ideological and material imperium, the

Introduction

25

polysemous nature of the very word imperium actually destabilized the etymological methodology (‘genealogy’), which posited a single recoverable (imperial) origin for both letters and kingdoms. While Chapter 2 is dedicated to the proliferation of vernacular writing during the reign of Alfonso X el Sabio (1252-1284) as manifested in his legislative masterpiece, the Siete Partidas, I begin the chapter by alluding to a contemporaneous Latinate text, Jiménez de Rada’s De Rebus Hispaniae (1247), which once again underscores the ancient notion of an isomorphic relationship between the origin of alphabetic letters and kingdoms. Yet, if Rada’s celebration of such a notion in the case of Castile would serve as a model for the prologue to Alfonso X’s proto-national vernacular history, the Estoria de Espanna (Primera Crónica General)(1270), as a declaration of the newly-found prestige of the vernacular written word, I argue that the actual diffusion of the vernacular as a written language would of course be effected most immediately by Alfonso X’s vernacular lawcodes. The greater part of this chapter, therefore, examines the correspondences between reconquest, repopulation and the acceptance of Castilian as an official written language of law. In Chapter 3, I initiate the transatlantic scope of the book with a comprehensive and revisionist analysis of Nebrija’s assertion that siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio. Having identified three types of modern reception and interpretation for the phrase, I ponder its significance within the context of Nebrija’s other works in both Latin and the vernacular. In many ways, the chapter is thus intended as a critical revision of Felix G. Olmedo’s nationalistic panegyric from 1944: Nebrija (1444-1522): Debelador de la barbarie, comentador eclesiástico, pedágogo, poeta. My overview of the social function of the written word during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs and my subsequent reading of Nebrija’s Latin poems from the 1480’s demonstrate the extent to which his wider corpus should be considered a reflection of the millenarian and imperial propaganda being promoted at the Castilian court. Even though the modern consensus is that imperio could not have possibly meant ‘empire’ in the modern sense of territorial overseas expansion, I argue that an imperial sentiment typifies the whole corpus and hence renders the compañera del imperio phrase ‘imperial’ by default. Moreover, my discussion of the tropes, figures, topoi and imagery, which typify Nebrija’s appreciation of the philologist’s craft in a wide variety of his

26

Companion to Empire

works, confirms that it is the humanistic discourse of barbarism and warfare which would eventually become the fundamental ‘companion’ to empire. In Chapter 4, I examine the manifestation of that same humanistic rhetoric during the initial period of transatlantic conquest and colonization. I focus on Martyr D’Anghiera’s De Orbe Novo, Decades (1516) as a means for gauging the extent to which the initial encounters between Renaissance Europe and America were understood in terms of a confrontation between alphabetic and non-alphabetic cultures. In particular, I trace the emergence of the ‘letterless Indian’ trope in the Decades and consider its discursive relationship to the classical figure of a mythical Golden Age in the invention of EuroChristian maritime expansion. While this image of a bucolic ‘state of nature’ was identified with a pre-literate, pristine Christianity, it also represented the fantasy of returning to the ‘primitive’ origins of contemporary ‘Iron Age’ society in the colonial imaginary. I conclude the chapter with a discussion of the extent to which the circulation of those same tropes constituted a fetishization of the (alphabetic) written word. In Chapter 5, meanwhile, my focus shifts from a European reification of an alphabetic writing system to a consideration of how early colonizers responded to Mesoamerican writing systems. As a point of departure, I allude to Book 2 of More’s Utopia (1516) to argue against the view that Amerindians were always imagined as ‘peoples without writing’, and, subsequently, having re-visited Martyr D’Anghiera’s history and other canonical conquest narratives of the early colonial period, I present a picture of more varied reactions to the scriptural cultures of the Valley of Mexico. Reactions, which, needless to say, reflected a whole series of often conflicting vested interests on the part of ecclesiastics, conquistadores, and primitivist and anti-primitivist humanists of the period. I then continue the demystification of alphabetic writing begun in the previous chapter by engaging directly with contemporary scholarship on the question of the importation of alphabetic writing into the Americas and especially as manifested in the historian James Lockhart’s New Philology of early colonial documentation in Nahuatl. My reading of Lockhart’s reproduction of the foundational Anales de Tlatelolco centers upon a discussion of whether the alphabetic transcription (translation) of preHispanic pictographic and oral traditions to produce such histories is

Introduction

27

isomorphic with the preservation of precisely those same traditions, or, on the other hand, simply constitutes the colonization of Amerindian culture by a culturally-specific ‘literate mentality’. In the sixth and final chapter the different conceptions and functions of the written word and the equally-varied forms of imperium presented throughout the book will culminate with a consideration of somewhat more abstract notions of writing and of a more dramatic fusion of writing and (imperial) power. In my reading of Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán’s transcription of the Proceso del Cazonci (1530), I examine the relationship between the ‘metaphorical writings’ or violent bodily inscriptions inflicted upon the Cazonci, and the writing up of those same inscriptions in the form of legal documentation. In effect, in this chapter I return more overtly to the question of the role of the written word in the Castilian vernacular as a language of empire, and in particular, the complex relationship between conquest, law-making and the expansion of that same vernacular in the early years of the so-called bureaucratic ‘conquest’ of New Spain by the Crown’s lawyers. My overall aim, then, is to deconstruct the traditional opposition between the violence of military conquest and this bureaucratization of colonial power by focusing on the foundational violence inherent to the establishment of a colonial polity and the rule of law.

28

Companion to Empire

Notes 1

Of course, Menéndez Pidal’s previous work, the Manual de gramática histórica española (1904), written in an attempt to bring Spanish linguistics up to speed with the nineteenth century neogrammarians’ prescriptions and views on phonetic laws would become a model historical grammar for Spanish and Latin American universities and was successful enough to demand several re-editions until 1941 (del Valle 2002). 2 Foucault interprets On the Genealogy of Morality as well as other later works as evidence of Nietzsche’s own transformation of his earlier, less ‘radical’ thoughts on the writing of history, and especially those contained in his ‘On the uses and disadvantages of history for life’ (1873-76). In this early essay, Nietzsche had proposed three kinds of history – monumental, antiquarian and critical – all of which, to varying degrees, might be put to profitable use by the historian, but only on condition that their use did not dispense of a fundamental principle for the writing of history: that the search for historical knowledge never substitute or threaten action (the “primum mobile of life”) in the present, or forfeit the use of history as a source for motivating preparation for the future. To pre-empt the danger that historical knowledge might indeed become an obstacle to actual living in the present and for the future, Nietzsche concedes that a culture should also allow itself, along with its historical sense, an unhistorical tendency or an expedient forgetting which is the prerequisite for all spontaneous action in the moment: “we shall thus have to account the capacity to feel to a certain degree unhistorically as being more vital and more fundamental, inasmuch as it constitutes the foundation upon which alone anything sound, healthy and great, anything truly human can grow” (Nietzsche 1989: 63). In other words, if a people or culture becomes so caught up with simply imitating the epic moments of their history as manifested in monumental history and its concomitant national rituals, or so consumed with a pious reverence for pristine national origins and ‘eternal’ traditions as in the case of antiquarian history, or, finally, so judgmental and condemnatory of their past that they destroy all trace of it quite nihilistically (as in the case of a critical history), they will be incapable of ‘acting anew’ and producing their own great cultural feats, except perhaps in the form of farcical parodic masquerades of past glories. Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche’s later works, however, leads to a re-shaping of the views expressed here. For instance, Foucault believes the later Nietzsche regarded the erasure of the subject as the logical and inevitable outcome of a rigorously applied critical history rather than as an ‘illusion’ that might be spared. Moreover, as for the modes of monumental and antiquarian history, Foucault believes Nietzsche would have genealogy revel in mocking the flamboyant masquerading of monumental history and its recuperations of past glories for the interpretation of more recent historical events. The imitation and farcical repetition of epic moments from the past would be driven to their extremes by a genealogical approach to the point of ridiculous parody which, ultimately, would leave no doubt as to the vacuous and ‘unreal’ nature of such histories. In the end, the ‘unreality’, badly concealed by monumental (linear) history, would provide a stark contrast to the past revealed by genealogy: “Taking up these masks, revitalizing the buffoonery of history, we adopt an identity whose unreality surpasses that of God who started the charade” (Foucault 1971: 161). Of course, while these masks immediately allude to the imitations used to

Introduction

29

‘dress up’ recent historical events in the guise of monumental past historical events as a means for underscoring historical continuity, the ‘mask’ of the monumental parody is analogous to another ‘mask’: that worn by the supposedly unified subject of history to conceal his heterogeneity. As for the second of Nietzsche’s modes of history, the antiquarian, Foucault explains that it too was re-formulated in terms of Nietzsche’s later genealogical methodology: while antiquarian history had previously sought to promote the national continuities of “soil, language and urban life” by conserving national origins for posterity, the genealogy would once again ‘unmask’ the unified self on which such a history was predicated: “If genealogy in its own right gives rise to questions concerning our native land, native language, or the laws that govern us, its intention is to reveal the heterogeneous systems which, masked by the self, inhibit the formation of any form of identity” (Foucault 1971: 162). 3 Street’s (1983) study underscores the relevance of Clanchy’s findings to analyses of the literacy/orality binary in modern social formations. 4 In On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), Nietzsche had proposed that histories of supposedly transcendental values could not simply be viewed as foundational absolutes which remained constant despite the vicissitudes of history, or as values which had arisen simply for utilitarian reasons and then, again, remained immutable with the passing of time. Instead, Nietzsche argued that the shifting value of such values should also be taken into account in writing such histories. His genealogy, then, was intended to be a means for writing the history of how values like the notion of good and evil, for example, did not emerge from a single origin and then remain constants transhistorically. Nietzsche argued that such values had multiple origins simply because their meaning was constantly being re-interpreted as a result and manifestation of a collision of forces driven by the will to power at distinct historical junctures: “There is no more important proposition for all kinds of historical research than that which we only arrive at with great effort but which we really should reach – namely, that the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and domination consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning’ [Sinn] and ‘purpose’ must necessarily be obscured and obliterated”. (Nietzsche 1994: 55). Nietzsche then extrapolated from this premise that the history of institutions, customs, art forms, and religious rites, might be understood in semiological terms as series of ‘signs’ (rather than as unchanging essences) constantly shifting in meaning by being re-interpreted over time, and, in such a way that the causes of these new interpretations need not be connected among themselves in linear formation, “but sometimes just follow and replace one another at random”. (Nietzsche 55). In other words, for Nietzsche, the writing of history ought to be approached in a way which demonstrates that all aspects of human life are the products of contingency and subject to perpetual change and manipulation (Ansell – Pearson 1994); rather than, in contrast, understanding those same aspects of human life as having emerged from a single primordial moment with a single (original) meaning (and use or purpose) which would remain fixed throughout time and which would be directed towards an

30

Companion to Empire

identifiable goal in the future where, once again, the original meaning would be found intact. 5 A salient feature of de Certeau’s work is his preoccupation with subjectivity and writing in the early colonial period. In fact, de Certeau’s concern with the role of the European voyages to the New World in the constitution of modern subjectivity led him to conceive of a ‘science of the Other’ or what he dubbed a heterology (de Certeau 1986). Whether the Other is God, people in other cultures, or the textual past inherent to historiography, the quest of any ‘voyage’ towards it is always similar: the production of self through the invention of an Other. At the same time, within this perception of modern consciousness as a striving for mastery over ‘otherness’, writing has a fundamental role to play. Not only does the modern writing practice function as a reflex of such a mentality, it also serves as a condition of the ‘production’ and ‘conquest’ of the Other and the space inhabited by the Other. As a result, de Certeau defines writing as a practice which, rather than depicting the world, fabricates it within a textual operation. This is particularly evident in de Certeau’s definition of modern historiography. The historian’s craft consists not of recording, but of ‘writing’ in the sense of constructing the world. Such a definition thereby dismisses the possibility of naive realism and supports the conception of history as a literary practice: “Thus the past is the fiction of the present” (de Certeau 1975: 10). 6 Mary Carruthers’ (1992) continuation of Frances Yates’ (1966) early work on the arts of memory made a significant contribution to the argument against the notion that phonetic literacy necessarily determined the development of logico-empirical thought and the shift to visual and spatialized perception which had been posited by the likes of Goody (1963) and Ong (1982). Carruthers demonstrated that these cognitive abilities could be equally attributable to training in an art of memory that had been linked to logic since the time of Aristotle. For other rebuttals of the traditional celebration of literacy over orality, see Fabian (1983), Street (1983), Finnegan (1988) and Halverson (1992). 7 Gellrich (1985) and Jaeger (2000), for instance, underscore the central importance of scriptural metaphors in pre-modern conceptions of reality and, specifically in the case of Jaeger, a growing sense of ‘self’ in textual terms. 8 Bloch (1983) and Vance (1986), for example, made significant contributions to the orality/literacy debate, not simply by stressing the scriptocentrism of the pre-modern era, but by pointing out that the distant alterity of the Middle Ages from our own present might not be as distant as we anticipated in the sense that, like our contemporary (academic) world, the Middle Ages was: “a period marked by intense debate about the nature and function of verbal signs. Linguistics, within the medieval order of human (conventionally or socially determined) discourse, constituted a proper field of legitimation capable of producing in the first instance knowledge of the perceptible world. Moreover, the millennium between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries was an age in which speculation about linguistic signs was fundamental to speculation about the larger universe. Not only was medieval culture a culture of the Book, its epistemology an epistemology of the Word and of words, but disciplines that today are considered primary were, until the Renaissance, subordinate to the ‘artes sermonicales’” (Bloch 1983: 12). 9 According to Scholem (1996), the text was composed by a Jewish Neo-Pythagorean between the third and the sixth century (167).

Chapter 1 Generating the Origins of Letters and Kingdoms Ideo autem prius de linguis, ac deinde de gentibus posuimos, quia ex linguis gentes, non ex gentibus linguae exortae sunt. [We have therefore placed the discussion of languages first and then the discussion of peoples, because peoples emerged from languages and not languages from peoples.] Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 9. 1. 14.

1

Book 9 of the twenty books which make up Isidore of Seville’s unfinished encyclopedic compendium, the Etymologiae, sive Origines, groups together a range of topics which, at least at first glance, appear to be unrelated and to have been organized as if at random. The book in question is entitled ‘De linguis, gentibus, regnis, militia, civibus, affinitatibus’ [On languages, peoples, kingdoms, (the ranks within) the military hierarchy, cities and family-trees]. Yet, if we accept that one of the governing principles of organization for the encyclopedic work had been the medieval “Great Chain of Being” (from God to inanimate materials), then to dedicate a book to what might be considered ‘human institutions’ makes perfect sense, given that the previous three books had been devoted to sacred topics.2 It also makes somewhat more sense if we point out that, after a brief discussion of the biblical explanation for the origin of languages, the book is devoted to analyzing the etymologies of the names of different peoples of the known world, of the terminology classifying imperial and late imperial military and civil rank, and relations of consanguinity in family genealogies. As the opening quotation above illustrates, the organizational premise for this particular section of the

32

Companion to Empire

Etymologiae is of course the biblical myth of Babel and hence, the notion that the confusion of tongues ‘spawned’ different peoples and, by extension, the classifications of structural inter-relation which those same peoples employed to govern themselves.3 In effect, the diversity of tongues and peoples might be traced along a line of descent in a way that mirrors the relations of kinship described at the end of the same book. Indeed, Book 9 serves as an emblematic example of how Isidore of Seville’s preoccupation with word origins was predicated upon a broader etymological methodology which united the development of languages and of (patriarchal) human history as ‘generational’ or even ‘reproductive’ processes deriving from a single unified origin. Given this compatibility between a Late Imperial search for the origins of words, languages and peoples, we might ponder Bloch’s contention that throughout the Christian Middle Ages, the notion of signification itself was consistently couched in genealogical terms and hence, confirmed the fact that this was a “pervasive association operative at all levels of culture and as close as one may come to a ‘mental structure’ of the age” (Bloch 1983: 34).4 ‘Genealogy’, then, in the sense intended by Bloch here, is quite incongruous with that proposed by Nietzsche, which I described in the introduction. Instead, this premodern genealogical methodology provided a principal of coherence around which a universal history between interconnected elements might be traced back to a single origin.5 Contemporary assessments of the value of etymology as the science of the ‘history of words’ or ‘word origins’ would, ironically, deny it and, by extension, would deny pre-modern genealogy any notion of historicity, anyway. Traditionally, etymology has been regarded as a means whereby the ‘authentic’ meaning of a given word might be revealed so as to make the user a ‘better’ speaker of a given language, yet this is of course a fallacy: if we accept that the ‘true’ meaning of a word is somehow a primordial signification then we replace the importance of the contemporary usage of a given word as determined by its social and historical transformation. To restore the etymon as the ‘true’ signified is to present an unquestionably stagnant understanding of language that is transhistorical rather than historical. It is to replace the myth of progress with the myth of a transcendent origin unaffected by historical processes (Attridge: 1989).

Generating the Origins of Letters and Kingdoms

33

Bearing this premise in mind, I am going to propose a more contemporary interpretation of the apparently intimate relationship between interwoven languages, peoples and kingdoms. My reading of selections from Isidore’s of Seville’s most emblematic works, the Etymologiae, sive Origines and the Historia de Regibus Gothorum, Vandalorum et Suevorum as textual ‘unities’ designed to provide ideological support for the legitimation of an apparently unified Visigothic Hispania, however, does not rule out the notion that peoples have their origin in languages, rather than languages in peoples. On the contrary, I would argue that these two texts demonstrate that language, and more specifically here, written language, does indeed produce people[s]: a Hispano-Roman-Gothic people reconciled after the Visigothic conversion to Catholicism and the concomitant military subjugation of virtually the whole Peninsula. In this opening chapter, my primary focus is therefore on Latinate writing and its ideological function in the (Christian) Iberian Peninsula of the period prior to the Moslem conquest of 711. Modern sources for this period (Fontaine 1959; Díaz y Díaz 1976; Hillgarth 1985a, 1985b; Collins 1991, 1992, 2000; Barnwell 1997; Valverde Castro 2000; Orlandis 2003) agree that, despite predictably low levels of literacy in the modern sense, the evidence is more than ample for suggesting an early use of writing to inscribe a vision of political, religious and cultural unity between the distinct communities of the Peninsula and hence, a centuries-old association of textuality (grammatica) with political power (imperium). In this respect, I will be specifically interested in examining how, in an attempt to reconcile his Romano-Gothic present with the imperial Roman past and, at the same time, to re-assert a more recent rupture with the Eastern Roman Empire, Isidore of Seville attributes multiple meanings to the term imperium in the Historia de Regibus Gothorum.6 The apparently polysemous nature of the word functions as a metaphor for the historical discontinuity characterizing the unprecedented Hispano-Roman and Gothic alliance and hence, ends up destabilizing the notion of imperial continuity supposedly enabled by the very writing of an (‘imperial’) history. Ironically, then, what I propose to do here is to analyze the history and varied meanings of a single word to reveal the inadequacy of Isidore of Seville’s etymological methodology for revealing the ‘origins’ of words, peoples and kingdoms. Finally, having considered Isidore of Seville’s encyclopedic and historiographical contribution to

34

Companion to Empire

the Visigothic renaissance, I end the chapter with a brief overview of another textual genre which underscored the continued interdependence of grammatica and imperium: the Visigothic law-codes which would have a significant impact on medieval Iberian lawmaking for centuries to come. The Origins of Words and Things The pre-modern analogy between the multiplication of humanity, the spread of languages and the ‘generation’ of signification is further illustrated by the fact that, from the fourth century onwards, Christian historiography (inaugurated by Eusebius of Caesarea, Constantine’s imperial historian) adopted the genealogical structure underpinning the Old Testament narrative to a more general conception of Christian historiography: with each successive generation, humanity ‘increased’ away from the original couple to a plethora of patriarchal families, tribes and ‘nations’ which dispersed and augmented with the passing of time. In the same way, pre-modern linguistic theory followed this conception of history closely. For while all languages were ultimately linked to the original language of Hebrew “lenguam Hebraicam omnium linguarum et litterarum esse matrem” [The Hebrew language is the mother of all languages and letters] (Etymologiae 1. 3. 4), all individual words were grounded in a primordial moment of signification which, not surprisingly, an etymological methodology was well equipped to reveal (Bloch 1983: 43). Similarly, contemporaneous grammatical theory stressed not only the centrality of etymology as a fundamental methodological tool, but that language itself could be reduced anatomically into original parts which, when assembled, would increase and produce discourse. Just as Hebrew was the ‘maternal’ language, and the etymon of a word revealed the original ‘authentic’ meaning of that same word, the letter was regarded as the original foundation on which words, groups of words, figures of speech and whole languages were dependent for their ‘generation’. The analogical relationship between human history and language theory found a parallel in the physical sciences; indeed, the parallel was not only unavoidable, but also embraced as an integral part of the generational conception of the material universe and its signification. The Greek stoicheion, which signifies ‘element’ or ‘atom’, was borrowed from ancient physics and applied to the description of letters.

Generating the Origins of Letters and Kingdoms

35

Letters were described accordingly as the elementa of grammar, thus confirming the corresponding parallels between material reality, formed by combinations of physical elements in ancient atomistic theory and language, formed by combinations of letters or linguistic elements (Bloch 1983; Irvine 1994; Drucker 1995; Scholem 1996). In this way, the physical world was made up of a kind of ‘language’, a ‘writing’ and, hence, of signifying chains which formed to create the ‘discourse’ of materiality. In Book 13, ‘De mundo et partibus’ [On the World and its Parts] of the Etymologiae, this analogy is reiterated: “Littera, pars minima, atomus est, nec dividi potest” [The letter, which is the smallest part, is the atom, and cannot be divided] (13. 2. 4). Echoing the works of the ancient grammarians, letters are presented as the smallest units of writing (indivisible and irreducible media of knowledge) and the most minute links in the chain which makes up the body of transmissible canonical textuality (Irvine 1994: 215). Just as all things are derived from the smallest particles, elementa, so all meaning must be traced back to the etymon of a given word and then to the individual letters/elements of which that same etymon is constituted. In this respect, it is also worth considering the medieval inheritance of the age-old conflict (at least as old as Plato’s Cratylus) between theories of languages that favored the notion of a naturalistic relationship between words and their referents and that of a conventional (arbitrary) relationship. Despite Isidore of Seville’s reverence for etymology as a methodological principle, he inherited the ancient acknowledgement of the coexistence of both a natural and an arbitrary sign/referent relationship: “Hinc est quod omnium nominum etymologiae non reperiuntur, quia quaedam non secundum qualitatem, qua genita sunt, sed iuxta arbitrium humanae voluntatis vocabula acceperunt” [Hence, etymologies cannot be found for all words, because certain things did not receive their names according to the nature with which they were created, but they received them by the arbitrariness of human will] (1. 29. 3). Yet, the primary motivation behind the composition of the Etymologiae was, by its very nature, to insist on the intimacy between the properties of words and things. Indeed, Isidore of Seville’s work perpetuates both the notion that the properties of things determined word formation and that naming was essentially indispensable for knowing “Nisi enim nomen scieris, cognitio rerum perit” [If you do not know the name, knowledge of

36

Companion to Empire

things is lost] (1. 7. 1). The world could therefore only be comprehended through the correct understanding of word origins, while the contemporaneous multiplicity of things and their significations, like the multiplicity of peoples, could be traced back to an absolute beginning when no differentiation existed between them. In other words, in ‘the beginning’ language and the physical world did indeed converge (Bloch 1983: 62). Grammar and Power in the Late Empire Isidore of Seville’s convictions regarding language and the physical world parallel the contemporaneous belief in the intimate relationship between grammatica (‘letters’) and imperium (‘power’). Indeed, it seems logical that if letters have such a fundamental and foundational role in human existence, then those same letters would also have a primordial role in the exercising of power over the world constructed from letters (‘elements’) and the peoples ‘emerging’ from language. Martin Irvine’s (1994) study of the period from the late empire to the advent of the Carolingian renaissance has proved to be extremely useful in confirming this conception of grammatical culture as a prerequisite for the wielding of different kinds of imperium in Visigothic Hispania. Irvine argues compellingly for an understanding of the Christian translatio imperii et studii of the late empire in terms of a preservation of a classical grammatical tradition which permitted its practitioners access to political power: During the time of the empire, only those trained in grammatica could hope to rise to political power, serving in the upper levels of Roman civil and imperial administration. It was this system that the young Augustine, Cassiodorus and future Pope Gregory I, like generations of Romans before them, were trained to exploit for their own advancement. The social and political function of grammatica remained a constant: throughout the Middle Ages, generations of monks and clerics could depend on expertise in grammatica for advancement through the ranks of civil and ecclesiastical authority. Only those trained in grammatica were empowered with the specialized literacy and textual competence that marked the litteratus in the Roman Empire, in short, that gave one access to textual power. (Irvine 1994: 49)

Quite simply, then, grammatica was indispensable for acquiring imperium, understood most immediately here as ‘political power’ wielded by an individual through the authority afforded by public office.

Generating the Origins of Letters and Kingdoms

37

That the grammarian also considered himself the custos historiae or ‘guardian of textual tradition’ was essential to the reproduction of an ideology that allowed the synonymy between power and letters. For grammatical discourse was responsible for both establishing the canonicity of a body of texts and nullifying their temporal and cultural alterity by producing a myth of tradition – and, in particular, an unbroken tradition of literary discourse which united Greek and early Roman literature with that of the present. By forging a textual corpus underscored by tradition and a temporal unity which dissolved the distinction between the past and present, grammarians were appropriating auctoritas as a constant, unchanging and untarnished ideology of power which was handed down from generation to generation and permitted them access to imperium (Irvine 1994: 86). The tripartite parallel of tradition – canonicity – authority was central to Saint Augustine’s codification of the Roman grammatical tradition and its transformation into a grammatica Christiana, that is, a textual culture at the center of whose canonical corpus was no longer Virgil or Homer, but the Holy Scriptures and a Christian textual community whose authority rested on establishing a ‘Christian’ method for textual interpretation (Ando 1994; Augustine 1996). In other words, even though the major shift characterizing the transition from the late empire to the medieval period was that of Christianizing pagan literature and establishing a canonical corpus centered on the Bible, grammatica as a master discipline of ‘letters’ remained a constant, as did its indispensability to the exercising of political power.7 The History of Alphabetic Letters In Visigothic Iberia, Isidore of Seville was not only the “final codifier of the model of grammatica known universally throughout the Middle Ages” (Irvine 209), but also the personification of the alliance between letters and imperium bolstered by grammatical tradition. Once he became archbishop of Seville, Isidore also became a chief administrator, participating in and leading the Toledo Councils, which, after King Recarred’s conversion in 589, resulted in a mutually beneficial political alliance between Church and monarchy. While the Etymologiae, sive Origines serves as formidable proof that the grammarian was both encyclopedist and polymath, and underscores the indispensability of letters for the preservation of knowledge and its

38

Companion to Empire

transmission, the work is therefore also the magnum opus of an ideologue and administrator who strove to underscore how essential grammatica was and would be to the successful preservation of the new Visigothic kingdom.8 The derivative nature of the Etymologiae, however, cannot be overstated. In constituting a compendium of knowledge inherited from pagan and patristic sources, the work is an emblematic illustration of a pre-modern transmission rather than augmentation of authoritative knowledge (Barney et al. 2006: 10-11). Isidore of Seville’s aim was to synthesize and organize excerpts from the works of earlier writers in such a way that a vast storehouse of information might be made accessible to the lay and clerical readers of his own age in a simplified form replete with quotations and paraphrases. In that sense, Isidore of Seville resembles the archetypal medieval Christian chronicler described some years ago by Spiegel as “a faithful conveyor of the written record and his text as a vehicle for transmitting segments of the past conjoined” (Spiegel 1983: 45). Unfortunately, as perhaps the most celebrated transmitter of fanciful and erroneous etymological assertions, Isidore of Seville also resembled the archetypal medieval chronicler in other ways, for “by substituting compilation for research, the medieval chronicler became peculiarly a slave to his documents, whose errors he piously passed on” (Spiegel 1983: 45). Having said that, it is also worth noting that the scorn poured upon Isidore of Seville by modern scholars for his adherence to a “hyper-Cratylian mimological” etymology (which permitted him to derive homo from humus, for example, because man had been formed from the soil of the earth), would also be replaced by praise of his method during the resurgence of interest in etymology in the sixteenth century (Eco 1995: 80–85). More importantly for my purposes here, however, is the fact that the inherited knowledge compiled in the Etymologiae still served to symbolize historical continuity between the Hispano-Roman present and antiquity, and, hence, the continued celebration of the ancient reverence for grammatica under Visigothic rule. The scope and systematic structure of the Etymologiae, which were fundamental to the later medieval summa encyclopedic tradition, appeal to such historical continuity by also reflecting the pre-modern semiotic conception of the universe (Ukolova 1989: 310). For this first comprehensive encyclopedia of the Middle Ages serves as an analogue to a medieval Christian universe composed of symbols in a

Generating the Origins of Letters and Kingdoms

39

chain of signification, which ultimately led to the divine author and transcendental signified of that same universe (Maravall 1967a [1953], 1967d [1966]; Ladner 1979). The unified, hierarchically ordered cosmic system reflected in the composition of the encyclopedia might then offer a model for preserving the symbolic unity of Visigothic Hispania. Indeed, the fact that the opening book of the encyclopedia is dedicated to grammar, symbolizes not only the foundational importance of the discipline to the Etymologiae itself, but also to the condition of possibility for knowledge of the universe and for the inscription of Hispania within that same universe. Given the genealogical methodology inherent to early medieval language theory it is not surprising that Isidore of Seville’s work begins with a standard assessment of the building blocks or ‘atoms’ which produce discourse: “Primordia grammaticae artis litterae communes existunt” [The beginnings of the art of grammar are common letters] (1. 3. 3). Of course, since these “primordial atoms” also have their own history, Isidore of Seville gives a brief summary of the accepted biblical and pagan explanations for the emergence of the letters of the three sacred languages: Hebrew, Greek and Latin.9 While Hebrew was considered to be the oldest spoken language, it was also the source of all alphabetic writing having first been written in the commandments received by Moses: “Hebraeorum litteras a lege coepisse per Moysen” [Hebrew letters began with the law set down by Moses] (1. 3. 5). Greek letters, meanwhile, are imitations of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics encountered by the goddess Isis, but were first invented and used by the Phoenicians: “Graecarum litterarum usum primi Phoenices invenerunt” [The Phoenicians were the first ones who invented the use of Greek letters] (1. 3. 5). In their turn, Latin letters were first brought to the Italic peninsula by the nymph Carmentis (1. 4. 1). Despite the brevity of this account of the origins of alphabets, and despite his omission of any mention of the semi-mythic Cadmus or the Egyptian god Thoth (identified with the Greek Hermes) to whom the invention of writing was generally attributed, Isidore of Seville thereby presents the most significant elements of the history of writing that would endure throughout the medieval period and, as we shall discuss in the later chapters, would be adhered to by Renaissance humanists interested in ‘exotic’ writing systems. Beyond the invention of letters, however, Isidore of Seville deems it necessary to also

40

Companion to Empire

inform his readers of the mystical (both Christian and pagan) symbolism associated with the form of certain Greek letters, the “mysticas litteras” (1. 3. 8): the letter Y, for instance, is identified with life, the  (theta) with death, and the T with the cross. The A (alpha) and the  (omega), of course, as the ‘beginning’ and the ‘end’, are identified in Christian belief with the universality of Christ (ibid.). While Isidore of Seville thereby reveals the patristic nature of many of his sources, the encyclopedic and etymological tradition he embodies can, in large part, be traced back to the influence of the Roman Republican polymath Varro (116-27 b.c.e.).10 This influence is particularly apparent in the first five books where he presents the basic building blocks of a general education based on the seven liberal arts (Mignolo 1995: 138; Barney et al 2006: 11). The first two books are also indebted to Cassiodorus’ fifth century Institutiones and Donatus’ fourth century Ars grammatica. These influences are apparent in the explanation of the nature of letters as “signs of things” and hence, his reiterating the ancient notion of an intimacy between letter, speech and referent: “Litterae autem sunt indices rerum, signa verborum […] Verba enim per oculos non per aures introducunt” [Letters are signs of things, figures of words […] For they introduce words through the eyes and not through the ears] (1. 3. 1). Similarly, Isidore of Seville restates the ancient function of writing as a receptacle for memory and the conception of letters as bearing an inherent power to preserve the voice: “quibus tanta vis est ut nobis dicta absentium sine voce loquantur” [the power of letters is so great that they speak the words of those who are absent without the use of a voice] (ibid.). The written word is thus closely connected to memory, the remembrance of voices conveying knowledge, and identifying things and persons no longer present. Any reverential attitude towards the written word lay primarily in these mnemonic qualities: “Usus litterarum repertus propter memoriam rerum. Nam ne oblivione fugiant, litteris alligantur” [The use of letters was found so as to preserve the memory of things. For, so that they might not vanish into oblivion, things are tied to letters] (1. 3. 2). Yates (1966), Colish (1969), Vance (1986), and Carruthers (1992) have observed that the medieval privileging of the faculty of memory is in part attributable to Augustinian Neo-Platonism and the conception of all understanding as a form of recollection. Intelligible objects of knowledge are spiritual entities in that they exist immutably

Generating the Origins of Letters and Kingdoms

41

and eternally within the mind of God, and hence, by extension, always already existed; but they can only be grasped (recalled) by human beings through divine illumination which is facilitated by the tripartite action of the memory, intellect and will (Vance 1986: 52). While these three faculties correspond to the Trinity, memory is the most powerful, corresponding as it does to the Father, while the intellect is the analogue of the Son and the will the analogue of the Holy Spirit. Not surprisingly, there emerges a parallel here between a conception of knowledge as a ‘recollection’ or ‘recuperation’ of the previouslyknown or the ‘already existing’ and Isidore of Seville’s concern with word origins: since etymologies demonstrate that all words contain a previous, primordial signification which allows them to signify as signs in written discourse. The legacy of this parallel between writing and the externalization of memory is also reflected in the standard definition of historia as a discipline to be subsumed under the category of grammar: “Quae enim videntur, sine mendacio proferuntur. Haec disciplina ad Grammaticam pertinet, quia quidquid dignum memoria est litteris mandatur” [For those things which are seen can be declared without fabrication. This discipline belongs to grammar, because whatever is worthy of memory is entrusted to letters] (1. 41. 2). While we can therefore identify a parallel between the univ-ersalizing structure of the Etymologiae and the desired cohesiveness of a unified Hispania which can boast a recuperated classical culture, we should also reiterate the methodological parallel between the history of individual words and history in general: the search for historical origins or unchanging essences to be recovered by the inscription of the past characterizes historiography in the same way that it characterizes the etymologizing of words. Visigothic Histories and the Origins of imperium As far as Isidore of Seville’s own purely historical work is concerned, his Chronicon Mundi, a universal history which, like that of his contemporary and countryman, Juan de Biclaro (540–621), continued the Eusebian historiographical model for a universal history of the world, clearly illustrates this pre-modern genealogical search for continuity and the recovery of a unique origin (Wolf 1990). However, it would be for the first ever history dedicated specifically to the Visigoths in Spain that Isidore of Seville’s historiography will most

42

Companion to Empire

often be remembered. Others, like Augustine’s pupil, Paulus Orosius (385–420), Cassiodorus (490–582) and Jordanes (6th century) who summarized Cassiodorus’ history of the Goths in his Getica (551) and, of course, once again, Juan de Biclaro, of whom Isidore was certainly aware and by whom he was most likely influenced, had all written histories of the Goths or general histories which had included accounts of the feats of the Goths in Roman-Christian universal history. None of these other historians, however, had devoted their histories solely to the Goths in Spain. Isidore of Seville was probably commissioned by the monarchy to produce such a work (Barnwell 1997), and chose therefore to compose a history that underscored the role of Providence in the unfolding of historical events. He was thus able to celebrate the Goths as a people chosen by God to succeed Roman rule in the Peninsula and, in the process, to consolidate the ideological fusion of Romans and Visigoths within a universal Catholicism (Hillgarth 1985b [1970]). If the Etymologiae symbolized territorial cohesion and cultural unity, they were primarily intended as a means for preserving late imperial textuality in early medieval scribal culture and amongst literate members of the Visigothic nobility; in contrast, the Historia de Regibus Gothorum was intended to function as a propagandistic assertion of the divinely-sanctioned place of the Visigoths in Hispanic history and, simultaneously, as a defiant declaration of the political autonomy of the Visigothic monarchy. The history was clearly, therefore, directed at both the imperial court in Constantinople and potentially rebellious members of the Visigothic nobility at home. The history not only demonstrated that Isidore of Seville now regarded Gothic feats and victories as ‘worthy of letters’ and of their monumentalization in a history, but also that the inscription of Visigothic Hispania’s origins might consolidate material rule over the Peninsula and hence demonstrate the manipulation of grammatical culture for the maintenance of imperium. More importantly, however, is the fact that I have chosen this particular history to examine the semantic mutability and socio-historical variability of the term imperium itself. If, some years ago, Hillgarth (1985a [1966]: 501) noted that the use of the word imperium to describe Hispania itself appears for the first time in the Laus Hispaniae which precedes the history, I will be more concerned with identifying the shifting meanings of this one emblematic word. In doing so, I aim to draw

Generating the Origins of Letters and Kingdoms

43

attention to the ideological need to intensify the productivity of grammatical culture at a time of historical rupture when different kinds of ‘imperial’ power requiring their own ideological legitimation would emerge. Ultimately, Isidore of Seville’s attempt to inscribe a vision of imperial continuity between the ancient imperial province of Hispania (the ‘origin’) and the Roman-Visgothic kingdom of his present was compromised by the need to negotiate the material discontinuity between distinct forms of imperial rule. The word imperium had, of course, had a long history that reflects the shifting socio-cultural and political conditions in which it was employed over the centuries. However, as modern historians of imperialism point out, despite the variety of semantic transformations which imperium went through before the modern period, its theoretical roots always reached back to antiquity (Folz 1969; Pagden 1995; Muldoon 1999). During the period of the Roman Republic, to hold or wield imperium was to possess the moral authority associated with the office of Roman magistrate and hence, legitimate political office, which could be held by several individuals (imperatores ‘those who command’) simultaneously. By the first century b.c.e., imperium was also associated more recognizably with the geographical extent of the ‘rule’ of the Roman people and the political and cultural unity created out of the diverse territories that had been brought under Roman rule by its generals and designated provinciae of the empire. By the end of the Republican period, ‘empire’ was closely associated with military rule in the sense that those same Roman generals who were destined to create the transition from Republic to early empire were regarded as wielding imperium in the name of the Roman people for every territorial conquest they made over other states. Only when Octavius Caesar became ‘Augustus’ in 29 b.c.e. did the imperium or authority of the Roman people became represented in the figure of a single individual. In that sense, the emergence of a Roman empire was paradoxical: command of the state apparatus became restricted in the hands of a single ruler and legislator when the supposed shift from Republic to empire had been intended to facilitate the participation of all Roman citizens in the governance of state (Pagden 1995: 17). It is for this reason that the empire immediately found its critics amongst its own ranks: those who condemned imperial rule as the breeding ground for moral decay and absolutist corruption and longed for the lost

44

Companion to Empire

Republican era as one characterized by Stoical virtue. The supporters of Roman imperialism, however, stressed the legislative nature of the office of ‘emperor’ and the association of empire with universal law. Moreover, it was the conception of Roman law as universal law, which was a primum mobile in establishing a merger between imperium and juridical rule over the entire known world Of the varied nuances implied in the term imperium which premodern and early-modern Christendom would inherit from Rome we can list the following: simply ‘command’, ‘authority’, ‘rule’ or ‘political office’ with no territorial connotations; rule over provinciae brought about through military conquest; and, finally, the extension of Roman rule, law and culture to other territories, and potentially to the whole world under the absolute sovereignty of a single ruler. After the Christianization of the empire under Constantine in the fourth century, the universalism of imperial ideology was capitalized upon and absorbed by Christians within the notion of an Imperium Christianum co-extensive with the Roman empire. However, the political collapse of the Western Empire in the fifth century and the subsequent evolution of former western provinciae into kingdoms ruled over by the Germanic invaders would lead to further fragmentation of the meaning and nature of imperium (Folz 1969: 60). While the Germanic rulers would continue to take advantage of pre-existing Roman institutions and imperial insignia and, in general, to maintain a certain reverence for Constantinople as the heart of a universal Christian empire, they successfully repelled Justinian’s attempts to re-conquer the western kingdoms and to re-create the ancient political unity between east and west in the sixth century (Brown 1992). The ancient empire thus remained divided between the Byzantine Empire and a series of western kingdoms unified only by a common Christianity. During the same period, a distinction arose between ‘kings’ and ‘emperors’ in the West in the sense that those medieval kings who conquered and ruled over other kingdoms regarded themselves as wielding imperium over several territories and as bearing an authority superior to that of kings ruling over a single territory.11 If Irvine’s (1994) analysis stressed the notion of imperium as an individual’s access to political power, it is the association of the term more specifically with the legitimation of territorial expansion and administration which interests me here. For there is little doubt that in the specific case of Hispania, the term had also enjoyed multiple

Generating the Origins of Letters and Kingdoms

45

significations and semantic mutations in the centuries preceding Visgothic rule and more importantly, even in the seventh century, long after the fall of the ancient Roman empire in the West, imperium still retained its ancient association with universal territorial ‘empire’. In fact, scholars have argued that there was a deliberate policy on the parts of the Visigothic monarchy and the Iberian Bishops to imitate the ancient empire so as to demonstrate that the Goths were the legitimate heirs to Roman imperial jurisdiction over the Peninsula and that they were in effect the equals of the emperors of the Eastern Empire who made the same claim (Valverde 2000: 184). Imperium, therefore, fragmented into three distinct but interconnected designations: the Eastern Empire, the ancient (unified) Roman Empire and the resurgence of a Western Empire under Gothic hegemony. This appeal to the ancient Roman Empire would appear to indicate that the principal motivation behind historiographical projects like Isidore of Seville’s Historia de Regibus Gothorum was thus to stress the continuity between Gothic hegemony and an ‘imperial’ precedent. While this appeal to ancient ‘imperial’ origins would also appear to suggest a manifestation of the genealogical approach to medieval history posited by Bloch, we should, nevertheless, be cautious. Medieval chronicles of this period between the fall of the western empire and the evolution of medieval kingdoms are not simply dealing with continuity and homogeneity, but are concerned with negotiating the shifting relationships between lands, peoples, and rulers (both ecclesiastical and secular) which characterize the period (Johnson 1995: 132). In other words, historical narrative of this kind, while appealing to an imperial past as a means for reinforcing the link between origin and present reality, and, simultaneously, providing the symbolic imagery to legitimate contemporary rule, was also seeking to explain a rupture with the past and hence the novelty of a present discontinuous with former systems of government. In the specific case of Visigothic Spain, the coexistence of historical rupture and continuity manifests itself in the fact that, while the Visigothic monarchy embraced the use of imperial imagery to consolidate its power base, it was doing so to assert its complete independence from the imperial claims over Spain still held by the Eastern Empire (Hillgarth 1985; Barnwell 1997; Valverde Castro 2000). It is also worth noting the parallels here between propagandistic histories which underscored the ‘imperial’ legacy of Visigothic

46

Companion to Empire

Hispania and other manifestations of that same legacy which were promoted by Visigothic kings. From the reign of Leovigild (569-586) onwards, and hence the period when Visigothic territorial unity within the Peninsula would be achieved, cities were founded in the Roman manner, coinage was issued in imitation of imperial models, a royal court was set up at Toledo with all the pomp and lavish ceremony associated with Constantinople, and again, in the Byzantine manner, religious uniformity was rigorously insisted upon.12 In effect, the Visigothic monarchy asserted its political independence from the Eastern Empire by imitating the ancient Roman Empire of the west, and, rather paradoxically, by re-inventing Hispania as an alternative Byzantium in the west (Hillgarth 1985a [1966]: 498). The Inscription of Imperial Origins Writing during the reign of King Sisebut (612-621) when Visigothic military dominion over virtually the whole Peninsula was being secured by the successes of general Suinthila, Isidore of Seville strove to project these recent military successes back onto the entire history of the Goths in Spain as proof of historical continuity (Wolf Baxter 1990; Collins 1991; Valverde 2000). The praise heaped on Sisebut as an ideal ruler then became transferred to Suinthila (King from 621631) when the history was revised in 625 to confirm the final fall of Cartagena to the Visigoths and their now uncontested dominance throughout the Peninsula (Wolf 1990: 14). The intention was also to reflect the religious achievements of recent Visigothic rulers who had managed to put an end to the cultural alienation which had existed between the Visigothic rulers and the Hispano-Roman population for over a century. The earlier successes of Reccared’s Arian father, Leovigild, in the northern half of the Peninsula would have been worth little had the religious divide between the two populations continued. Recarred’s conversion to Catholicism was also the single most important factor in the creation of what has come to be referred to as a ‘renaissance’ in the seventh century in a region about which there were until that point a scarcity of textual sources (Barnwell 1997: 57). It is unlikely that the corpus of textual material which emerged after 589 – particularly the Visigothic historiography of interest here - would have been produced without the conversion, since it was almost entirely the work of the Catholic clerics bent on supporting the monarchy ideologically.

Generating the Origins of Letters and Kingdoms

47

In her study of this particular issue, Valverde Castro (2000) underscores the fact that this religious reconciliation was the most decisive factor in creating the sense of a unified sovereign territory whose inhabitants shared a single politico-religious identity. This same sense of a collective identity differentiated them in an almost proto-national fashion from other kingdoms and, in particular, from the Eastern Empire in the shape of the Byzantine forces which had, until recently, enjoyed a considerable presence in the southern reaches of the Peninsula: Como súbditos y como católicos, todos los habitantes sometidos a la autoridad del rey visigodo pasaron a formar parte de un mismo orden político-religioso y a compartir unos mismos intereses en todos los órdenes de la existencia, realidad que hizo surgir el sentimiento de pertenecer a una comunidad peculiar y diferenciada tanto frente a Bizancio como frente al conjunto de reinos bárbaros surgidos tras la desaparición del Imperio Romano Occidental. (Valverde Castro 2000: 171)

The Visigoths clearly needed the religious, cultural and administrative backing of the Church if they were ever to secure and maintain hegemony over the Iberian population. That they did indeed succeed in creating the political and territorial unity they so much desired is reflected in the fact that in his history of the Goths, Isidore refers to Suinthila’s rule over the newly unified kingdom as imperium as if to underscore the legitimacy of the Gothic claims to the legacy of imperial Rome as sovereign rulers over a delimited geographical space (Valverde Castro 157).13 The intention was obviously to underscore the fact that the Goths had successfully repelled and ousted the imperial troops from the Eastern Empire who had re-conquered southern Spain under Justinian, and hence, as an assertion of supreme ‘dominion’ or ‘authority’ equal to that claimed by the Eastern forces and reminiscent of that wielded by ancient Rome (Valverde Castro 2000: 155). Rather disconcertingly, however, following the Byzantine historiographical method of his predecessors, Isidore of Seville dates each entry of his chronicle deferentially according to the respective reigns of the eastern emperors, while simultaneously referring to the eastern imperial forces – the enemies of the Goths – as Romani. Nevertheless, the anti-Byzantine nature of the history is asserted at the outset in the much celebrated Laus Hispaniae (Menocal 2002). In this preface to the history, Isidore of Seville uses imperial imagery to

48

Companion to Empire

describe a Hispania that is not only beyond the grasp of the Byzantines, but indeed now itself the supreme ruler of provinciae: Omnium terrarum, quaeque sunt ab occiduo usque ad Indos, pulcherrima es, o sacra semperque felix principum gentiumque mater Spania: iure tu nunc omnium regina provinciarum, a qua non occasus tantum, sed etiam oriens lumina mutuat: tu decus et ornamentum orbis. (1975: 168) 14 [Of all the lands from the west to the Indies, you, Spain, sacred and always fortunate mother of princes and peoples, are the most beautiful. Rightly you are now the queen of all provinces, and from whom not only the west but also the east borrows its lights; you, honor and ornament of the world.]

By the end of the Laus Hispaniae, the notion of Hispania as a powerful heir to the ancient Roman Empire in the west and, hence, as a competent rival to Constantinople, is unequivocal as Isidore alludes to the fact that the Iberian Peninsula is “dotibus imperiorum fertilis” [rich in imperial gifts] (1975: 170). More importantly, the Goths are described as a people possessing this land, rich in natural resources, “inter regias infulas” [amidst royal emblems] and “imperii felicitate securas” [secure in the good fortune of empire] (ibid.). Clearly, the use of imperium here is a means for recalling the continuity of the prestige and power traditionally associated with both (ancient) Roman and Byzantine imperialism and for making use of it to pit the legitimacy of the ‘imperial’ dominion of the Goths against that of the Eastern Empire. In this respect, critics like Rodríguez Alonso (1975) continue to interpret the stress on regional patriotism and political autonomy in the language of ancient imperialism as an instance of an embryonic ‘Spanish’ proto-national sentiment. Yet, it would be more appropriate to view the Laus Hispaniae, not as a celebration of ‘Spain’ as a ‘national’ entity, but as a celebration of the Goths and their monarchy as the people and institution chosen by Providence to inherit Roman ‘imperial’ rule in the Peninsula. Hillgarth’s observation that “Isidore does not write national but royal history” (1985 [1970]: 299) continues to resonate as the most reasonable interpretation of the preface to the history. Isidore of Seville’s portrayal of the Goths, then, like that of his predecessor Juan de Biclaro, broke with the ancient historiographical tradition of depicting them as antagonistic invaders and as the barbaric scourge of Roman imperial greatness. Instead, the Visigoths were, as we can see, recast and legitimated as the rightful inheritors of

Generating the Origins of Letters and Kingdoms

49

Hispano-Roman Iberia and as the most recent addition to a cultural mix still bearing traces of an imperial past: Iure itaque te iam pridem aurea Roma caput gentium concupivit, et licet te sibimet eadem Romulea virtus primum victrix desponderit, denuo tamen Gothorum florentissima gens post multiplices in orbe victorias certatim rapuit et amavit, fruiturque hactenus inter regias infulas, et opes largas, imperii felicitate securas. (1975: 170) [Thus rightly did golden Rome, the head of all peoples, once desire you, and although the same Romulaean virtue, first victorious, betrothed you to itself, at last, nevertheless, the most flourishing nation of the Goths after many victories in the world eagerly captured and loved you, and enjoys you up to the present amid regal insignia and abundant treasures, secure in the felicity of empire.]

This eulogy, which has patristic and classical sources, demonstrates a feminization of a desirable Hispania, seduced and sequestered by the conquering Goths (an image to be repeated in Castilian historiography centuries later) (Rodríguez Alonso 1975; Wolf 1990). Moreover, not only is Hispania depicted as abounding in natural resources, but it has also produced, as Isidore of Seville proceeds to remind us, several Roman emperors from amongst its own population: “alumnis igitur et gemmis dives, et purpuris rectoribusque pariter et dotibus imperiorum fertilis sic opulenta es principibus ornandis ut beata pariendis” [You are as rich in native gems as you are in purple-clad leaders, and, abundant in imperial gifts, you are as wealthy in adorning your princes as you are happy in producing them] (1975: 170). In other words, while the Goths represent imperium, gendered masculine, in the sense of brute strength and military force, we might assume that the Peninsula is the natural home of imperium in the sense of an imperial grandeur, wisdom, and statecraft dependent upon the cultivation of Latin letters or grammatica, gendered feminine – all of which are apparently lacking to the Goths until the renunciation of Arianism under Reccared. Further analysis of the Historia de Regibus would suggest that other notions of imperium were also mobilized by Isidore of Seville in his attempt to describe a political entity, which had emerged at the end of the sixth century. That this was a transitional period in terms of the establishment of a new political reality under a Christianized RomanoGothic leadership is revealed by the fact that Gothic territory is also simply referred to as regnum, while imperium is employed in the

50

Companion to Empire

sense of legitimate ‘jurisdiction’ or ‘rule’ (over a territory): for instance, the Visigothic king Leovigild is described as besieging his son Hermenegild who had revolted against his father’s rule over certain territories within the Peninsula: “Hermenegildum deinde filium imperiis suis tyrannizantem, obsessum exsuperavit” [Then, after besieging him, he (Leovigild) defeated his son Hermenegild who was usurping rule over his territories (‘imperiis’)] (1975: 49. 254). The point here is clearly to contrast the illegality of Hermenegild’s aggression as an attempt to usurp power like an ancient tyrant, and Leovigild’s lawful rule. Meanwhile, if in section 52 of the history, Recarred, Leogivild’s successor, is portrayed, as “elevating” the Goths culturally by his religiosity “cultu praeditus religionis” [he was gifted with a reverence for religion], by his piety with respect to the Catholic faith “fide pius” and his dedication to peace “pace praeclarus”, his father, Leogivild, is soberly commended (for) “ille armorum artibus gentis imperium dilatans” [increasing the dominion of the Gothic people by the arts of war] (1975: 52. 260). Hence, here the word appears to connotate territorial subjugation or ‘dominion’ (in contrast to the ‘peace’ of Reccared); and there is certainly no connotation of the imperial grandeur formerly equated with the ancient Roman Empire or even of the justice generally associated with supreme authority. One would therefore be tempted to regard this opposition between the portraits of Leovigild and Recarred as one between military power and religious devotion as an implicit acknowledgement of the fact that Leovigild had, despite his military successes, not converted to Catholicism and remained Arian. In that sense, only Recarred and his successors could be depicted as new ‘Constantines’ in the west – or as warrior Christian ‘emperors’ on the Byzantine model. Similarly, historians have debated why Isidore of Seville makes no mention of Hermenegild’s conversion to Catholicism as a factor leading to the rebellion and confrontation with his father Leovigild. Presumably, the ideological necessity of presenting a vision of territorial and cultural unity was of such importance that it meant forfeiting the opportunity to depict Hermenegild as a Catholic martyr (Hillgarth 1985 [1966]: 491-499). Finally, where Isidore of Seville’s selective use of the nomenclature of dominion and sovereignty assumes its most unequivocally Byzantine tone is when, in his account of Suinthila’s rule, he also refers to Hispania as a monarchy rather than an imperium. Ironically,

Generating the Origins of Letters and Kingdoms

51

this may have been the most striking means of asserting an ideological confrontation with Byzantine claims to supreme rule over Visigothic lands. For, if Suinthila’s triumph over Byzantine forces had also been referred to as a manifestation of imperium with imperial Roman connotations, Isidore of Seville also declares that: “Totius Spaniae intra oceani fretum monarchiam regni primus idem potitus quod nulli retro principum est conlatum” [This same (Suinthila) was the first to have acquired the monarchy of the whole kingdom of Spain above the straits, a deed which had not been achieved by any ruler in the past] (1975: 62. 276). Suinthila is not here referred to as the first ruler of a Hispanic ‘empire’ as he had been earlier, but as having been the first to achieve the monarchy of the kingdom of all Hispania (“Totius Spaniae […] monarchiam regni”). Perhaps in the context of the Visigothic rejection of Byzantine claims to jurisdiction over Spain, to use the word ‘monarchy’ is of much more ideological significance and of more political clout than to have used imperium. ‘Monarchy’, a loan word, from Greek, was that form of government most closely associated with the imperial court at Constantinople after Constantine had transformed the Roman imperial title into one more closely resembling the theocratic Hellenistic model (Pagden 1995: 15). That ‘monarchy’ indicated sovereign rule in the hands of a single (Byzantine) ruler is underscored by Isidore of Seville himself when discussing the word’s etymology: Monarchae sunt, qui singularem possident principatum, qualis fuit Alexander apud Graecos, et Iulius apud Romanos. Hinc et monarchia dicitur. Monàs quippe singularitas Graeco nomine, arkhé principatus est. (Etymologiae 9. 3. 23) [Monarchs are those who have undisputed command, as Alexander did in the case of the Greeks and Julius in the case of the Romans. From this the word monarchy is derived. For, in Greek monas means ‘uniqueness’, and arké ‘command.]

The apparent complexity of the usage attributed to imperium and the appearance of both regnum and monarchia in the history would perhaps be an indication of the paradox the Visigoths were confronted with when describing their struggle to assert political autonomy from the imperial power they nevertheless continued to imitate. Isidore of Seville’s history of the Goths might be best interpreted, therefore, as evidence of how historical narrative served to present a genealogical understanding of historical (Christian) continuity, but from within the

52

Companion to Empire

parameters of the discursive possibilities available for doing so during this post-imperial ‘gestation’ period of the Middle Ages. In other words, Visigothic historiography sought not only to explain the present as the legitimate manifestation of an imperial legacy, but also to negotiate the very real historical discontinuity, which characterized the reality of a Hispania simultaneously opposed and deferential to Constantinople. And this quite clearly meant attempting to designate the different kinds of imperium that had emerged after the fragmentation of the Western Empire and the recent rupture with the Eastern Empire. More importantly, the only tool available for inscribing the present within a mythical historical continuum was the vocabulary afforded by the textual cultures of the late imperial period and the early medieval Byzantine Empire from which Visigothic rule was increasingly distanced. In effect, Isidore of Seville employed that same ‘imperial’ vocabulary to attempt to explain and describe the new phenomenon of supra-regional governance of a territory, which, until the late imperial period, had constituted a single Roman provincia or ‘colony’. Ironically, in doing so, this historical figure most closely associated with the belief that his etymologies were an indispensable methodology for discovering the ‘true’ (the etumos) nature of things, destabilized that same methodology (‘genealogy’). In the process, he also undermined the possibility of positing a single recoverable (imperial) origin for both letters (grammatica) and kingdoms (in this case, seventh century Hispania). The Reception of Isidore of Seville Despite the emphasis on rupture and discontinuity in my reading of Isidore of Seville’s history, there can be no denying that the Visigothic textual renaissance would set a precedent for the evolution of textual culture in the Christian kingdoms after the Moslem conquest of the Peninsula in 711.15 Moreover, it seems quite ironic, or perhaps also predictable, that Isidore of Seville himself has been constructed by posterity as a historical figure who personifies continuity, especially between Late Imperial and medieval cultures. The Etymologies, for instance, has been conceived of as a ‘hinge’ between two historical periods (Wright 1982: 82), and hence demonstrates the extent to which Visigothic grammatical culture was, in its turn, employed by later generations to satisfy their own need to believe in coherent

Generating the Origins of Letters and Kingdoms

53

historical precedents. Indeed, even after the advent of speculative grammar in the twelfth century and the shift away from lexical analysis, especially the study of individual letters and word origins, to a more general conception of language, the grammatical culture transmitted in the Etymologiae would continue to enjoy popularity until the Renaissance.16 Nor is there any doubt that during the Iberian Middle Ages, his history of the Goths enjoyed a popularity analogous to that of the Etymologiae. The Historia de Regibus Gothorum assumed a foundational status as both direct primary source and authority in the Latinate histories, which emerged between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries. More specifically, the history of the Goths had set the precedent for a vindication of the Visigoths and their incorporation into universal Christian history as legitimate heirs to Roman rule in Hispania and hence, thereby laid the foundations for the notion of a mythical Hispano-Roman Visigothic unity, which would come to dominate Christian historiography after 711. From the Crónica de Alfonso III (880) to the vernacular historiographical works of Alfonso X el Sabio, Isidore of Seville’s recast, heroic Goths are ever present (Wolf 1990; Linehan 1993). In that respect, it is worth recalling that both Lucas de Túy’s Cronicon mundi and Jiménez de Rada’s De Rebus Hispaniae, the two most comprehensive, elaborate and ideologically loaded of the thirteenth century Christian Latinate histories, were greatly indebted to the history of the Goths. In the case of Lucas de Túy, promoting the history was also a means for promoting León, the city to which Isidore of Seville’s remains had been transferred in the eleventh century, and hence another factor setting in motion his cult and devotional ritual as a Saint. In the case of Jiménez de Rada, the history of the Goths provided the means for ‘Castilianizing’ Peninsula history and promoting the primacy of Toledo (Fernández Valverde 1987, 1988; Linehan 1993; Maravall 1997 [1954]). In the prologue to the De Rebus Hispaniae, which I will discuss in more detail in the following chapter, Jiménez de Rada acknowledges his respect for auctoritas and his debt to the previous historians who have served him as primary sources. Isidore of Seville is of course mentioned, and rightly so, given that (as in the case of Lucas de Tuy’s work) Jiménez de Rada reproduces the Historia de Regibus Gothorum practically verbatim.

54

Companion to Empire

The Visigothic Renaissance and Territorial Law In reference to the Carolingian renaissance, Irvine argues that lettered culture was a reflection of empire and that grammatical culture was “the law of the land” (Irvine 1994: 305) in the sense that grammatical culture provided the conditions of possibility for a uniform writing system (Latin) and uniform written legislation. The foundation of the Carolingian renaissance was thus not only the recognition that textual culture was “co-extensive with the authority of the king” (Irvine 313), but that authority over lands and peoples would be more efficiently exercised through the production of written territorial laws on the Roman model. Similarly, in Visigothic Hispania the implied synonymy between writing and the authority of Roman Law did not go unnoticed. As with all other aspects of written culture, Isidore of Seville employed his etymological methodology to explain the derivation of the word ‘law’: the law was the law (lex) because it had to be read (legere), unlike oral ‘uses’ and ‘customs’: “Nam lex a legendo vocata, quia scripta est” [For law is derived from legendo (‘to be read’) because it is written] (Etymologiae 5. 3. 2). Although heirs to Germanic unwritten customary law, the Visigothic monarchs also recognized that their hegemony over the Iberian Peninsula would be enhanced by promulgating generalized law codes like the Liber Iudiciorum, ‘the Book of Judges’. The first complete Latinate version of this law-code was completed under Rescesvinto in 654 while an amended version was promulgated under Ervigio in 681. And even if the Liber would be rejected by an embryonic Castile in favor of local fueros (charters) and unwritten law in later centuries, its foundational importance to monarchical rule would be revived after it was translated into the vernacular as the Fuero Juzgo in the thirteenth century. Indeed, if the Visigothic renaissance had a significant impact on future generations, it was not solely because of the continued relevance of the Etymologiae and the Historia de Regibus Gothorum, but also because of the legacy of this particular law-code. The territorial legislation contained in the Liber had initially served to consolidate the reconciliation between Goths and Hispano-Romans and to re-affirm the executive power of the monarchy (Pérez Bustamante 1995: 62). Yet, while the Liber was intended as a single law code for a single kingdom under one monarch, the role of the church in the promulgation of the law-code cannot be overstated. The

Generating the Origins of Letters and Kingdoms

55

Toledo Councils guaranteed not only the authority of the laws, but also that they would be enacted and diffused through the intercession of the Bishops and other members of the Church hierarchy (Gimeno Menéndez 1995: 110).17 The cultural, political and legislative unity that the Visigoths had striven to achieve after this reconciliation between Catholic Bishops and the monarchy would of course be irreversibly affected by the Moslem conquest. Territorial law codes like the Liber, for example, although consistently used in some regions, even in territories settled by Moslems, or reintroduced by the northward movement of the Mozarabs (Gimeno Menéndez 1995: 113), did fade in importance between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. Local legislation in the form of unwritten custom or the Latinate fueros would instead take precedence as a means for legislating repopulated communities within newly-conquered spaces. On the other hand, it is during this same period that Christian Iberia, like the rest of western Christendom, would be affected by the resurgence of interest in the political principles derived from Roman Law. By the twelfth century, the law had come to be regarded as an autonomous science, would be studied as an integral part of scholastic curricula in the recently founded universities, and more importantly, would play a critical role in the secularization of monarchical rule. Indeed, the period would witness what Stock has described as a generalized transition “from the priest-king, whose connections are with an oral, pictorial, gestural, and liturgical culture, to the desacralized law-king, whose links are with the literate, the administrative, the instrumentally-rational, and the constitutional” (Stock 1983: 33). It is this ‘law-king’, in the figure of the thirteenth century Castilian monarch, Alfonso X el Sabio, that will be the subject of the next chapter. In particular, I will be interested in how the alliance between writing and imperium manifested itself in his monumental vernacular law code, the Siete Partidas.

56

Companion to Empire

Notes 1

All Latin quotations are taken from Lindsay’s edition of 1911. On the division of the work into twenty books and the organizational criteria determining that same division, see the introduction to the recent English translation of the complete Etymologiae by Barney et al. (2006: 3-28). 3 In appealing to the myth of Babel, then, Isidore of Seville is reiterating the belief that the one language which had unified humanity prior to the building of the tower, had been Hebrew and that after the divine destruction of Babel, the confusion of tongues fragmented an original human ‘community’ into distinct ‘nations’ with their own mutually unintelligible languages. In that sense, Isidore of Seville is of course faithful to the Babel myth as contained in Genesis 11. On the fact that Genesis 10 appears to suggest a multiplication of tongues prior to the building of the tower and hence, a centuries-old theological quandary, see Eco (1995) and Ives (2004). In Chapter 5, I shall allude to Derrida’s (1985) interpretation of the Babel myth in the preface to his reading of Benjamin’s essay The Task of the Translator. Derrida posits a more complex relationship between the act of translation and the biblical conflation of the linguistic and divine origin of Semitic genealogies. 4 While Bloch’s thesis serves as a useful methodological tool for my purposes here, we must remain aware of the totalizing tendency of his macro-study, and, as Johnson (1995) reminds us, of the exceptions to the rule. For a more specific study of the relationship between genealogy as a ‘perceptual grid’ and the composition of dynastic histories, see Spiegel’s (1983) essay on vernacular chronicles in thirteenth century France. 5 In Foucauldian genealogy, meanwhile, any notion of coherence was hardly to be embraced as a methodological tool, but regarded with suspicion as a ‘surgical operation’ disguising the true object of study for the genealogist: the historical discontinuity and rupture, which revealed multiple ‘beginnings’. 6 Henceforth, I shall refer to the history as Historia de Regibus Gothorum since I shall not be alluding to the sections dealing with either the Vandals or the Suevi. Even though I will be quoting from the edition of the history provided by Rodríguez Alonso (1975) under the title Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi de Origine Gothorum Historia Wandalorum Historia Sueborum, the Historia de Regibus Gothorum title is the most commonly used and the most-widely recognized. 7 By the time of the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, Augustine’s legacy had been inherited by two opposing tendencies in the Church with respect to the usefulness of harnessing such classical pagan learning to biblical exegesis (Riché 1975; Irvine 1994). On the one hand, ‘the rigorists’ called for a complete rejection of secular learning and under the influence of Eastern asceticism, established those monasteries that promoted an exclusively Christian ideal of learning, which, in terms of discursive style, promoted res before verba and rusticitas before sermo scholasticus. Meanwhile, the classically educated aristocratic clergy were in favor of a humanistic textual approach to Christian culture reconciled with Roman and Hellenistic traditions as promoted by the Augustine of De doctrina christiana. In the fifth century, this latter group considered themselves defenders of classical culture and Romanized Christianity before the threat posed by the Germanic invasions. A leading figure amongst the humanists of Ostrogothic Italy in the following century was a partisan of Augustine’s teachings, Cassiodorus Senator (490–585), while in seventh 2

Generating the Origins of Letters and Kingdoms

57

century Iberia, Isidore of Seville, was heir to the grammatical legacy of both Augustine and Cassiodorus. Not surprisingly, what both Cassiodorus and Isidore of Seville have in common is a tendency to eulogize the written word as the foundation of a textual culture which, unlike in the late imperial period, was now unopposed as the foundation of a Romano-Gothic society and a universal Christian culture. 8 Isidore of Seville is recognized as the single most important figure of what has come to be labeled the ‘Visigothic renaissance’ in the late sixth and early seventh centuries when the region enjoyed a “constructive revival” of classical culture (Wright 1982: 82). Not only could Spain boast a wealth of well-stocked classical libraries, a higher level of Latinity than that of Merovingian Gaul, but also a concerted effort on the part of the Visigothic monarchy and the Spanish Bishops to promote lettered culture as a means whereby the new unity of the Romano-Gothic kingdom might be cemented ideologically (Díaz y Díaz 1976: 14). 9 On classical conceptions of the origin of letters, see Drucker (1995: 57–59). 10 For a detailed summary of the sources for the Etymologiae, see Barney et al. (2006: 10-17). 11 Muldoon has argued that, despite the papacy’s intentions in having him crowned Roman Emperor in 800, Charlemagne himself viewed his imperial title as primarily related to his rulership over the Franks and other kingdoms and not as a Roman title dependent on the papacy (Muldoon 1999: 27). His use of the imperial title and ancient imperial insignia was hence more a recognition of his supremacy as a ‘(Christian) king of kings’ rather than as a concerted attempt on his part to re-establish the Roman Empire in the West. 12 Barnwell (1997) and Valverde Castro (2000) describe the different uses of imperial imagery, insignia and ritual to this ideological end. For instance: through the issuing of legislation in imitation of Justinian’s earlier influence in this regard and the more general association of emperorship with the drawing up of legislation; through imperial inscriptions on the coinage issued during each reign; the wearing of imperial robes; and finally, the building of cities as a means for expressing Visigothic civitas. 13 In the final section (65) of the history of the Goths, Isidore refers to Suinthila’s “longaevuum […] imperium” [long period of imperial rule]. 14 All quotations are taken from the Latin text provided by Rodríguez Alonso in his 1975 bilingual edition. The text in question is the longer of the two available versions (both reproduced by Rodríguez Alonso) and ends in 625 in the middle of Suinthila’s reign. 15 Some historians contend that there is also a tendency to overestimate the impact or distribution of the Isidorean renaissance in seventh century Hispania. They argue that that Isidore of Seville’s encyclopedic works were simply an attempt to preserve a cultural heritage threatened to extinction for an elite group of literate clergy and lay aristocrats (Riché 1975: 23; Linehan 1993: 44). 16 In this respect, we should also take into account Irvine’s contention that during the Christian Middle Ages, “along with the Scriptures and Donatus, the Etymologies was a text one can safely assume almost every library would have possessed” (Irvine 1994: 210). Indeed, just to underscore the point we should remember that the most celebrated grammatical treatise of the Middle Ages, Priscian’s Institutiones Grammaticae, which was rediscovered during the Carolingian period is also estimated to have survived in numbers no greater than those of the Etymologies. Furthermore, González Cuenca’s 1983 edition of the fifteenth century manuscript Las etimologías

58

Companion to Empire

de San Isidoro romançeadas includes a panegyric to Isidore as a preface to the actual text in the manuscript. Although the preface is probably an eleventh century version according to González Cuenca (1983: 33), it attests to the high esteem that both Isidore and his corpus were held centuries after his death: “e tanto fue sabio que non tan solamente en nuestros tiempos mas desde el tiempo de los Apóstoles o de ante, sacado ende el primer hombre e Salomón, creemos que en todas las sçiençias non fue ninguno mayor d’él” (González Cuenca 1983: 77). 17 Collins tells us that this strategic relationship permitted the Church, principally through the Councils held in Toledo, to provide spiritual sanctions against those forces determined to challenge monarchical power (Collins 1991: 146). Both sides were obviously strengthened politically through this expedient rapprochement, but after 589 the Councils, which had initially been uniquely ecclesiastical assemblies, became fundamental organs of Visigothic rule. While ratifying Church authority, the monarchy thereby also created propitious conditions for implementing legislation of a distinctly territorial character in a single politico-juridical space. In this regard, we should also note that the vigorous anti-Semitism of the Catholic Church-Monarchy alliance bolstered this emphasis on territorial cohesion and cultural, religious and legislative uniformity. That the unity of Hispania’s population would supposedly be ‘protected’ against ‘minority’ groups associated with religious dissension is manifested most clearly in those sections of the Liber Iudiciorum dealing with the Jews and with all forms of heresy. While the role of anti-Semitism in the forging a sense of cultural and religious homogeneity in Visigothic Hispania is of critical importance to the contemporaneous history of the region, it is clearly beyond the scope of the present study to include a detailed analysis of the question.

Chapter 2 The Vernacular Letter of the Law in the Siete Partidas Non ha lança que false todas las armaduras Nin que tanto trespase como las escribturas; Que la saeta lança fasta un çierto fito, E la letra alcança de Burgos a Aíbto; E la saeta fiere al vivo que se siente, E la letra conquiere en vida e en muerte; La saeta non llaga sinon es al presente, La escribtura llega al d’allén mar absente; De saeta defiende a omre un escudo, De la letra nol puede defender todo el mundo. Sem Tob de Carrión, Proverbios morales

The standard depiction of Alfonso X el Sabio, King of Castile (1252– 1284), as the ‘father of Castilian prose’ and hence, the first Castilian monarch to employ the vernacular as a written language of monarchical rule, is now generally rejected as a commonplace of Spanish historiography, especially as regards the question of the implementation of Castilian as an official language of the kingdom. Lomax (1971), Palacios Alcaine (1991) and Wright (2000) among others, for example, remind us of the use of the vernacular (albeit on a much smaller scale) in official documentation that predated both Fernando III and Alfonso X’s reigns.1 What cannot be denied, however, despite revisionist views of the alfonsine relationship with the vernacular like these, is that textual production in Castilian

60

Companion to Empire

increased so dramatically under Alfonso X that the vernacular became a de facto ‘official’ language of government.2 Studies of the relationship between the proliferation of vernacular writing and Alfonso X’s exercising of power over conquered territories in the thirteenth century have tended to stress the need the King felt to boost the prestige of Castilian as a written language worthy of being placed alongside Latin, Arabic and Hebrew.3 The King and his collaborators promoted Castilian as another sacred script, which could not but transmit transcendental truths, wisdom and knowledge quite transparently. If Castilian, like Latin, were accepted as analogous to God’s metaphoric writing, Castilian subjects would presumably venerate and trust secular/vernacular writings with the same fervor with which they revered holy writings. The favorable comparison between Castilian and Latin, the sacred language of learning and knowledge, is underscored by Alfonso X’s tendency to refer to Castilian as “nuestro latín” (Maravall 1967 [1965]: 140). This transfer of the prestige of church Latin (and its clerical empire) to the vernacular made the vernacular ‘the Latin’ of the King’s own corporate kingdom and his legislative bureaucracy. Once weighted with such authority, the Castilian language, as the ‘modern Latin’ of the recuperated patria, might be used as a credible vehicle with which to inscribe a new communal consciousness into the imaginations of both repopulated subjects and conquered/converted (Moslem/Jewish) subjects. In parallel fashion, Castilian’s newly found prestige would be enhanced through representations of Alfonso X as a semi-divine figure conveying divine truths to his scribes in the vernacular.4 Just as the Judaeo-Christian God had written the Book of Nature and inspired the writing of the Bible, the King would create his own secular patria in writing. The History of Letters and the History of Hispania Despite the validity and usefulness of such approaches to the question of status planning, there always remains the danger that we privilege this consecration and mythologization of vernacular writing rather than focusing on the simple fact that the written word (in both Latin and the vernacular) had become indispensable to the practical and the ideological functioning of the proto-nations which now existed in Western Christendom.5 That this was the case is demonstrated most

The Vernacular Letter of the Law in the Siete Partidas

61

emblematically in the prologue to a Latinate history which predates Alfonso X’s celebrated promotion of the vernacular as a written language of science, law and historiography: Jiménez de Rada’s De Rebus Hispaniae (1236-43). Widely acknowledged as another milestone in the history of Christian textual culture in the Iberian Peninsula, this history not only reaffirms the fundamental place of Isidore of Seville’s historiographical works as a precedent for later medieval historiography, but presents a striking illustration of how the early eulogies of grammatical culture (letters) had evolved into a dramatic acknowledgement of the fundamental importance of a ‘literate mentality’ (Clanchy 1979) to medieval monarchical bureaucracies and their ideological formations. In striving to inscribe Castile within a universal history recognized by all western Christian kingdoms, Jiménez de Rada, like the Leonese historian, Lucas de Túy before him, begins his history by locating Hispanic origins in the biblical and classical traditions of the stories of Noah and Hercules respectively, but not without first having intertwined these mythical origins with the history of letters. More specifically, in the prologue to the De Rebus Hispaniae, Jiménez de Rada stresses the foundational importance of letters to the history and cultural identity of the proto-nation. Just as Isidore of Seville had equated the origins of languages with those of peoples and kingdoms, Jiménez de Rada presents a brief history of the invention of alphabetic letters to underscore the indispensability of written history to the preservation and transmission of knowledge to posterity: Caeterum ne desidia sapientiae inimica itinera studii occultaret, illi qui pro luce sapientiam habuerunt, et eam rebus omnibus praetulerunt, figurales litteras invenere, quas in syllabas congesserunt, ut his compingerent dictiones, quibus ut ex trama et stamina quasi a texentibus oratio texeretur: et por hoc futuris saeculis praeterita ut praesentia nunciarent, et vigilata studia artium liberalium et officia mechanica subtiliter adinventa scriptura posteris conservarent. (Jiménez de Rada 1968: 1) [But, so that inactivity, the enemy of wisdom, did not conceal the paths of knowledge, those individuals who regarded wisdom as their guiding light and preferred it over all else, invented the forms of letters. They joined these letters to make syllables so that with those same syllables they might create words, and then, with those same words, so that discourse might be woven as if by weavers from the weft and the warp yarns. And through this discourse they could communicate past events to future generations as if they were contemporary events. Moreover, after writing had been invented with such fine weaving

62

Companion to Empire (subtiliter), they were able to guarantee the safe-keeping (of studies) of the liberal arts and the mechanical skills for posterity.]

The history of writing and the writing of history thus become indistinguishable. The origins of Hispania and the origins of writing are thus inextricably linked within an ideological framework which once again reflects the belief that present signification is only ever realized through a process of memory which, in its turn, is the recollection or recuperation of an originary, previously-possessed knowledge. While proto-national collective memory, supposedly interrupted by the events of 711, must be re-activated through the writing of history, it will ultimately complete a process of recuperation paralleling that of military conquest of lands previously lost in battle: Cum igitur Hispaniarum successus variorum principum cruentis cladibus iteratus et linguam mutarit [sic], et origo suae gentis pluribus intercepta dominiis sit oblita, iam fere gens et origo incolarum Hispaniae ignoratur. (Jiménez de Rada 1968: 2-3) [Therefore, since this fate of the Hispanic kingdoms, repeated in the bloody disasters of various kings, changed the language and caused the origin of the people (truncated by so many different rulers) to be forgotten, the lineage (gens) and descent of the inhabitants of Hispania are now virtually unknown.]

This then is the reason Jiménez de Rada gives to Fernando III for justifying the need for a national history which the king had apparently requested of him: historiography permits the recovery of (virtually forgotten) communal origins and language, the affirmation of historical continuity and the declaration of a recovered protonational tradition to the world. In this respect, we might recall that, like the seventh century, the early thirteenth century was indeed another period of historical ruptures and transformations for the Iberian Peninsula and hence, again a period in which historiography was employed to forge a vision of historical cohesion and continuity. At the time of writing, Jiménez de Rada was Archbishop of Toledo in a Castilian kingdom which, after the crucial battle of Navas de Tolosa in 1212, the unification of León and Castile in 1230, and the other territorial conquests which characterized the reign of Fernando III, was not only now the most powerful and geographically extensive within the Peninsula, but one

The Vernacular Letter of the Law in the Siete Partidas

63

which sought to be acknowledged internationally as such by the rest of Christendom (Valverde 1987: 48). It is for this reason that in the proemio to the history which is dedicated to Fernando III, Jiménez de Rada describes his motivation as being that of providing (a) “ad praeconium vestrae gentis et vestram gloriam Maiestatis” [proclamation of our people and of your majesty’s glory] (Rada 1968: 4). Protonational historiography was thus fundamental to an equally protonational ideology promoting the notion of a shared history, religion, language and culture uniting the recently enlarged population now living within the confines of a newly formed geo-political space. Proto-Nationalist Orthographies We might ponder the motif of Latinate histories that the invasion of 711 had ‘changed’ the Christians’ language (“linguam mutarit [sic]”), which also appears in Jiménez de Rada’s prologue. Did Jiménez de Rada believe that, if his historiographical operation could remember lost origins, then his history could also in some way preserve an unchanged form of what he considers a pristine Hispano-Gothic language that had been mutated by the vicissitudes of historical events? This is of course a particularly pertinent question given that Jiménez de Rada composed his history in Latin during a period in which vernacular writings were now starting to become accepted as a parallel norm.6 Jiménez de Rada is therefore perhaps taking a stand to demonstrate that, as far as he is concerned, Latin represents continuity and tradition, while the vernacular and its new writing system signify disruption and the loss of origins. It is clear that for Jiménez de Rada, the only letters which can recuperate the Gothic origins of Castile and hence be considered dignified enough or ‘worthy’ of the task are those still identified with the transmission of transhistorical wisdom and traditions, both secular and sacred: Latin letters. Latin was after all, as far as Jiménez de Rada was concerned, the language of Hispania’s Romano-Gothic origin(s) and it would seem logical that only that ‘original’ language could recuperate a proto-national ‘beginning’. Any show of acceptance of the new vernacular system for the writing of history would be the equivalent, once again, of attempting to construct a cohesive historical continuum back to a mythical origin with an instrument (vernacular writing) which, by its very existence, reflected another historical rupture with the past.

64

Companion to Empire

On the other hand, if he did intend the history as a manifestation of Castile’s political power on the international stage, it makes sense that he should write in the language still understood and accepted as the most prestigious writing system by the rest of Western Christendom. What is more, Jiménez de Rada’s history represented the culmination of a medieval Christian historiographical tradition which had traditionally been in Latin - the only written language available to Christian historians prior to the codification of the vernacular. Interestingly, therefore, Jiménez de Rada demonstrates that the use of Latin as the realm’s written language had never precluded a patriotic sentiment: on the contrary, he chooses to use the only language associated hitherto with grammar and history in Christian territories, while all the time championing Castile’s political autonomy and hegemony in the central Peninsula. In other words, given the recent emergence of Castile as a ‘corporate’ supra-regional, hegemonic kingdom, Jiménez de Rada’s proto-national sentiment should, on the one hand, be regarded as innovative, but nevertheless, as also resistant to the association of that same proto-national sentiment with a written language identified solely with Castile.7 Ultimately, such resistance would soon be superseded by a more general acceptance of the vernacular as a proto-national written language. Indeed, even this new writing would soon be welcomed as a sign-carrier for inscribing the kingdom’s origins within a seamless historical continuum where the invention of all letters (that is, including the vernacular) was identified with the birth of kingdoms and where writing in both Latin and the vernacular was conceived of as recuperating immutable bodies of knowledge: En buscando aquesto, fallaron las figuras de las letras; et ayuntando las, fizieron dellas sillabas, et de sillabas ayuntadas fizeron dellas partes; e ayuntando otrossi las partes, fizieron razon, et por la razon que viniessen a entender los saberes et se sopiessen ayudar dellos, et saber tan bien contar lo que fuera en tiempos dantes cuemo si fuesse en la de su sazon; et porque pudiessen saber otrosi los que despues dellos viniessen los fechos que ellos fizieran, tan bien como si ellos se acertassen en ello; et por que las artes de las sciencias et los otros saberes, que fueron fallados pora pro de los omnes, fuessen guardados en escripto; por que non cayessen en olvido et los sopiessen los que avien de venir […] Ca si por las escripturas non fuesse, ¿qual sabiduria o engenno de omne se podrie menbrar de todas las cosas passadas, aun que no las fallasen de nuevo que es cosa muy mas grieve? (Brancaforte 1984: 47)

The Vernacular Letter of the Law in the Siete Partidas

65

Not surprisingly, Jiménez de Rada’s identification of the invention of letters with the excavation of the origins of Hispania, would serve as a model for this declaration of the very same sentiments in the prologue to Alfonso X’s proto-national vernacular history, the Estoria de Espanna (Primera Crónica General) (1270), as if to underscore the newly-found prestige of the vernacular written word. If, however, the implied alliance between vernacular writing and the exercising of imperium would be declared most overtly in vernacular histories like this one, the diffusion of the vernacular as a written language which facilitated the administration of reconquered and repopulated territories would be effected most immediately by Alfonso X’s vernacular law-codes.8 Repopulation, Castilian Law, and castellanización A generalized legislative policy in vernacular writing had begun with Fernando III’s decision to have a Castilian version of the Liber Iudiciorum drawn up as the Fuero Juzgo between 1241 and 1251. It would be Alfonso X, however, who would take the boldest steps towards homogenizing the diverse municipal fueros (charters) and replacing them with new territorial codes promulgated by the Crown.9 The culmination of his legislative policies would take the form of his monumental Siete Partidas, a lawcode that not only illustrated the official acceptance of Castilian as a language of government, but also demonstrated the emergence of vernacular writing as a regulatory practice designed to exert socio-juridical control over repopulated spaces and peoples. The Partidas are hence evidence of how vernacular writing was privileged in a way which, rather than inaugurating Alfonso X’s role as the ‘father of Castilian prose’, simply demonstrates in a much more sober fashion the strategic importance of the written word to the securing of conquered lands. Ultimately, the Partidas exemplify how the diffusion of the written word as a vehicle of law and monarchical power served as a regulatory mechanism which initiated the transformation of a fragmented extra-discursive reality (the regional parts) into a governable whole (newly-extended supra-regional Castile) under one law-king. The consecration of the Castilian vernacular as a written language cannot therefore be isolated from the equally important fact that the vernacular was of course central to the castellanización policy which Alfonso X had inherited from his predecessors. On the one hand,

66

Companion to Empire

material castellanización involved the repopulation of conquered lands with Christian vassals from the north; the creation of large estates overseen by members of the military orders and nobility who had contributed to military conquest; and the granting of privileges and charters as an incentive to new communities agreeing to live in frontier areas still hotly contested by opposing factions (Vicens Vives 1979). Ideological castellanización, meanwhile, meant accompanying these acts of colonization with the promotion of vernacular writings (governmental documentation, legislation and ‘national’ historiography) in the spoken language understood by the majority living under Castilian rule (González-Casanovas 1995). The drawing up of territorial rather than local legislation in Castilian rather than in Latin would prove to be a useful ideological tool for securing conquered territories and initiating a process of legislative unification.10 By the early thirteenth century, the parochial nature of local fuero legislation, in so far as its geographical application was limited and its socio-political effects suited principally to local (aristocratic) interests, was already being challenged by territorial law-codes promoted by the Crown’s castellanización policies.11 Like Fernando III before him, Alfonso X continued this policy, convinced that newly conquered territories might be unified in one supra-regional political unit with centralized rule, which would eventually challenge local aristocratic interests. Alfonso X thus sought to make use of vernacular writing to facilitate the contemporaneous shift from feudal overlordship to a corporative monarchy with imperial pretensions (Maravall: 1967c [1965]). Indeed, it was this reasoning that had already led to the drawing up of the territorial law-codes in the vernacular, which preceded the Partidas: the Espéculo (1255) and the Fuero Real (1256). Both of these law-codes served, in accordance with the Crown’s “política anti-nobiliaria”, to replace local fueros or unwritten customary law, with laws based on Justinian Law which favored the king as señor natural to all his people (Palacios Alcaine 1991: xiii). According to Palacios Alcaine (1991), the Fuero Real was promulgated as a model municipal charter and intended for wide distribution amongst the towns and cities of Castilian territories where it enjoyed “una extraordinaria difusión” (ix). In both cases, meanwhile, it is worth reiterating that the codes were drawn up in Castilian, thus demonstrating the acceptance of the vernacular as an acknowledged written language of government and the climax of a shift

The Vernacular Letter of the Law in the Siete Partidas

67

away from Latin that had begun with the translation of Latinate fueros in the 1240’s (Wright 1996). The Partidas and Castilian imperium Nevertheless, it is the Siete Partidas which best illustrate the interwoven correspondences between the culmination of the Crown’s vernacular language planning, the climax of fuero legislation, and the emergence of a greatly extended, supra-regional Castile.12 While the Fuero Real had been designed to serve as a model for a whole series of municipalities and regions, the Partidas present the vision of a centralized government using a truly territorial legislative code to enhance its rule. In effect, the Fuero Real had become, not simply echoed, but greatly amplified and presented within the context of a new political philosophy intended for a whole kingdom. Castilian customary laws would be combined with Roman and Canon Law to form the basis of what would be drawn up as a universal legislative code for a unified political space with well-defined boundaries. The universal nature and encyclopedic style of the Partidas has led historians like Palacios Alcaine (1991) to go so far as to regard them as an imperial law code designed for application beyond the shores of the Iberian Peninsula. Moreover, when one takes into account the fact that the year (1256) that the compilers began work on the code corresponds to the year Alfonso X was elected to candidature for the crown of Holy Roman Emperor, it is difficult not to be convinced that the intention was to create a law-code “fit for an emperor” (Craddock 1981: 374). Indeed, even if the law-code itself was not intrinsically ‘imperial’, it also seems reasonable to assume that Alfonso X intended his legislative masterpiece to thereby at least promote his own image as a suitable candidate for the title of Holy Roman Emperor. It is worth pausing and clarifying further Alfonso X’s understanding of the nature of his own imperium in Castile in the thirteenth century. If we first look back briefly to the reign of the eleventh to twelfth century king of Leon-Castile, Alfonso VI (1040 – 1109), we will see that when he was referred to as imperator totius Hispaniae in Chancery documents, his contemporaries shared a conception of ‘empire’ which was akin to the Carolingian notion of territorial conquest over other kingdoms. Maravall (1997 [1954]) confirms that this was the case by explaining that the medieval

68

Companion to Empire

Hispanic conception of the Peninsula was of a series of kingdoms (Hispaniae) ruled by a corresponding series of kings, over which one king, ‘the king of kings’ or ‘emperor’, might exercise power. Alfonso VI, then: aparece como emperador de algo que, independientemente de la referencia personal a un titular, es de por sí, el “reino” de las Españas. Este giro de pensamiento es de la más pura tradición isidoriana, tal vez renovada por la conquista de Toledo. A nuestro modo de ver constituye la trama fundamental del pensamiento político de España en la Edad Media. Presente o latente, ese “regnum Hispaniae” o ese “imperio de España”, constituye la perspectiva de fondo de nuestro medievo. (Maravall 1997: 443)

Alfonso VI, however, also used the imperial title as a means for countering Gregory VII’s use of the Donation of Constantine to claim temporal jurisdiction over Spain for the papacy (Maravall 1997 [1954]: 442; Muldoon 1999: 56). In effect, Alfonso VI’s use of imperium is in the sense of a supreme political authority won by conquest and thus opposes the ecclesiastical conception, which implied a concession from the Church. By the time that Alfonso X had the Siete Partidas composed in the thirteenth century, the Iberian Peninsula, like the rest of western Christendom, had been transformed by the revival of Roman law in the twelfth century and the formal codification of secular resistance to papal claims of the kind encountered by Alfonso VI. The adage associated with the new legal theory, rex imperator in regno suo underscored the monarchy’s supremacy in temporal affairs and prepared the ground for the early modern notion of political ‘sovereignty’.13 The Siete Partidas make no bones about this secular notion of imperio as secular authority and the fact that a king can wield it, by the ‘Grace of God’ rather than any intervention by the Pope: Imperio es gran dignidad, noble e honrrada sobre todas las otras, que los omes pueden aver en este mundo temporalmente. Ca el Señor a quien dios tal honra da es Rey e emperador [...] E el no es tenudo de obedescer a ninguno fueras ende al papa en las cosas espiritualas. (Alfonso X 1985: 2. 1. 1)

Alfonso X thereby presents a vernacular codification of imperium that might simply be understood as political power over sovereign territory and peoples. Consequently, given the fact that the Partidas were drawn up in the vernacular rather than Latin and that the references to

The Vernacular Letter of the Law in the Siete Partidas

69

imperial power in the Segunda Partida are most likely allusions to the contemporaneous political doctrine contained within the rex imperator in regno suo aphorism, I prefer to view the Partidas primarily as an affirmation of Castile’s linguistic, political and juridical hegemony over diverse territories within the central Peninsula. The Alfonsine Chancery Notwithstanding the fact that the Partidas, drawn up between 1256 and 1265, would not be promulgated until the fourteenth century, this vernacular legislative text is invaluable as evidence of a new sociocultural and political formation in which vernacular writing played a pivotal role and in which that same written word might be used to inscribe the monarch’s imagined ideal kingdom.14 The compilers of the Partidas dedicate no less than 61 laws in Title 12 of Book 4 of the Primera partida to notaries and the execution of their duties, while in Title 19 of the Tercera partida, another 16 laws stress the essential nature of this much-valued craft to the efficient running of the kingdom: E el pro que nasçe dellos es muy grande quando fazen su oficio lealmente ca se desembargan y se acaban las cosas que son menester en el regno por ellos y finca remenbranza de las cosas pasadas en sus registros, en las notas que guardan et en las cartas que facen. (Law 1)15

Indeed, much of the content of the Tercera Partida attests to the greater credibility attributed to written evidence over oral testimony and is devoted to defining the many kinds of ‘document’ which could be drafted and verified by a notary or by a credible seal. Title 18, for instance, contains a striking 121 laws pertaining to the correct use of written testimony in a court of law: ‘De las escripturas por que se prueban los pleytos’. Meanwhile, the workings of the Royal Chancery and its centrality to government administration are outlined in Title 20, which comprises only twelve laws. Despite this relatively brief mention, in the Segunda Partida, the chancellor’s position and powerful role as intermediary is so highly regarded that it is described as analogous to that of the royal chaplain: ca bien asi como el capellan es medianero entre Dios et el rey espiritualmente en fecho de su alma, otrosi lo es el chanciller entre él et los homes quanto en las cosas temporales: et esto es porque todas las cosas que el rey ha de librar por

70

Companion to Empire cartas, de qual manera quier que sean, han de seer fechas con su sabiduria. (Title 9, Law 4)

Even though Lodares (1995) might well have been correct in claiming that the naming of a chancellor was merely a political formality and more of an honorary title than anything else, there is no doubt that under Fernando III and Alfonso X the work of the Chancery as an institution multiplied considerably. Because of the increase in the size of the kingdom, the desire for centralized government and the subsequent need for a centralized legislative and juridical infrastructure, the volume of documents to be copied, revised, edited and then distributed in the name of the king also rose dramatically.16 The codification of court officials and their duties, which the Partidas provides, is clearly illustrative of the indispensability of the Chancery to thirteenth century monarchical rule. Given such a situation, it seems logical that the king himself would be expected to be proficient in the saberes to assure himself of personal control over his notaries and lawyers and to stamp his authority on the scriptural production issuing from his court: Acuçioso debe el rey seer en aprender los saberes, ca por ellos entenderá las cosas de raiz; y sabrá mejor obrar en ellas, et otrosi, por saber leer sabrá mejor guardar sus poridades et seer señor de ellos, lo que de otra guisa no podrie tan bien facer, ca por la mengua de non saber estas cosas haberie por fuerza de meter otro consigo que lo sopiese. (Segunda Partida, Title 5, Law 16)

The king’s ability to read and write was of course not restricted to the vernacular, but must also include knowledge of Latin. John of Salisbury’s infamous adage about illiterate kings being asses in the Policraticus, one of the earliest (12th century) medieval treatises which might be described as political science, springs immediately to mind in this regard. According to John of Salisbury, the competent and just king must be literate or at least be surrounded by literates so that he might be truly acquainted with Canon Law: It indeed seems too little to have the law in one’s purse, unless it is also faithfully protected in one’s soul. It is to be read all the days of his (the prince’s) life. As a result of this, it is clearly accepted that it is necessary for princes who are commanded to reflect daily upon the text of the divine law, to be proficient in letters. (Book 4. 43-4)

The Vernacular Letter of the Law in the Siete Partidas

71

John of Salisbury is referring here to ‘literacy’ in the sense of having the ability to read Latin, while ‘literacy’ as it appears in the Partidas almost certainly refers to a knowledge of both Latin and Romance: as the compilers state, the king should be well-versed in los saberes which would of course require a knowledge of both languages. Despite the spectacular promotion of the vernacular during the thirteenth century, the Castilian renaissance obviously did not result in the complete abandonment of Latin. Latin was used for foreign correspondence and initially alongside the vernacular for internal governmental transactions. One need only consult the second Partida to recognize the continued importance of Latinity within the governmental hierarchy. For instance, apart from the king himself, Law 4 of the ninth title states not once, but twice that the king’s chancellor should “sepa leer, e escrevir, tambien en latín como en romance” […] “et leer et escribir conviene que sepa en latin et en romance”. Controlling Legislation Latin, however, served another purpose in the compilation of the Partidas and the Fuero Real: it was the source language for the invention of innovative technical terms pertaining to jurisprudence and legislation in the vernacular. As Penny (2000) points out, the process of vernacular standardization meant elaborating the functions of the vernacular in the sense that once established as a distinct, but uniform writing system independent of Latin, its lexical capacities would have to be dramatically enhanced. Only then would Castilian be endowed with the capacity for challenging Latin’s supremacy in all linguistic domains or registers (Penny 2000: 203-4). One of the greatest tasks facing the compilers of vernacular legislation of the period, therefore, was how to transfer the legalistic language of Justinian Roman Law and other Latinate law codes to a writing system which was as yet ill-equipped for the syntactical and lexical sophistication possessed by Latin (Lodares 1995: 52-56). It is for this reason that the Partidas might also be regarded as an excellent illustration of ‘language planning’ and Alfonso X’s well-known attempts to create a castellano drecho or a uniform, standardized vernacular writing system which would override all other IberoRomance varieties of writing (Lapesa 1980: 238-247). In that sense

72

Companion to Empire

also, the Partidas are a receptacle for a vernacular writing system which has been enriched by the invention of new lexical items sanctioned by the Crown and the affirmation of Castilian as a language of law in its own right. The point that I would like to stress here, however, is not the question of how the vernacular’s prestige increased by comparison to Latin and the incorporation of cultismos into written prose. Instead, we should also remember that, having secured the acceptance of an elaborated vernacular as a written language of prestige, among the greatest preoccupations for the Castilian Crown of the period were also: 1) control over the production and diffusion of documents pertaining to a common law code; 2) limiting the authorization of legalistic written materials to those receiving the royal seal of approval and excluding those not sanctioned by the Crown; 3) the establishment of a standard language of law also authorized by royal sanction and understood by all the King’s subjects. And it is with these concerns in mind that we might reconsider the eulogy dedicated to the written word in the prologue to Rada’s De Rebus Hispaniae as it is reproduced in Alfonso X’s Estoria de Espanna (Primera Crónica General): Mas por que los estudios de los fechos de los omnes se demudan en muchas guisas, fueron sobresto apercebudos los sabios ancianos, et escrivieron los fechos tan bien de los locos cuemo de los sabios, et otrossi daquellos que fueron fieles en la ley de Dios et de los que no, et las leys de los sanctaurios et las de los pueblos, et los derechos de las clerezias et los de los legos. (Prologue, Estoria de Espanna (Primera Crónica General)

In this particular section, the focus is on the close relationship between the diffusion of writing and the growth of a communal identity deriving from a shared knowledge of history, law and science. While writing makes both canon and secular laws possible, and, more importantly, makes the laws available to the populace at large, both in the present and in the future, it also affords the continuity of tradition and the reproduction of a specific societal formation. Writing is privileged in the sense that it represents the means for preserving the kinds of knowledge which have been deemed worthy of such preservation. Such privileging requires authorization from the Crown and thus, in its turn, the Crown invests itself with the power to control the production of knowledges which are conducive to the bolstering of

The Vernacular Letter of the Law in the Siete Partidas

73

centralized monarchical power. If, in the process, the Crown chose to re-invent vernacular writing as a sacred script comparable to the languages of the Book and hence as a script with a magical aura, transmitting indisputable words of wisdom, our reading of the Partidas should warn us to be conscious that the actual function of the written word was also viewed in rather less metaphysical terms, and more as a material means for imposing the royal will upon its extended territories. Reading the definitions of writing and the duties of notaries as they appear in the Partidas can be a sobering experience in the sense that writing is not only something to be venerated, but a material practice to be carefully monitored and controlled. Despite the usual emphasis on the mnemonic advantages of the written word: “E pues que de las escripturas tanto bien viene que en todos los tienpos tiene pro, como que faze menbrar las cosas olvidadas, e afirma las que son de nuevo fechas” (Primera Partida, Title 12, Prologue), the compliers of the laws are under no illusion that the written word is somehow immune to abuse and manipulation through forgery. On the contrary, the recurring theme is that of how breaches of confidence, misunderstandings and false testimony can be avoided. One method for doing so is that the royal notaries prove themselves trustworthy enough to fulfill their duties as loyal vassals to the king. Should they fail to do so, the consequences could be fatal: Falsedat faciendo escribano de la corte del rey en carta ó en previllejo, debe morir por ello: et si por aventura á sabiendas descobriese poridat quell rey le hobiese mandado guardar, á home de quien le veniese destorvo ó daño, debel dar pena qual entendiere que meresce. Et si el escribano de cibdat ó de villa ficiere alguna carta falsa ó ficiere alguna falsedat en juicio en los pleytos quell mandan escrebir, débenle cortar la mano con que la fizo et darle por malo, de manera que non pueda seer testigo, nin haber ninguna otra honra mientras viviere. (Tercera Partida, Title 19, Law 16 [1807])

While the employment of trusted personnel was a sine qua non in the royal bureaucracy, royal authority would be stamped upon supposedly immutable written statutes and laws if care were taken with the way an individual law was expressed. This was particularly essential for the transference of Latinate legalistic terminology into Castilian and the establishment of a norm for the content of legalistic language in the vernacular. It is for this reason that the Partidas includes numerous definitions which might serve to authorize and clarify the

74

Companion to Empire

use of innovative legal terms: “Ius naturale en latin tanto quiere dezir en romance, como derecho natural, que han en si los omes naturalmente, e aun las otras animalias que han sentido” (Primera Partida, Title 1, Law 2 1555). The emphasis, however, was not only on the stylistic presentation of the laws or on the ways new lexical items were incorporated into vernacular writing. Codification of a standardized language also involved paying attention to the way the written word actually appeared on the manuscript, thus the parallel emphasis on attempting to establish standardized graphemes with which all sounds in Castilian might be expressed.17 The writing of the laws must be clear, precise without being unnecessarily brief, and unequivocal as far as was possible, not only in terms of intended meaning, but also in terms of the material legibility of each word of the law: Conplidas dezimos que deven seer las leyes e muy cuydadas e muy catadas porque sean derechas e provechosas conplidamiente a todos, e deven seer llanas e paladinas porque todo ome las pueda entender e aprovecharse dellas a su derecho, e deven seer sin escatima e sin punto porque non pueda venir sobre ellas disputacion ni contienda. (Primera Partida, Title 1, Law 2)

At the same time, they should also be without unnecessary elaboration that might obfuscate or lead to uncertainty over intended meanings. Just as the Church imposed canonical interpretations of biblical texts against the danger of heretical readings of tropologically complex passages, the Castilian Crown strove to avoid the slightest possibility of plural interpretations or deliberate manipulation of any given law. In effect, while the promotion of a ‘literate mentality’ in thirteenth century Castile undoubtedly meant the privileging of written law as more authoritative than oral custom, it also meant that Castilian subjects should familiarize themselves with and accept the unchallengeable authority of only those written laws sanctioned by the Crown in a language controlled by the Crown. Reading Laws in an ‘Oral’ Community This scenario, however, cannot but beg the question as to how a largely oral populace, in which a relatively tiny minority were ‘literate’ in the modern sense, would actually read their country’s laws. It is revealing for instance that, while re-affirming the primacy

The Vernacular Letter of the Law in the Siete Partidas

75

of written law issuing from the Crown over orally-transmitted usos and costumbres, the compilers of the Partidas repeat Isidore of Seville’s definition of the law; that is, that the essential authority of a law is inextricably linked to its being set down in writing and hence, having to be read: “Ley tanto quiere dezir como castigo o ensenamiento escripto que lega a ome que no faga mal o quell aduce a seer leal faziendo derecho” (Primera Partida , Title 1, Law 7) [1807]. This explanation thereby reveals the continued influence of aspects of Isidorean etymological theory which established an ontological relationship between word and referent: for Isidore of Seville and the ancient grammarians, as we have seen, the essence of the referent was revealed in the etymology of its linguistic sign. In the 1555 version of the Siete Partidas, the natural link between writing/reading, truth and law is even more explicit with the inclusion of the word leyenda: “Ley tanto quiere dezir como leyenda en que yaze enseniamiento e castigo escripto que liga e apremia la vida del hombre que no faga mal e muestra e ensena el bien que el hombre deve fazer, e usar” (Primera Partida, Title 1, Law 4). The law’s essence as a law depends on its legibility and hence, its written nature. Common speech is thus rendered unlawful, powerless and potentially untrustworthy until it has been objectified as an article of written law. John of Salisbury is once again helpful with regard to an understanding of how supra-regional legislation might be distributed and made known in such a culture. For as far as reading skills are concerned for the 12th century legislative and bureaucratically-minded monarch, John accepts that ‘secondary reading’ would be adequate in the case of rulers who are not able to read and must be read to: “Nor is he totally devoid of reading who, although he does not read himself, hears what is read by others of the faithful” (Chapter 6. Book 5. 44). By extension, this notion of secondary literacy amongst Christians of the pre-modern period is useful for then establishing how written materials were transmitted to large communities through the intercession of a minority who were skilled in the art of reading. The Primera Partida underscores that this was actually anticipated as the case in thirteenth century Castile with respect to the diffusion of the laws: E ninguno non puede nin deve escusarse por dezir que lo non sabe, ca si por el por si non las podiere saber deve las saber de aquellos que las sopieren. E quien esto

76

Companion to Empire non feziere si errare non puede ser escusado de non recibir la pena que las leyes mandan. (Title 1, Law 11)

Hence, no-one could be exempt or excused from the laws, not even those incapable of reading; they should make sure instead that they learn the law from someone with a knowledge of the legislation or simply someone who can read. Those able to read (the clerical or notarial minority whose Latinity is believed to have been poor during this period) would have carried out this communal task more efficiently with a vernacular text (as in the case of the Partidas) than they would have in Latin, thus providing yet another practical reason for the increase in vernacular writing during the thirteenth century.18 In this regard, it is also worth considering Wright’s hypothesis on the impact of the introduction of the Carolingian reforms into the Iberian Peninsula once again (Wright 1982). If local and territorial legislation had continued to be drawn up in Latin and pronounced in the way stipulated by the Carolingian reforms, they would of course have fallen on deaf ears. For the public to be made aware of their legal rights as members of repopulated communities or their obligations as subjects of the Crown, the written language being read aloud to them would have to be pronounced according to the spoken norm. Now that Latin could no longer fulfill that role, a new writing system that allowed such pronunciation had to be invented. It is during the period of Castile’s dramatic territorial expansion under Ferdinand III and Alfonso X, therefore, that the task of translating fueros from Latin would become a common activity in the Castilian Chancery, while new legislation would be drawn up in the vernacular.19 The Preference for the Vernacular At this point, we might still wonder why there was such urgency to implement the vernacular as an official language, and indeed, on such a scale, in Castile rather than anywhere else. And the answer, quite simply, would appear to lie with the efforts to repopulate those territories wrested from Moslem control in the decades both preceding and during Alfonso X’s reign. Between 1212, the year of the Christian victory at Navas de Tolosa, and 1284, the year of Alfonso X’s death, the political face of the Peninsula was completely transformed. Now, as the most geographically extensive of the expansionist Iberian king-

The Vernacular Letter of the Law in the Siete Partidas

77

doms within the actual Peninsula, it was in Castile’s interests, as indeed it was in the case of James I’s Aragon to the East, to consolidate its gains through the political and juridical use of its own language.20 Indeed, the written word had become such an essential aspect of medieval secular rule by this time that the organization of a successful repopulation policy depended upon it. Now that Castile’s own language was represented, under the illusion of alphabetic letter/sound equivalency, in its own spelling system (rather than in Latin), that was the system which would be embraced to satisfy the urgent need to consolidate conquest in writing. Lapesa, as is well known, suggested that Castilian was chosen over Latin as the alfonsine language of choice to appease Jewish sensibilities at the Castilian court (Lapesa 1980: 237). What is probably less well known is that Lapesa also proposed that Castilian patriotism was the principal reason for the dramatic promotion of Castilian prose (Lapesa 1985: 167-198). His explanation being that since ecclesiastical Latinity within the northern kingdoms had been controlled by French clerics from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, it is possible that, after the union of Castile and León in 1230, the Castilian monarchy opted for the promotion of the vernacular as a means for asserting a communal identity and hence a rejection of this Christian, but all the same, foreign meddling in Castilian affairs.21 The rejection of French influence outlined by Lapesa underscores mid-thirteenth century Castile’s ambition to emerge as the leading Christian power in a Peninsula where warring frontier communities had existed for half a millennium.22 While Wright (1997; 2000) bemoans Castile’s linguistic nationalism for eventually leading to the break-up of Western Christendom as a linguistic unit with a single writing system, the advantages of a standardized Castilian writing system obviously proved irresistible to the Crown. To this day, Fernando III’s sepulcher stands in Seville Cathedral as a monument to the emergence of the Castilian vernacular as a prestige language and of expansionist Castile’s linguistic and cultural hegemony. For, when he died in 1252, Alfonso X had had him buried in a tomb bearing inscriptions in Castilian, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic.23 Material evidence then that both son and father regarded themselves as having cultural and political hegemony in the formerly Moslem territories of the Southern Peninsula. Yet, to view the emergence of vernacular writing in the

78

Companion to Empire

thirteenth century on an unprecedented scale (and, in particular, the drawing up of legislation in the vernacular) solely as a means for asserting Castilian cultural and political hegemony over Jews and Moslems would of course only be partially correct. Similarly, González Casanovas’ (1994) contention that alfonsine Castile strove to loosen the Church’s monopoly over cultural production by promoting secular humanism in the life of the country, does not adequately explain the emergence of Castilian as a language of law and government administration. Moreover, even while the theories of a proto-nationalism based on standardized vernacular writing are most compelling, there is still another crucial factor to be raised in accounting for the direction of the Crown’s language planning in this period. The fact is, as I have been stressing, that the King was of course also pursuing a legislative policy in favor of centralized monarchy and to the detriment of the Castilian nobility: Entendiendo e veyendo los males que nascen e se levantan en las tierras e en los nuestros regnos por los muchos fueros que eran en las villas e en las tierras departidas en muchas maneras que los unos se julgavan por fueros de libros minguados e non conplidos, e los otros se judgan por fazanas desaguisadas e sin derecho, e los que aquelos libros tenien por que se judgavan algunos rayenlos e camiavan los como ellos se querian a pro de si e a daño de los pueblos. […] E por ende nos […] feziemos estas leyes que son escriptas en este libro. (Primera Partida, Prologue)

Among the principal motivations behind the drawing up of the Partidas, then, was the need to assert the monarchy’s independence from the Castilian nobility with respect to government administration of the newly-extended kingdom, to reduce the power afforded by local fueros and oral custom to members of the nobility and to put an end to abuses of those traditional legal codes. This would be achieved by demanding acquiescence and obedience from all the king’s subjects to a communal law superseding any previous legislation that did not favor the absolutist implications of Justinian law. Compare the following extracts from the 1807 and the 1555 versions respectively: E por esto todos son tenudos de las guardar tanbien los de las ordenes como los seglares, tanbien los ricos como los pobres, tanbien los omes como las mujeres. (Primera Partida, Title 1, Law 10)

The Vernacular Letter of the Law in the Siete Partidas

79

Todos aquellos que son del señorio del fazedor de las leyes, sobre que las el pone, son tenudos de las obedescer e guardar, e juzgarse por ellas, e no por otro escrito de otra ley fecha en ninguna manera. (Primera Partida, Title 1, Law 15)

Repopulation, Proto-Nationalism and Monarchism Beyond the question of the Crown’s ambitions against the Castilian nobility, we should also take into account the expediency of legislative transactions in the vernacular for frontier communities dependent on repopulation for securing dominion over captured territories. Standardized writing in Castilian would obviously best effectuate repopulation according to the law and ensure the spread of royal legislative reforms with the greatest speed. Besides, if such legislation had continued to be drawn up in the traditional way (in Latin) and pronounced in accordance with the Carolingian reforms (with letter/sound equivalency), a simultaneous translation would have been necessary, thus slowing down the whole process. The redistribution of lands or the granting of new charters and privileges to newly-settled communities would be more smoothly resolved if all parties involved were immediately aware of their legal rights and limitations (Lomax 1971; Palacios Alcaine 1991). The fact that Castilian would indeed become the accepted language of law in such matters was almost certainly more influential in its evolution as a prestige dialect and a language of power than the growth of literary prose in the same period. This is perfectly understandable when we consider that the King’s subjects, either through their own devices or as members of textual communities, will have had more contact with legislative writings, commercial deeds of sale and property ownership than any other form of vernacular writing. In other words, the “prosa útil” of daily life would have been the most influential in creating a sense of political unity amongst all the King’s subjects (Lodares 1995: 56). The second of the Siete Partidas attests to the obvious importance of repopulation to Castilian ambitions both in a descriptive and prescriptive fashion. The King wished to warn future monarchs of the danger posed to the emerging sovereign territory by internal rebellion in lands sparsely populated by Christians. Previous experience had taught the Christian rulers that territorial conquest did not guarantee a permanent victory and that each movement south should be accompanied by a policy of repopulation to consolidate the occupation

80

Companion to Empire

and division of conquered lands and cities: “sólo el establecimiento humano suponía garantía de dominio” (Gimeno Menéndez 1995: 96). The loss of reconquered territories in the eleventh and twelfth centuries first to the Almoravids and then to the Almohads had not been forgotten or taken lightly by the Christians (Fletcher 1992). It is therefore, first and foremost, the monarch’s duty to make sure that his lands are “bien complida et poblada et labrada et placerle siempre que haya en ella buenos tiempos” (Segunda Partida, Title 11, Law 1). The King’s subjects are not without responsibility in this regard either: Title 20 is dedicated to describing the people’s relationship with their homeland in normative terms, ‘Quál deve seer el pueblo á la tierra onde son naturales’. To repopulate is a civic duty critical to the contemporaneous transference of local (quasi-feudal) loyalties to the emerging corporate territory and, moreover, the people should bear a patriotic allegiance to three things of supreme importance: “La primera es amar a Dios; la segunda á su señor natural; la tercera su tierra” (Title 12, Prologue). Their ‘natural lord’ now of course referred to the king rather than the local feudal overlord. Similarly, tierra, rather than being synonymous with the señorío, was of course now to be understood as the term which would denote the whole corporate kingdom (Maravall 1967c [1965]: 119). Suffice it to say that these new loyalties are representative of what the compilers of the Partidas, under Aristotelian influence, propose is a ‘natural’ affinity between subject and sovereign territory: que otrosi es tenudo el pueblo a semejante desto, de obrar por amor que han á la tierra onde son naturales, en nodreciéndola, e acrecsentándola, et faciendo linage en ella que la pueble. (Title 20, Prologue)

Choosing momentarily to pass over the recovered latinate patria motif which comes to dominate the proto-nationalist rhetoric in the Segunda Partida, the compilers of the laws attribute the natural bond between subject and territory to the fact that that same territory is a mother to its inhabitants: “ca esta (tierra) les es asi como madre, de que sallen al mundo, e vienen á ser homes” (Title 20, Law 1). The natural bond is hence that between a male subject populator/conqueror and a feminized recuperated land. A land which has presumably been violated, occupied and taken captive by the Moslem ‘invaders’. To describe this repopulation rescue mission in any other language than the Castilian mother tongue would not do justice to the natural affinity between

The Vernacular Letter of the Law in the Siete Partidas

81

essentialized objects being woven here. Hence, while underscoring that repopulation by Castilian subjects is a legal obligation, the compilers also strive to invent the natural link between land, language and people. Inscribing the King’s Body The Castilian Crown’s embracing the vernacular tongue as their language of power permitted them to inscribe these new supraregional values into the imaginations of as many subjects as possible regardless of their social standing and cultural knowledge and thus to gather wide support for thirteenth century centralized monarchical power. Using the vernacular would presumably allow the Crown to convince the greatest number of people that an expanded Castile could be accepted as one kingdom, with, at least in theory, one people equal under one law. In effect, the ‘people’ of Castile were inscribed as the ‘owners’ of their own law code in their spoken tongue as if the Partidas were a transcription of their ancient laws and customs and hence truly the monumentalization of their own oral traditions. The book of law itself is by extension a metaphor for this notion of unity and a corporal whole comprising many parts: it is another ‘closed’ body which contains the potential for inscribing the real bodies of the kings subjects within the newly-formed social corpus. However, the law seeks first to establish the subjectivity of the regal institution as the ‘head’ of this corporal collectivity. Moreover, it is important to signal here that it is the institution that is inscribed by the law rather than the individual mortal king: for only the institution can claim immortality. Of course, Alfonso X does not deny his own role as the compiler of the laws in this one textual body: “Nos dixiemos de suso que feziemos estas leyes a pro de nuestras tierras e de nuestros regnos e mostraremos muchas razones porque conviene que las feziesemos” (Primera Partida, Title 1, Prologue). In doing so, however, he does not constitute himself as ‘law-maker’ or ‘writer of laws’, but relies on pre-existing traditions (Roman Law, Canon Law and the regional fueros, costumbres and usos), to create his legal corpus. In that sense, he appears not to produce new laws, but depends on the authority of the Law itself, as a natural autonomous authority, to be the writing Subject. As a result, Alfonso X is able to distance his individual self

82

Companion to Empire

so as to give the impression that he too is objectified by the law and thus eligible to be integrated into the immortal body of the monarchical institution. The King thus legitimizes his current position as ‘head’ of an eternal corporative kingdom: Y naturalmente dixieron los sabios que el rey es cabeza del regno; ca así como de la cabeza nacen los sentidos por que se mandan todos los miembros del cuerpo, bien así por el mandamiento que nace del rey, que es señor et cabeza de todos los del regno, se deben mandar, et guiar et haber un acuerdo con él para obedescerle, et amparar, et guardar et endereszar el regno onde él es alma et cabeza, et ellos, los miembros. (Segunda Partida, Title 1, Law 5)

There could be nothing more appropriate then than that this communal ‘body’ should be inscribed with its own ‘voice’ so that the speakers of that same language might not only perceive that territorial body as their own, but that, having also come to view the Law as an autonomous authority to which the King had ceded his individual power, the distinct ‘members’ of the kingdom might see the laws set out before them or read to them, not as products of the King’s court, but as scriptural manifestations of their own ancient communal traditions and shared values.24 The Seventh Partida: the Extremity of the Body of Law This conception of Castile as a unified proto-national territorial body culminates dramatically in the last of the seven partidas. In this concluding section of the law-code, the Crown’s lawyers sought to assert royal hegemony as the normative center from which to contain socio-religious behaviors by classifying and hence criminalizing a series of social groups as potential threats to the welfare of newly extended Castile. These minority groups are all relegated to the last of the partidas as if to underscore their existential and physical segregation from the main body of the realm and also from the body of law, and particularly, canon law, in the case of heretics, Jews and mudéjares. Moreover, quite fittingly, given the systematic, architectonic structure of the Siete Partidas, we might recall that the first partida is in fact devoted to defining abstract notions of natural, civil and canon law, and describing the duties of ecclesiastics and the faithful. A stark contrast to the criminals, criminal acts and penalties found in the seventh. The textual segregation of those figures included

The Vernacular Letter of the Law in the Siete Partidas

83

in this last partida is underscored in the 1931 English translation of the law-code by the addition of a descriptive title which does not appear in the Castilian original: ‘Underworlds: The Dead, The Criminal and the Marginalized’ (Alfonso X: 2001). Clearly, the culmination of the law-code with a partida devoted to deviant undesirables serves to symbolize the fact that the larger social body might flourish, either with the complete expulsion of those same undesirables, or at least through their containment and control once they are accepted within the contours of that same body. In that sense, far from presenting a vision of ethno-religious tolerance and harmony, the seventh partida in particular provides evidence of the circulation of a pre-modern discourse of proto-national unification through the identification of an alterity which could potentially be effaced or at least quarantined. And, in effect, the laws thereby set an ideological precedent for an institutionalized codification of minority religious groups which might, in given circumstances, and at a later date, provide the justification of actual violence against those same criminalized groups.25 Ironically, while these groups were perceived as oppositional or threatening to the hegemonic ideology of a centralized Christian monarchy, and hence, frequently represented in the partidas as possessing the capacity for causing grant daño a la tierra, the laws also thereby revealed the indispensability of those same groups to the rhetorical construction of a proto-national body and hence, the equally-constructed nature of the center/periphery dichotomy being simultaneously inscribed by that same law-code. The inscription of these outsiders in the final partida with a view to their social segregation, alienation, punishment and even execution is enhanced by the employment of a rhetoric characterized by tropes of disease. The plague, leprosy, madness and demoniac possession, all combine as evidence of the alleged threat to the synecdochical body of the king and hence, of the body politic. The result was thus the ideological merging of undesirables as a common enemy outside the pale of medieval Christian orthodoxy.26 The compilers of the Partidas classify sorcerers, soothsayers, Jews, Moors, heretics, suicides and blasphemers in sequential titles (Titles 23-28 respectively) as if to emphasize the commonalities between these distinct groups. The common thread connecting them all is of course the lack or distortion of the faith: they are, after all, all descreídos or ‘non-believers’ who disrespect or disobey orthodox Christian doctrine:

84

Companion to Empire Et por ende pues que en los títulos ante deste fablamos de los judios, et de los moros, et de los hereges et de los desesperados, que todos estos cuidando creer descreen en Dios, et teniendo que lo loan lo denuestan, queremos aqui decir agora de los que con saña cuidan denostar a él et a sus santos. (Title 28: ‘De los que denuestan a Dios, et a Santa María et a los otros santos’)

However, we might note that the first and gravest crime (“cabeza de todos los males”) outlined in the seventh partida is treason against the realm. Since this crime - aimed primarily at the Castilian nobility leads directly to a charge of infamy for the traitor and all his descendents, it is described in terms of a leprosy which takes inexorable hold of the traitor’s body, and, presumably, which also threatens to infect the royal body in a similar fashion: Traicion es uno de los mayores yerros et denuestos en que los homes pueden caer: et tanto la tovieron por mala los sabios antiguos que conoscieron las cosas derechamente, que la semejaron a la gafedat (lepra) ca bien asi como aquella enfermedat es mala que prende por todo el cuerpo, et despues que es presa non se puede toller nin mellecinar de manera que pueda guarescer el que la ha, et face al home despues que es gafo seer apartado et alongado de todos los otros. (Title 2: ‘De las trayciones’)

The tone is thereby set for the subsequent litany of crimes against the realm, and the ‘erroneous’ anti-Christian beliefs that are to be punished or contained by some form of legislative control. Even though none of the minority religious groups in the Siete Partidas is directly condemned as social lepers themselves, we might note that heresy was criminalized as a form of treason in the twelfth century (Barton Russell 1992: 60) and hence, presumably, understood as another ‘leprosy’. In this respect, we might note that the compilers of the Partidas, regarded the Jews’ execution of Christ as treason against God, and Christian apostasy to Islam as a form of treason brought on by madness: Ensandecen (enloquecen) a las vegadas homes hi ha et pierden el seso et el verdadero conocimiento como homes de mala ventura, et desesperados de todo bien reniegan la fe de nuestro señor Jesucristo et tórnanse moros […] facen muy grant traycion […] mandamos que si fuere fallado el que tal yerro ficiere en algunt lugar de nuestro señorío, que muera por ello. (Title 25, Law 4)

If non-Christians could be equated with a disease infecting the territorial body, their ‘erroneous’ religious beliefs were thus a form of

The Vernacular Letter of the Law in the Siete Partidas

85

locura which contrasted with the legislative razón of the ‘wise’ Christian king: the head of the realm. The Imperial Future of an author-function Bearing the tenor of the seventh partida in mind, Alfonso X was hardly a ‘progressive’ king who was ahead of his time politically as historians have suggested over the years.27 The complementary image of the King as a liberally minded aesthete concerned with protecting the welfare of his kingdom against a power-crazed Castilian aristocracy should also be rejected as a commonplace. Like any other Castilian aristocrat of the time, Alfonso X was primarily concerned with increasing and securing his own power (Doubleday 2001). Rather than projecting contemporary conceptions of enlightened rule onto Alfonso X, the emphasis in this chapter has been on the intricate relationship between pre-modern territorial conquest and the development of an authoritative, regulatory writing practice in the vernacular. Royal concerns over communal cultural pursuits based on a common language or the political rights of the whole Castilian pueblo were obviously secondary to the urgent need to impose a centralized rule of law over conquered territories where peoples of diverse faiths and languages co-existed. In effect, it was the latter rather than the former, which contributed more directly to the standardization of Castilian writing and its consolidation as an official language of government. If we are to remain mindful of this historical link between Castile’s territorial and linguistic expansion in the thirteenth century, it behooves us to make Alfonso X an object of study which refers, not to a figure of flesh and blood who invented Spanish prose, but to a discursive label - a foucauldian author-function - bestowing institutional authority on both vernacular writing as a regulatory practice and vernacular writings as discursive products legitimating the Crown’s control over repopulated spaces and peoples. Alfonso X should hence be understood more as the guiding principle around which vernacular law and history would be classified as ‘truth’ for up to three centuries after the King’s death. Indeed, it is worth briefly commenting on the future reception of the Siete Partidas by future generations because if, on the one hand, we should be cautious of regarding the law-code as the work of a

86

Companion to Empire

‘modern’ king, we should, on the other, also be wary of considering its indispensability to statecraft in later centuries as a simple illustration of how medieval institutions continued into the early modern period (Frankl 1962; Weckmann 1984). Instead, the fate of the Siete Partidas might be more accurately attributed to the fact that the re-articulation of Roman law provided by thirteenth century legislation of this kind established the foundation of the modern notion of absolutist state sovereignty. After its initial promulgation in 1348 as a supplementary body of law in the Ordenamiento de Alcalá de Henares, the Siete Partidas was destined to become the corner stone of the Castilian monarchy’s attempts to enhance government administration. Presumably, the creation of a homogeneous and cohesive legal system would complement the notion of a unified ethnic and religious community in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Pérez Bustamante 1995). In this regard, we might recall that the Partidas were revised and printed in an incunabulum version in 1491 to bolster Ferdinand and Isabel’s centralized monarchical state. The Partidas (along with the Fuero Real and the Ordenamientos de Cortes) were also a principal source for the famous compilation of amended legislation known as the Leyes de Toro of 1505 and enjoyed multiple re-editions in their own right (1501, 1528, 1542, 1550, 1555, 1565, 1576, 1578-88, 1598) (López Estrada and López García Berdoy 1992: 41). Finally, the wide diffusion of the Partidas in later centuries, particularly during and after the conquest of the Americas, should also be viewed as evidence of the fact that the Castilian vernacular would eventually become a hegemonic written language of the colonial bureaucracy in overseas territories.

The Vernacular Letter of the Law in the Siete Partidas

87

Notes 1

Even though its is generally accepted that Romance documents can be traced back as far as far back as the reigns of Alfonso VIII of Castile (1158-1214) and Alfonso IX of León (1188-1230) (Lomax 1971: 412-3), Wright has suggested that later translations can account for the existence of such documents and that the use of the vernacular for Royal affairs might possibly begin with the reign of Fernando III (1217 in Castile and 1230 in León) (Wright 1982: 238). 2 While none of his relatives oversaw a promotion of vernacular textuality on the same scale as Alfonso X, we should note, for instance, that Alfonso X’s father-in-law, James I of Aragon (1208–1276), promoted the Catalan language as an official language of his realm and was responsible for compiling the Llibre del Consulat de Mar, a compendium of laws governing maritime trade. Similarly, Alfonso X’s cousin, Frederick II (1194-1250) of Sicily, implemented political centralization and the drawing up of general legislative works. However, Frederick II’s support for the vernacular seems to have been limited to poetry (in Provençal and Old Italian) and a Greek version of the Constitutions of Melfi. In France, meanwhile, Louis IX (122670), another cousin of Alfonso X, did not promote the use of the vernacular as the principal language of government to anywhere near the same degree, and French was not actually inaugurated as an official language of government until 1539 (GonzálezCasanovas 1994: 4). 3 I am referring to the following in particular: Brancaforte 1984; López Estrada and López García-Berdoy 1992; González-Casanovas 1994; Márquez Villanueva 1994 4 The section quoted most often in this regard is the comparison between the King and Moses: “podemos entender e dezir que compuso nuestro Sennor las razones delos mandados, e que ovo ell auctoridad e el nombre dend, por quelas mando escrivir, mas quelas escrivio Moysen, assi como dixiemos nos muchas vezes; el rey faze un libro, non por quel el escriva con sus manos, mas por que compone las razones del, e las se deven fazer, e desi escrive las qui el manda, pero dezimos por esta razon que el rey faze el libro” (General Estoria. Parte 1.14, quoted in Brancaforte: 1984). In a similar vein, Rucquoi (1993) has underscored the constructed parallels between Alfonso X and the figure of Solomon as wise kings. 5 While I am aware of the potential for terminological anachronism here, given the more familiar association with modern nation-building (Penny 2000; Mar Molinero 2000), the Castilian Crown’s promotion of vernacular writing for political purposes make ‘Language Planning’ and, in particular, its sub-category, ‘status-planning’ (the area of a language policy concerned with elevating the prestige of a chosen standard through codification, elaboration of function and acceptance) useful tools for examining texts like the Partidas with regard to the standardization of Spanish prose. In effect, this chapter illustrates the results of the status-planning inherent to a protonationalist castellanización policy under Alfonso X. Furthermore, while recognizing the fact that pre-modern Castile can hardly be conceived of as a ‘nation’, it is nevertheless worth bearing in mind that a common spoken language is not necessarily a characteristic of a modern nation, whereas an artificially-created and privileged (mostly written dialect) register might well be (Anderson 1983). 6 As far as the events leading up to the codification of vernacular writing, we should principally bear in mind that the substitution of the ancient Visigothic rite and its accompanying script by the Roman rite and the introduction of Carolingian miniscule

88

Companion to Empire

script at the Council of Burgos in 1080 during the reign of Alfonso VI (1072-1109) may have been of fundamental importance. For the Carolingian reforms of Latin, which had had an impact in France since the ninth century, required not only the introduction of this new script, but also that Latin texts once read out loud with vernacular pronunciation, would now have to be pronounced with a grapheme/phoneme equivalency (Wright 1982). The only problem with reforming Latin in this way, however, was that it rendered the liturgy incomprehensible to a public unfamiliar with the new, non-vernacular pronunciation. In effect, the result was the eventual introduction of a vernacular orthographic system that would allow comprehensible readings in the vernacular to be resumed for that same public. In other words, ironically, Medieval Latin might be itself thought of as an invention which was responsible for the parallel invention of vernacular writing systems in the kingdoms where Romance languages were now spoken. Of course, the introduction of the reformed Latin, like the replacement of the Visigothic rite was not implemented with any degree of temporal or geographical uniformity in the Iberian Peninsula, thus delaying any notion of a subsequent global adoption of recognizably standardized vernacular writing systems until the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries (outside Catalonia, that is). Indeed, in the city of Toledo itself, Arabic would dominate as the chosen language of writing over Romance until almost a century after the introduction of the reforms (Wright 2002). 7 Wright’s work on the political struggle surrounding the vernacular-Latin binary, particularly as it manifested itself in the early thirteenth century Castilian chancery, provides more depth to our understanding of why Jiménez de Rada wrote with ‘traditional’ orthography (Wright 2000). Wright argues that Jiménez de Rada was a ‘traditionalist’ in the sense that he fought to maintain the primacy of Latin as the written language of the realm and in particular, of the Chancery, during his period as Archbishop (1209-1247) and as Chancellor ex officio against those who sought to promote the ‘new’, ‘innovative’ Romance writing system. That Jiménez de Rada had been educated in Paris where a movement was underway to defend traditional notions of litterae against the innovations which were taking place in Toledo, is another factor to be taken into consideration (Wright 2000: 102; 2002: 258). Only in the 1240’s when Rada’s influence was waning and his death was imminent (1247), would the innovators – those favoring the ‘new’ writing system - get the upper hand and the official acceptance of the vernacular would become a fait accompli. 8 It is also worth noting that Alfonso and Ferdinand were not isolated figures in their desire to rule over law-governed corporative kingdoms. According to Stock, even though the term cancelleria does not come into common usage in Christendom until the twelfth century, Royal Chanceries, as opposed to the more advanced papal archival administration, began to develop scribal techniques and archives for administration in England and France throughout the 1100’s (Stock 1983: 38-9). We should also note that interest in universal law codes was characteristic of other thirteenth century kingdoms in Iberia itself, not least of all in James I’s Aragon (Wolf 1989). 9 In the case of the Siete Partidas in particular, the Fourteenth century Crónica del Rey Don Alfonso décimo underscores the fact that Fernando III began the Partidas and that Alfonso completed the unfinished work: “e el don Ferrando su padre avia comenzado á facer los libros de las Partidas, este rey don Alfonso su fijo fizolas acabar” (1953: 9. 8).

The Vernacular Letter of the Law in the Siete Partidas

89

10 The task of repopulation facing Alfonso X, however, proved to be daunting: the area of lands conquered under his father had doubled within the space of twenty five years (1230-52), and yet demographically, the figures were in no way promising. Vicens estimated that while Castilian territories increased between 50 and 100 percent during this period, the conquests only meant a 10 percent increase in population (Vicens Vives 1979: 3-14). When cities like Seville fell to the Christians, they were completely abandoned by their erstwhile rulers and, although they were resettled by northerners (principally from Castile and León), the insufficient repopulation efforts left the city under-populated (González Jiménez 1989; 2000). In rural Andalusia the situation was even worse with lands remaining virtually deserted for years, while in the rural areas which were populated, the mudéjar population remained larger than the Christian minority (Vicens Vives 1979). Repopulation, clearly an essential means for the exercising of Castilian power in the southern Peninsula, would be a lengthy and slow process. 11 Palacios Alcaine (1991) and Gimeno Méndez (1995) provide introductions to the fuero tradition and its evolution from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. 12 Paradoxically, however, if the greatest achievement of Alfonso X’s reign was this vernacular legislative corpus, it would also eventually prove to be his downfall. In 1272 Alfonso X would be faced with open rebellion by the nobles and the Castilian clergy, forced to retract the more contentious aspects of his legislation and taxation and even to re-instate the authority of the old fueros which had been superseded by the new corporate legislation (Craddock 1981). The following comment from Alatorre (1979: 122-3) is typical of how, traditionally, his downfall has been attributed to his dedicating himself to letters rather than to political prudence: “Alfonso X careció de acometividad guerrera y de astucia diplomática […] Nadie se acordaría de él si no fuera por el papel decisivo que tuvo en la evolución de la lengua y la cultura”. 13 After the Investiture crisis of the eleventh century when the papacy re-affirmed the hierocratic principles of government, the laity had been galvanized into laying the foundations of a ‘political’ framework that might diminish papal control over temporal affairs. Driven by the re-introduction of the Aristotelian concept of a ‘natural body politic’, or of human beings as naturally political animals, and the recuperation of the ancient category of civis or ‘lay citizen’ rather than Christian, western Christendom would witness the advent of corporate monarchies which acknowledged autonomous regal rule in temporal affairs; the regnum would gradually be freed from the sacerdotium in the sense that the Pope’s control over temporal affairs would be greatly diminished. This period also witnesses the evolution of a political terminology based on Roman, Aristotelian and Thomist principals which would allow people to think for the first time in terms of an autonomous secular scientia politica. Concepts like ‘sovereignty’, ‘law’, ‘subject’, ‘obedience’ and so on had always been interpreted in an ecclesiological framework, whereas from the thirteenth century on, these terms would also become the working tools of the new politology (Ullmann 1965: 114). 14 As far as the chronology of the alfonsine legislative corpus is concerned, Craddock’s study (1981) appears to have been accepted as the most thorough. 15 All quotations from the Siete Partidas are taken from the 1807 version compiled by the Real Academia de la Historia. In cases where contrastive analysis proves to be of considerable relevance, I also refer to the version glossed in Latin by Gregorio López in 1555 [1985]. It is also relevant to point out that no satisfactory manuscript tradition

90

Companion to Empire

has been established for the Partidas, with no original codex extant and the earliest manuscript of any section of the law code dating back to the fourteenth century. On the issues of chronology, the manuscript tradition and the promulgation of the laws, Craddock, O’Callaghan and Burns provide an ample bibliography in their respective introductions to the re-published and re-edited English translation of the Partidas (2001). 16 On the work of the Castilian Chancery, see Lodares (1995: 49-54) and the bibliography he provides on page 49. 17 On the difficulties faced by Alfonso X’s scribes in establishing a standard orthographic system, see Penny (2000: 206-209). 18 On the decline of Latinate culture from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, see Márquez-Villanueva (1990: 76-110). 19 On the difficulty of dating the first fuero translations, see Wright (1996, 2000). 20 If Alfonso X’s father-in-law, James I of Aragon promoted written Catalan in a like fashion, and would make Aragon the dominant Iberian power in the Mediterranean, the kingdom of Castile under Alfonso X remained the largest Christian kingdom in the peninsula itself. 21 The successful occupation of Seville and Cordoba had also apparently led to a change in attitude towards French military intervention and aid in the Peninsula. In this regard, Lapesa (1985) tells us that Jiménez de Rada had initiated an anti-French policy in ecclesiastical affairs. In fact, his aversion towards Cluny and attempts to expel French clerics from the Spanish Church actually resulted in a reduction in the number of foreign-born bishops in Castile. Consequently, when Alfonso X came to the throne in 1252, only two of the bishops in the whole of Spain were of Gallic origin (Lapesa 1985: 186). 22 Similarly, the concomitant shift in language nomenclature appears to complement this proto-nationalism: the distinction between romançe, the name for any variety of Ibero-Romance, and latín, would, by the fifteenth century, be virtually eclipsed by a castellano/latín opposition when ‘Castilian’ became the name for a language of state identified with specific political boundaries (Penny 2000: 204-5). In short, the transition from romance to castellano in the Iberian Peninsula is a political and not a linguistic transition. 23 According to Márquez-Villanueva, the tomb was concealed from the public for many years for obvious reasons and even as recently as the 1992 Expo, it remained hidden from view (1994:129). 24 The metaphor anima-corpus, according to which the clergy had laid claim to rule over the laity, would be appropriated by the secular realm and suffer a transformation in significance in the late medieval period. In effect, the emerging monarchies of western Christendom would transform the king into the ‘soul’ (anima) or the ‘head’ (caput) of his own corporate kingdom (corpus) who would rule as a legislator within a juridical infrastructure resembling that of the Church. On the metaphorical body of the king and the medieval body politic, sources include Kantarowicz 1997 [1957]; Ullman 1965; Maravall 1967b [1956], 1967c [1965]; Le Goff 1989. See also my comparable discussion in Chapter 6. 25 We might recall Nirenberg’s argument that, rather than polarizing the notions of tolerance and (violent) intolerance, the medieval Iberian notion of convivencia between the three faiths implies the fusion of the two terms since the potentiality for religious and ethnic violence was ever-present. Indeed, Nirenberg goes so far as to

The Vernacular Letter of the Law in the Siete Partidas

91

suggest that sporadic inter-communal violence was in fact a necessary catalyst for “associative action” and hence, essential to the continued functioning of convivencia (Nirenberg 1998: 9). And, as far as the criminalization of religious minorities in particular is concerned, I am also thinking of Nirenberg’s contention that the discourse of persecution (expressed, for example, in a law-code) only acquires force when people actually choose to make use of it and take action according to the ‘vocabularies of hate’ contained within that same discourse. In other words, people of the pre-modern era were not simply subject to elite discourses quite passively, but actually chose to become active participants in, for example, those acts of persecution against medieval minorities which were predicated on the prior existence of discourses of persecution (Nirenberg 1998: 6). 26 Leprosy was a widely disseminated rhetorical figure throughout western Christendom in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries for conflating traitors with Jews, Moors and heretics (Moore 1987; Burton Russell 1992; Goodich 1998). Any form of heterodoxy could thus be depicted as a plague or simply an infection spreading unrelentingly throughout the territorial body. As a result, ‘outsiders’ (Jews, Moors, lepers, heretics, etc.) came to be demonized as the objects of an exclusionary discourse, which, more often than not, obscured the differences between them and hence, proffered the vision of a common threat. 27 I am thinking here of Maravall’s tendency to eulogize Alfonso X and present the King virtually as a ‘democrat’ (Maravall 1967c [1965]). A more recent example of this tendency is Piña Homs’ (1995) impassioned defense of Alfonso X from his traditional critics.

Chapter 3 The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire” La Gramática se extendía mucho más, era un mundo de conocimientos, en el cual quería introducir a los niños para que con la ayuda de sus maestros comenzaran a recorrerlo, y llegaran, si podían a hacerse dueños de él. Considerada así la obra de Nebrija, no hay duda que fue un verdadero descubrimiento, comparable con el de Colón, pues así como el navegante genovés descubrió el camino del Nuevo Mundo, así Nebrija descubrió el del Antiguo y ofreció a España tesoros de belleza y de sabiduría mucho más estimables que las perlas de oriente y las minas del Potosí. Felix G. Olmedo, Nebrija (1441-1522) (1944)

O rey Don Hernando e Doña Isabel; En vos començaron los siglos dorados. Juan del Enzina, Égloga cuarta (1492)

The publication of Antonio de Nebrija’s (1441-1522) Gramática castellana in 1492 is quite justifiably regarded as the next monumental milestone in the history of the Spanish language after the Alfonsine renaissance. However, there is no denying that Nebrija’s posthumous fame – especially outside Spain – is rarely attributed to his having written the first formal grammar of any modern Romance language. Instead, this early modern philologist is much more often remembered for the four and a half page prologue which precedes his vernacular grammar, and, in particular, for his having marked that same prologue indelibly with his declaration that “siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio”. This becomes even more apparent when we also remember that Nebrija enjoyed only a chequered career

94

Companion to Empire

during his lifetime and, more importantly, that his vernacular grammar, unlike his Latin works, enjoyed only meager success before the eighteenth century. Indeed, while Gil Fernández has suggested that the eighteenth century reception of Nebrija’s best known work, his Latin grammar, the Introductiones Latinae (‘El Antonio’), had secured that work’s immortality and a mythical quality in Spain’s history no less than that of El Cid because it had become “una irrenunciable gloria de nuestro patrimonio cultural” (Gil Fernández 1981: 186), I would argue that the compañera del imperio cliché has been exclusively responsible for Nebrija’s continued notoriety amongst modern scholars of Hispanic imperialism. On the other hand, if Hispanists like Kohut (1997:11) have underscored Nebrija’s totemic role in Spanish letters as no less than the padre of Castilian humanism, I would once again suggest that it is the infamous imperial phrase that has continued to be an indispensable factor in perpetuating such patriarchal mystification which, without a doubt, is more generally identified with the excesses of early twentieth century nationalist philology than contemporary scholarship. Nowadays, particularly for those interested in colonial discourse analysis, the enduring resonance of the phrase lies in its motto-like capacity for quite summarily reflecting contemporary truisms like knowledge is power, that writing is ‘violent’ and the fact that political power cannot be maintained without the manipulation and control of self-legitimating discursive formations. Furthermore, for contemporary historians, Nebrija’s mythical status (and, needless to say, convenient usefulness) owes much simply to his timing: for, by uttering the phrase in 1492, he synthesized, albeit unwittingly, the intimate relationship between the rise of national vernaculars and the inauguration of early-modern transatlantic expansion that characterized the period in which he lived.1 I am particularly interested in the phrase, however, not simply because it serves as a pithy adage which encapsulates the theoretical premise of this whole book, but because the phrase is also of course a quotation. In that sense, those familiar with Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history will recognize that I am taking certain liberties with Benjamin’s concern with quotations as potential monads for given historical eras (Benjamin 1985b: 254; 262-263). We might recall that Benjamin had called upon the historian to search for the truth of history in the metaphorical fragments and debris of official

The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

95

history in the shape of forgotten allegorical quotations. He also urged the historian to wrench those same quotations from their original contexts and to confront them with the historian’s present in a dialectical image so as to throw new light on the past from which they had been extracted. Similarly, my approach to Nebrija’s philological corpus here is intended to create a dialectical confrontation between modern interpretations of the quotation and its original historical significance. I am thereby taking liberties in the sense that the quotation I am working with is hardly a forgotten fragment lying on the periphery of a monolithic totalizing history, but one of the very foundations of such a history. Yet, as far as I am concerned, the quotation in question, generally regarded as having been fullyexplained and being self-evident to the extent that it has become no less than a cliché of Hispanic Studies, might actually direct our historical gaze to those neglected or overlooked areas from which it had previously been diverted by the very existence of such clichés. Such an analysis of the same quotation allows us to reconsider the more pervasive imperial character of Nebrija’s philological corpus – in both Latin and the vernacular - and which far exceeds the implications inherent to the prologue to the Gramática castellana alone. Imperium and imperio In that sense, my argument is meant to question the most prominent of current scholarly views regarding the question of imperial ideology in Nebrija’s work. For it is now generally agreed that the word imperio in Nebrija’s fifteenth century quotation could not possibly have meant territorial expansion and rule in the modern sense of ‘empire’, but was more akin to the modern concept of ‘power’ or ‘sovereignty’ within one territory (Kamen 2003; Lodares 2007; Fuchs 2007). Others, while noting that the word imperio was historically and contextually variable and could hence mean ‘nation’, ‘monarchy’ and ‘rule’ at different times, also point out that Nebrija never refers directly to Castile as an imperio in the prologue, but alternately as reino, monarquía, and republica (Asensio 1960; Carrera de la Red 1988). Nevertheless, I argue that such an empirical explanation is of limited impact if we relocate the quotation within the context of the undeniably messianic and millenarian tone which typifies, not only

96

Companion to Empire

the rest of the prologue to the Gramática castellana and Nebrija’s other works in both Latin and the vernacular, but which also typifies a wider book culture promoted by the Catholic Monarchs at the time. The rhetoric employed to promote imperial image-making in that same book culture manifested itself in the shape of a series of tropes, figures and topoi, which demonstrated the conviction that language was indispensable for buttressing political power and also for securing internal political hegemony. That same rhetoric was employed to legitimate overseas expansion in a sense sufficiently germane to medieval notions of universal imperial rule under a single world ruler. Consequently, whether imperio simply meant ‘power’ in Nebrija’s 1492 pronouncement or not, we cannot overlook the fact that that same pronouncement comes couched in a rhetoric designed to promote Castilian rule in terms of the old universality, and hence, the old idea of imperium as the right to world rule. Such rhetoric, needless to say, would prove to be a constant feature of Nebrija’s corpus, as we shall see, from the Latin poetry of the 1480’s to his later linguistic and historical works of the first two decades of the sixteenth century. In this latter respect, we need only remind ourselves of Nebrija’s observations on the incipient colonization of the Indies in 1509: Nunc vero quis est, qui non intelligat quamquam titulus imperii sit in Germania, rem tamen ipsam esse penes Hispanos Principes, qui Italiae magnae partis atque maris nostri insularum domini iam moliuntur bella in Aphricam transmittere, atque missis classibus caeli motum secuti iam pertingunt insulas Indorum populis adiacentes? Neque eo contenti alterius orbis magna parte explorata parum abest ut Hispaniae atque Aphricae finis occiduus cum orbis terrarum fronte Orientali adiungatur. (Nebrija 1545 [1509]: Rerum a Ferdinando et Elisabe Hispaniarum felicissimis Regibus gestarum Decades duae. Exhortatio ad lectorem) [But now who is there who does not realize that, although the imperial title is in Germany, the empire itself is actually in the hands of the Spanish Princes? For, as lords of greater Italy and the islands of the Mediterranean, they are now preparing to take war to Africa, and, having sent out their fleets and followed the movement of the heavens, they are now also reaching the islands lying next to the peoples of the Indies. Nor are they content with this, even after having explored a great part of that other (New) world, and satisfaction comes only with the knowledge that they may join the westernmost limits of Spain and Africa with the easternmost front of the whole globe.]

Here, of course, there can be little doubt about the meaning of imperium. Rather than signaling ‘power’ or ‘sovereignty’, Nebrija illustrates the contemporary tendency to explain the emerging

The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

97

American colonies in terms of the western movement of the Holy Roman Empire and thus, reveals the extent to which the dream of a universal Christian empire continued to be cherished. In the same way, we might note that Nebrija’s use of imperio simply as ‘power’ within the frontiers of a kingdom and then, at other times, as a reference to the medieval notion of universal empire reflects the extremes of the ongoing humanist debates over the nature of imperium. For more than two centuries, humanists had argued over whether the best form of government was indeed that of one world monarchy or, given the emergence of the proto-nation states during the Renaissance, whether the universality implicit to the Holy Roman Empire had become an obsolete notion, precisely because of the rise of those same states (Maravall 1952, 1958; Yates 1975; Fernández Santamaría 1977; Pagden 1995; Izbicki and Nederman 2000). In fact, principally because of the conflicts which had arisen with regard to the proper relations between the Holy Roman Empire, the papacy and the individual monarchs of Europe since the fourteenth century, writings concentrating on imperial themes escalated rapidly and continued to represent a significant proportion of political treatises composed well into the Renaissance (Izbicki and Nederman, 2000: 8).2 Dante’s De Monarchia (1310), for instance, which had promoted the notion of a single world ruler as a means for preventing war between individual kingdoms, was opposed in later years by those Italian humanists – most notably in the case of Petrarch - who preferred to focus on the patriotic unification of the Italic Peninsula over any notions of universal empire identified with the barbaric roots of the Holy Roman Empire in Charlemagne’s Germany. Ironically, however, this patriotism was often draped in an imperial rhetoric designed to promote the notions of universal rule and cyclic imperial renovation (Yates 1975: 13). Moreover, if a strongly anti-imperial tenor had characterized the attitudes of many strands of political theory during the Renaissance, not least of all in the emblematic case of Machiavelli, the association of the medieval empire with spiritual renovation and a golden age of peace and justice in which Christ could reign, would, in later years, again find favor. For the old imperial idea provided the perfect rhetoric for those Spanish Erasmians like Alfonso de Valdés who were determined to interpret the reign of Charles V as the inauguration of a universal pax

98

Companion to Empire

christiana (Bataillon 1950; Fernández Santamaría 1977; Subirats 1994). Not surprisingly, Dante’s De Monarchia would once again prove popular amongst those same advisors to promote the new emperor as the long-awaited one world ruler. Needless to say, the first few decades of colonization in the Americas obviously represents a critical period in the evolution of conceptions of universal imperium. While the unprecedented number of lands under the nominal control of a single ruler in the figure of Charles V appeared to constitute a truly ‘universal’ Holy Roman Empire, this was no single ‘organic’ whole ruled from a single imperial capital, but a conglomeration of polities whose universality and unity had been challenged precisely by the emergence of the American territories (Maravall 1958: 117). Indeed, the very existence of the transatlantic territories proved that no ancient ruler could have possibly aspired to be the sole ruler of the orbis terrarum, while the existence of other, non-Christian empires (Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal) during the same period, with their own claims on ancient imperial legacies, led to the subsequent pluralization of the term and its employment when referring to the Inca and Aztec civilizations (Maravall 1952: 238). Similarly, the terms of the papal bulls which sanctioned the expansionist policies first of Portugal and then Spain, and treaties like that of Tordesillas, of course undermined the notion of a one world empire under a single ruler since the world was theoretically being divided between two Iberian powers. Furthermore, resistance to the expansion of the old imperial title was manifested most notably in the case of Castile itself, where Charles V was forbidden from using the title on Castilian soil even though nostalgia continued for the homegrown imperialism of the previous era under the Catholic Monarchs (Fernández Santamaría 1977: 15). By the end of the sixteenth century, after the definitive separation of the Spanish ‘empire’ under Philip II from the Holy Roman Empire, imperium was replaced by monarchia universalis as the preferred term for supra-national authority and the continued promotion of Spanish ambitions to universal Christian rule (Pagden 1995: 43). At the same time, however, the need for rhetorical continuity with the ancient Christian Imperium Romanum, meant that Philip II considered becoming the first Castilian ruler to assume the title Emperor of the Indies and the fact that, by the seventeenth century, the Kings of Castile would on occasion be referred to as ‘Emperors’ of America

The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

99

(Pagden: 32). And, as we know, this delay on the part of sixteenth century monarchs to assume the nomenclature of empire to describe themselves and their conquests, not to mention Nebrija’s earlier (1492) use of imperio to simply indicate ‘power’, has led commentators over the years to suggest that there never was a ‘Spanish Empire’ in the modern sense, but merely an embryonic nation-state torn between the old medieval notions of universal rule and new forms of supra-national rule.3 In response to such arguments, we might contend that, whatever significations the word imperio may or may not have possessed during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the kingdoms of Iberia did emerge as supra-regional, maritime powers that controlled their overseas territories from a metropolitan center. Moreover, whether the rulers of those same countries ever explicitly referred to their overseas colonial possessions as empires or not, does not detract from the fact that those same possessions required a formidable series of ideological formations to sustain them. We should also note that if the medieval universal empire with a single Dominus mundi never actually materialized as a political reality, it survived as a phantasmagoric idea in the form of imperial image-making and messianic propaganda (Yates 1975; Tanner 1993). While Nebrija’s own imperial exuberance illustrates the legacy of the universalist rhetoric employed by the likes of Petrarch and Valla in this way, it therefore also pre-empts the survival of (Yates’ notion of) the “phantom” or “mirage” of the “imperial hope” during the first years of Charles V’s rule and of the influence of Erasmian universal pacifism on Castilian intellectuals (Yates 1975: 1-2). It is more than tempting, then, to view Nebrija’s use of the word imperio itself as a phantom or mirage for his readers of the distant future: for the word both invoked those medieval notions of empire which, even by 1492, as we have noted, were trite, and, on the other, appeared to signal that new forms of supra-regional rule were being formulated. This emphasis on Nebrija’s rhetoric should not, however, obscure the fact that that same language of universal rule was intended to legitimate very real expansionist ambitions on the part of the Catholic Monarchs after the capitulation of Granada, especially as regards the possibility of incursions into North Africa. Moreover, after the incipient colonization of the Americas became a reality, Nebrija’s imperial jubilation was obviously designed to celebrate the recent material expansion across the Atlantic.

100

Companion to Empire

Before embarking upon a more detailed discussion of the imperial rhetoric found in Nebrija’s actual works, however, I would like to first consider the reception and dissemination of the 1492 quotation over the centuries by those historians and linguists concerned principally with linguistic colonization. For, despite the fact that Nebrija’s pronouncement could not have referred to a royal language policy for the as yet unknown Americas, it has invariably, and much to the annoyance of Hispanic philologists, been used to describe the expansion of the vernacular in transatlantic lands during the sixteenth century. After all, this is certainly an iconic instance of how the subsequent interpretation of an individual work might be of greater historical interest than the author’s apparent intentions and influence. It is also a striking instance of how, despite the objections of those same historians of the Spanish language, the retrospective gaze of historians of imperialism directs us to an undeniable conclusion: whatever Nebrija’s original intentions, and whatever the original meaning of the word imperio, his quotation functions as a metonym for the array of images, tropes and rhetorical topoi in Latin and Castilian in which the inextricable link between lettered culture and imperial power were manifested and would continue to be manifested for years to come. For any discussion of the modern reception of the quotation by both Nebrija’s apologists and his critics also underscores the fact that the rhetoric of imperial triumph and messianic imagemaking would indeed eventually be employed to mythologize the material conquest of the Americas. As we shall see, it even allows us to ponder the extent to which the more specific idea of imperial renovation might survive well into the twentieth century. Modern Reception of the Quotation Given the apparent lack of interest in the GC in the centuries following its publication, save a brief rekindling of interest when it was republished in 1744, it is to the late nineteenth and twentieth century that we must look for the sources responsible for influencing contemporary interpretations of the work.4 Broadly speaking, I have identified three significant strands of reception for the prologue by scholars of this latter period: firstly, Latinamericanists of the latetwentieth century who have adopted Nebrija’s prologue as a convenient point of departure for the commencement of the ideological or

The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

101

scriptural conquest of the Americas and, in particular, the compañero del imperio phrase as a motto for the destructive force that literacy might become as an instrument of colonialism; secondly, from the Generation of 1898 to the mid-twentieth century when debate over the relationship between unified states, their populations and their national languages would reach fever pitch intensity, Nebrija and his Spanish Grammar would enjoy a resurgence, especially among propagandists of the post war period5; finally, those contemporary philologists who have striven to neutralize the importance of the phrase, regarding it as a red herring, which detracts attention from Nebrija’s other works. The tendency in this final group has been instead to emphasize his role as a pioneering grammarian, as a Latin humanist, as a pre-Erasmian Greek scholar and hence, simply as a landmark figure in the history of linguistics in Spain. Although distinct, what is striking about these three forms of reception is that all three identify Nebrija and his grammatical works as a monumental terminus a quo: either as the lamentable beginning of a violent conquest; as the triumphant beginning of a unified Spanish nation whose language would spread worldwide with its empire; or as the revolutionary beginning of both Latin humanism in Castile and also of modern vernacular linguistics. Such a contrived search for origins was critiqued by Janet Abu-Lughod (1989) as a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ view of history when she reminded historians of what should really by now be a truism when considered in reference to contemporary historiography: “it is only after events have run their course that we build the narrative that appears to make them inevitable” (Abu-Lughod 1989: 112). The particular bone of contention for Abu-Lughod was the fact that, traditionally, history had located the origins of western capitalism and modernity in the sixteenth century, or at its earliest, in the fifteenth century when Europe first began to ‘flex its muscles’ before ‘exporting’ its ‘modern civilization’ to the rest of the world. In other words, the subsequent development of the western ‘miracle’ had been located in an exclusively European arena and hence lent credit to the belief that Europe had expanded and prevailed as an imperial power for five centuries simply because of its inherent (‘miraculous’) ability to do so (Abu-Lughod 1989: 111). Enrique Dussel eagerly seconded AbuLughod’s call to extend the search for the origins of modernity and contemporary globalization beyond the geographical limits of Europe

102

Companion to Empire

and beyond the temporal/cultural confines of the European Renaissance (Dussel 1997). In calling for a decentering of traditional European historiography, both Dussel and Abu-Lughod, not only warned us against an understanding of history as a self-fulfilling prophecy, but also to be wary of the commonplace of projecting a contemporary, hegemonic Weltanschauung onto representations of the past and thus distorting the alterity of that same past. More recently, and, in a manner germane to these arguments, Fuchs (2003, 2007) has challenged the mythologization of the year 1492 as a marker for periodization in Spanish history and culture. The irony for Fuchs is that the association of the year 1492 with the fall of Granada unites the nationalist fiction of Gothic, Christian Spain and the ideologically-opposed tradition of mourning the early modern ‘loss’ of medieval convivencia (Fuchs 2007: 497). Most importantly for my purposes here, Fuchs reminds us of a point that is often overlooked: Iberian overseas expansion, either in the form of Portuguese expeditions along the western coast of Africa, the Castilian annexation of the Canary Islands or the Aragonese expansion in Italy and the Balearics, had not simply emerged out of nothing in 1492 and was certainly not solely focused on the Americas (Fuchs 2007: 496). The tendency to mythologize 1492 as the annus mirabilis and hence, as a symbolic rupture between the medieval and modern eras simply reinforces the teleology of the modern nation and oversimplifies the history of Iberian colonialism (ibid.). However, even if Fuchs’ demythologizing gesture is especially relevant for re-thinking traditional historical paradigms with regard to Peninsula history, we should not forget that the date retains a powerful symbolic value in the Americas. Stern (1992), for instance, argued that 1492 might actually serve as a useful temporal marker for discussing the continued resonance of the past in the present and hence, for framing discussions of the legacy of conquest, but of course, without ever obfuscating the fact that the date obviously holds no primordial significance for the beginnings of Amerindian civilizations. While I would posit that we should also be aware, like most revisionist historians of the last two decades, that a purely antiquarian history is also obviously impossible, it is still difficult to disagree with the basic premise these scholars propose. Nevertheless, we cannot help but also interpret their apparently revisionist critique as a call for

The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

103

a return to the traditional notion of what constitutes a recording of the facts: that is, the striving for the noble art of an empirically-objective history which, free from cultural prejudice, might provide a more accurate representation of the past and tell us what really happened. In other words, however much such critiques are informed by current concerns with ‘identity politics’, they remain rooted in an empiricist tradition. And, as we know, in the case of interpretations of the prologue to the GC, this becomes problematic: for empirical objectivity is only one of several factors that might guide us in assessing the value and impact of such a text. What I intend here is, once again, the fact that, if viewed with historical precision, we know that Nebrija cannot possibly be predicting the conquest of the Americas and the use of the (vernacular) written word to colonize Amerindian consciousness. Yet, it is virtually impossible not to concur with those Latinamericanists who read the prologue to the GC as an amazingly appropriate point of departure for the whole process of expansion and conquest which would characterize the next five hundred years of European history and the vast scriptural machinery that would accompany and narrate it.6 In that sense then, the subsequent fate of the language and the culture, which Nebrija was striving to consecrate, makes the appeal to the sacrosanct authority of the archive rather less crucial. We might also recall that, while the GC was virtually unknown during the colonial period in the Americas, Nebrija’s lexicographical works and Latin grammars were successfully used by missionary ethnographers to alphabetize indigenous languages and to facilitate the evangelization of Amerindian communities in their own languages. This aspect of the colonial enterprise is one that I will go on to discuss in more detail in the later chapters. Nebrija and Modern Nationalism The second category of reception for the GC in which we might explore the tension between an attempted empirical objectivity and the self-fulfilling prophecy notion of history, is that provided by twentieth century philologists working in Spain. The tone and general direction of such work in the first half of the twentieth century might, quite justifiably, be traced back to two monumental figures of Castilian letters. On the one hand, the late nineteenth century nostalgia for

104

Companion to Empire

Spain’s imperial past encouraged Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo to make his celebratory rediscovery of Castilian literature of the medieval and early modern periods. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, meanwhile, was responsible for establishing the philological tradition, which re-examined the legendary origins of the Castilian language and re-asserted the manifest destiny of the hegemonic Iberian language (Del Valle 2002). As Mar Molinero (2000), Lodares (2002) and Del Valle (2002) have argued, this assertion of Castilian philological nationalism also arose in response to the vitality of the cultural nationalism that had arisen contemporaneously in Catalonia and of which Catalan philology played no small part. The response of the Castilian philologists was to create a discourse in which Los castellanos aparecen como un pueblo vitalista, predestinado por la historia a cumplir una alta misión: garantizar la unidad de España a través de su hegemonía cultural, política y lingüística. (Lodares 2002: 123-4)

Given this renewed interest in the origins of Castilian language and literature combined with the nationalistic notion that a common language might symbolize national identity, some of Nebrija’s original corpus was re-published, while academic commentary on his work, particularly the Castilian Grammar, grew dramatically. For instance, Menéndez y Pelayo included the second book of the Grammar in his Antología de poetas líricos castellanos (1890-1906). Then, in 1926, during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, a complete edition was published by González Llubera, followed by José Rogerio Sánchez’s edition of 1931, the year in which Castilian was for the first time declared the official language of the country.7 The first critical edition of the twentieth century, however, would appear during the post-war years of nationalist exaltation and at the height of Francoist imperial propaganda. Edited by Pascual Galindo Romeo and Luis Ortiz Muñoz, this 1946 facsimile edition included a preface by none less than the director of the recently founded CSIC (1944), José Ibañez Martín, who took the opportunity to celebrate the compañera del imperio phrase in triumphant terms. Indeed, it is in this preface that we witness the solidification of a another modern reading of the prologue which is more symbolic than empirical: for Ibañez Martínez, Nebrija’s phrase is the perfect motto for notion of an inextricable link between national and linguistic unity:

The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

105

Nebrija estuvo presente en la gran hora histórica en que se consagra la unidad española, como el más firme cimiento de nuestra grandeza nacional […] Creada la lengua común, como vínculo firmísimo de unidad nacional, todavía le estaba reservado un más alto destino. Ya Nebrija, en las primeras frases de su prólogo, había estampado la concepción capital de nuestra expansión lingüística. ‘Siempre la lengua – dice – fue compañera del imperio’. (Quoted in Bierbach 1989: 220 221)

Nebrija’s vernacular works thus become proof of the linguistic and cultural origins of a unified nation, which should be celebrated rather than condemned. The recovery of Nebrija as the originator of the national language cannot, therefore, be divorced from the propagandistic recovery of the Reconquest myth as the bedrock for Francoist ideology during and after the Spanish Civil War. The nationalistic motto of an homogenous Spanish community, namely España una, grande, libre - found its perfect analogue in the mythical Castile of 1492 where the end of the Reconquest served as a metaphor for the defeat of the Republicans and other internal enemies bent on dividing the nation. It was not therefore unusual for Franco’s propagandists to identify the leader with El Cid freeing Spain from the Moors or to promote a mythologized Isabel as the model of feminine virtue and Catholic piety for Spanish women to emulate (Weissberger 2004). Given the traditional identification of Nebrija with the cultural reforms of Isabel in the fifteenth century, nor is it surprising that he should enjoy his own renewed mythological status during the same period when so much emphasis was placed on the intimacy between tradition, race and language. Moreover, beyond the question of national unity, Nebrija’s mention of an imperio in his prologue was positively embraced during this period of a renewed imperial spirit as a prophetic allusion to the diffusion of Spanish in the Americas and hence the future transatlantic grandeur of Spanish culture. Menéndez Pidal, for instance, did not hesitate in 1940 to support Ibañez Martínez’s oracular interpretation of the prologue to the GC and to declare that the Grammar “fue escrita en esperanza cierta del Nuevo Mundo” (Menéndez Pidal 1947: 50) and again in 1950, that the companion to empire phrase was a “profecía ambiciosa” (Menéndez Pidal 1950: 21). Christine Bierbach (1989), meanwhile, argued that one could never assert that Nebrija intended to suggest a direct relationship between national and linguistic unity since in 1492 no such unity existed and that therefore, what Ibañez Martínez’s reading of the prologue

106

Companion to Empire

demonstrates is simply the construction of a myth to serve the ideology of a nacionalismo integral by Franco’s propagandists of the 1940’s (Bierbach 1989: 230).8 Yet, given that this imperial sentiment coincided with the quincentenary of Nebrija’s birth in 1944 and the concomitant flurry of academic writings commemorating the event, there can still be little room for doubt that the period witnessed the mythologization of Nebrija and his pronouncement. This dovetailed with a state propaganda, which eulogized the reign of Isabel and Ferdinand as the origin of a modern unified Spain.9 In fact, in that respect, the ideological interpretation of Nebrija by nationalistic philologists was perfectly appropriate given, as I shall go on to discuss, that a salient feature of Castilian humanism of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was its fervent patriotism.10 Yet, again - and here we must agree with Bierbach’s observations - an application of an empirical prism will demonstrate that the patriotic enthusiasm which characterized Nebrija’s age was even then largely limited to the propagation of proto-national unity rather than representing any reality on the ground. Those nationalist philologists who celebrated the consecration of a national language to match the unification of the country, failed to recognize that the union of Aragon and Castile hardly meant the formation of the modern Spanish state. On the contrary, the union consisted more of a strategic alliance, which did not preclude the continued separation of the distinct kingdoms, especially with respect to the maintenance of regional law codes and even overseas possessions (Elliott 1990). And although the union certainly did mean the increased hegemony of Castilian as a written language, the spoken forms of other Iberian varieties continued to thrive. We might also note that in the case of Catalan, now in decline after enjoying centuries as a leading literary, scientific and legislative language of pre-modern Iberia, the written form would not come into complete disuse until the early eighteenth century (Mar Molinero 2001: 42). Evading Imperialism in Contemporary Philology If, then, the first two categories of reception for the prologue to the GC have tended to exploit the symbolic, serendipitous nature of Nebrija’s phrase, those scholars in the third have tended to make (an attempted) empirical objectivity the principal criterion for evaluating

The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

107

Nebrija’s intentions rather than the convenient applicability of his quotation to later events. Indeed, unlike the first two categories, this third kind of reception strives to establish what Nebrija really meant rather than how his words reflected any oracular qualities. A notable approach to the question in this regard has been to argue that Nebrija’s concerns with the vernacular have been blown out of proportion and that the real language of power was still overwhelmingly Latin (Rico 1981; Binotti 2000; Lodares 2002). The most often quoted of the latter group has of course been Rico (1981) who, during the quincentenary of the first edition of the Introductiones Latinae, decided to tackle the imperial question head-on as if in response to the myths propagated by the likes of Ibañez Martínez in 1946.11 Rico focuses on the prologue to the edition of this Latin manual which had been dedicated to Isabel (under whose command it was written as a bilingual edition, Latin – Castilian), so as to emphasize what he perceives as the relative peripheral nature of the GC to Nebrija’s overall project: namely, to promote a pristine classical Latin as the indispensable foundation for the consolidation of the institutions of a modern proto-nation. In that sense, as far as Rico was concerned, the true ‘prologue’ to the Castilian Renaissance was to be found in the shape of the preface to the Introductiones Latinae rather than in the prologue to the GC as had traditionally been suggested.12 Following this precedent, other scholars have tended to avoid or dismiss the question of Nebrija’s imperial pretensions as a distraction that diverts attention from an extremely varied corpus. Apart from his Latin grammars and Latin-Spanish dictionaries, Nebrija’s works included Latinate histories of the Catholic Monarchs, a work of cosmography, studies on the pronunciation of ancient Greek, Latin and Hebrew and even poetry in Latin. Meanwhile, only two works, the GC and the Reglas de Ortografía (1517), were dedicated exclusively to the elevation of the vernacular. It is predictable, then, that contemporary historical linguists can complain that: Aunque de su actividad como lexicógrafo y, sobre todo, como gramático se ha escrito mucho, en realidad, se le conoce por poco más que por el tópico de “la lengua compañera del imperio”. Compuso gran cantidad de obras y destacó en el terreno grammatical y lexicográfico. (Guerrero Ramos, 1995: 11-12)

Similarly, in a study of sixteenth century vernacular grammars, Girón Alconchel (2001), has been content, like many others before him, to

108

Companion to Empire

direct the reader to Asensio’s study from 1960 with regard to the compañera del imperio phrase. Asensio had shown the derivative nature of the phrase by emphasizing a primary debt to other Renaissance humanists. Asensio established that Nebrija’s primary sources were to be found in the works of the first Italian philologist, Lorenzo Valla and the fifteenth century Aragonese jurist, Gonzalo de García de Santa María.13 Asensio thereby demonstrated the unoriginal nature of Nebrija’s prologue, and the fact that the companion to empire motif only became associated with the notion of global, universal empires when later adopted by sixteenth century Portuguese grammarians. Presumably, in the light of Asensio’s findings, contemporary philologists like Girón Alconchel were content to conclude that the cliché merited little further attention and time would be better spent considering Nebrija in the context of the other vernacular grammars produced during the sixteenth century. Presumably, one had to infer from this premise that the majority of sixteenth century humanistic pursuits might be examined as somehow detached from the question of overseas expansion in the same period. What is perhaps a common thread in the arguments of the researchers in this third category, therefore, is a tendency to underscore either the peripheral nature of Nebrija’s vernacular works in contrast to his major concern with Latin humanism or to reject the association of either the Latinate or vernacular corpus with any imperial conception of political power, especially with regard to a prophetic conception of royal language policy beyond the frontiers of the Iberian Peninsula. On the other hand, of course, there are exceptions like Esparza Torres (1995) who makes no distinction between the importance of the Latinate and vernacular works, arguing that there is a methodological cohesion which links both the grammatical and lexicographical projects. Yet, even then, Esparza Torres gives little attention to the propagandistic nature of the prologues and dedications, which accompany many of Nebrija’s works, and prefers to stress that Nebrija was a pioneering linguist rather than a deft exponent of royal ideology. That Nebrija was in fact both a pioneering linguist and an ideologue is clear from the fact that he himself refused to separate the two spheres, developing as he did his own version of a humanistic discourse which established extremely intimate parallels between his own power over language and its governance and that of his sovereigns’ governance of their

The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

109

territories. In effect, instead of approaching Nebrija’s corpus in terms of a Romance/Latin split or in terms of a discussion over the degree to which spoken Castilian was (not) imposed upon indigenous communities in the early colonial period, I am more interested here in the notion that there was an ideological cohesion to a wide selection of Nebrija’s works in both Latin and Castilian which reveal his conviction that written language was essential to bolstering both internal government administration and certain kinds of imperial power. Needless to say, central to such a conception of Nebrija’s work is the fact that he was a propagator of the imperial messianism that underwrote the textual culture flourishing during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs and the “heyday of (Castilian) classical humanism” between 1480 and 1530 (Lawrance 1990: 220). The Ubiquity of Letters in an Oral Culture una maravillosa arte de escrevir, do tornamos en las hedades áureas, restituyéndonos por multiplicados codices, en conoscimiento de lo pasado, lo presente y lo futuro, tanto cuanto ingenio humano conseguir puede. Diego de Valera, Corónica de España (1482)

Despite claims by some contemporary historians that, in general, unwritten testimony still enjoyed more authority and legitimacy amongst Europe’s largely oral cultures during the Renaissance, and that “Europeans were not wedded to the ideology of literacy” (Cañizares Esguerra 2001: 88), the years following the end of the Castilian civil war in 1479 provide striking evidence of the increased importance of the written word as a tool for propagating royal ideology and for facilitating government administration through printed and comprehensively-distributed legislation. However, any consideration of the relationship between the written word and the exercising of monarchical power in the fifteenth century cannot be exclusively limited to the predictable sites of scriptural production. Manuscripts and, after the introduction of the printing press in 1473, printed books were not the only surfaces on which a writing practice designed to enhance regal authority might appear. As Ruíz García (1999) reminds us, the espacio gráfico – or the social/public spaces where writing might be found - grew progressively throughout the period in question, culminating in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel

110

Companion to Empire

when the most varied of objects and locations within the everyday environment of the monarchs’ subjects were employed to display the symbolic presence of the regal bodies. In this respect we need only think of the infamous use of the monarchs’ initials, F and Y as a ubiquitous alphabetic accompaniment to the royal coat of arms, while the omnipresent tanto monta, monta tanto motto, traditionally thought to have been devised by Nebrija in his attempt to associate Hispanic rule (particularly that of Fernando) with the Gordian knot myth and hence, ancient Greek imperialism, demonstrates the growing importance of the written word in iconic manifestations of royal power throughout the fifteenth century (Ruíz García 1999: 291).14 Whilst heraldry served to combine the notions of the legitimacy of royal lineage, the sacredness of monarchical rule and the dignity of monarch, the addition of initials, mottos, and epigraphic inscriptions, elaborated with striking ornamentation within the non-alphabetic support of the actual coat of arms, demonstrated that even when contemplated by a largely illiterate populace, individual letters and brief combinations of words might also evoke the majesty of royalty in absentia. In that sense, writing itself enjoyed a symbolic connection with power and transmitted certain ideological values. Even if the viewer was unable to decipher the message expressed, s/he could appreciate an institutional presence on the surfaces on which the iconic-graphic combinations were encountered: La imagen de los signos evocaba la identidad del referente y visualizaba la extension de su poder. Su sola presencia conseguía un efecto propagandístico sobre los súbditos quienes adivinaban en ella la impronta de la realeza. (Ruíz García 1999: 292)

While these scriptural heraldic symbols might be found permanently inscribed on surfaces as varied as tombstones, sculptures, paintings, jewelry, furniture, books, saddles and even pillow slips, writing in the form of epigraphs on signs, banners and flags was also to be frequently employed for exhibition of a more temporally-limited kind. At public processions, courtly fairs and fetes, funerals, executions and ecclesiastical celebrations, the employment of the written word with royal propagandistic value increased throughout the fifteenth century and stands as testimony to the existence of an early modern environment in which the scriptural presence of the monarch was to be found in a variety of everyday socio-cultural practices. If this was,

The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

111

therefore, undoubtedly still an oral culture, it was also a culture in which alphabetic signs intertwined with the myriad of signs of other kinds, which made up the fifteenth century Book of Nature. Printing and Propaganda Having established that the written word invaded a generalized social space and settled on a myriad of public surfaces, the surfaces with which I am primarily concerned here are of course the manuscript and the printed page. For, as we have seen, even though the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel does not represent an ab initio inauguration of a textual culture designed to legitimate and promote monarchical power, there is no doubt that, especially after 1473, the year in which the first Spanish press is said to have been established in Zaragoza (Torres Revello 1940), the scriptural diffusion of royal ideology was incremented in spectacular proportions during this period. Of particular relevance in this respect was the need to surpass and refine earlier examples of fifteenth century royal propaganda in order to justify Isabel’s contested accession to the Castilian throne (Nieto Soria 1988, 1999, 2001). Despite its association with the modern era, propaganda might be suitably employed in describing the history of fifteenth century Castilian monarchs since, even prior to Ferdinand and Isabel’s reign, the dialogue between the “representación del poder y el poder de la representación” was undeniably indispensable to the maintenance of royal power (Nieto Soria 2001: 199). In fact, one of the reasons why there was such a concerted effort on the part of the Catholic Monarchs to legitimate their reign through an elaborate staging of the monarchical institution was the consciousness that a key element in the political crisis of Enrique IV’s reign had been the insufficient attention the King and his court had paid to the circulation of such propaganda (Nieto Soria 2001: 199). The intense mythologizing of the figures of Ferdinand and Isabel, which typified their own reign, is testimony to the fact that they were not prepared to make the same mistake. Special emphasis was thus placed on national historiography, especially with the advent of the war for the capture of Granada (1482-1492) and the colonization of the Canaries when the dispute between Castile and Portugal over the islands was finally settled to Castile’s advantage in 1479 (Elliott 1990 [1963]: 58). While national

112

Companion to Empire

histories composed in the vernacular were commissioned to homegrown historians, a body of Italian humanists was invited to the royal court to produce writings in Latin, which might serve to sing the praises of the monarchs beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula. The propagandistic nature of this historiography was also to be found in the works of court poets, while Isabel’s well-documented religious reforms involved the commission of books devoted to religious themes and hence the naturalization of the bonds between people, church and monarchy.15 In effect, a strongly nationalistic and overtly propagandistic book culture was cultivated as the ideological bedrock on which an embryonic absolutism at home and a nascent expansionist policy abroad might be secured. Ferdinand and Isabel clearly saw the immediate advantages of the printing press and the potential contribution of massively reproduced texts to their ideological aspirations. As Ruíz García insightfully points out, the uniformity of the printed text served as the perfect analogue to a political project aspiring to administrative, cultural and religious homogeneity: La uniformidad del producto se adecuaba al proyecto ideal auspiciado por los Reyes Católicos basado en una acción unitaria de signo politico, cultural y religioso. Ciertamente, el arte de la tipografía era un instrumento muy adecuado para homogeneizar los mensajes y difundirlos, por ello se inició una estrategia de publicar en letras de molde todo cuanto la Corona consideraba fruto de su labor institucional. (1999: 298-9)

The Monarchs’ favorable reception of print technology is reflected most famously in the legislation promulgated to exempt both foreign and national owners of the new presses from taxation since, according to the Pragmática of 1480, for instance, the new presses would result “en provecho universal de todos y en ennoblescimiento de nuestros reynos” (quoted in Marsá 2001: 14). On the other hand, they also quickly responded to the realization that massively reproduced messages would have to be carefully monitored to avert the potentially subversive effects of printing. It is for this reason that in 1502, the Crown took the important step of formalizing censure by introducing legislation which required that all printed materials be subjected to examination before being authorized for distribution with a licencia real (Marsá 2001: 24). Indeed, interestingly enough, the iconic and verbal combinations found in heraldic symbolism would come to legitimate a book’s contents and to authorize the book’s

The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

113

reproduction because the royal coat of arms would be found in all books that were licensed. This symbol of royal patronage not only functioned as a metaphor for the extension of the royal presence throughout the kingdom, but also for royal authority over the book culture it cultivated and, indeed, for the Crown’s monopoly over written knowledge. As far as the languages of this propagandistic print culture are concerned, that is, Latin and Romance, the situation was an inversion of the renaissance experienced under Alfonso X: rather than a codified vernacular writing system challenging traditional writing (Latin), it was now a pristine classical Latin that would be introduced to complement a primarily vernacular textual culture. Things had certainly changed since the thirteenth century when the revolutionary vernacular writing system had become a de facto language of government and national histories. By the fifteenth century, written Castilian, now conceived of quite unequivocally as a distinct language in opposition to Latin rather than simply as an alternative orthographic system, was firmly established as a language of law, historiography and literature (Round 1962). The publication of Nebrija’s Introductiones Latinae in 1481 coincided perfectly with royal efforts to inaugurate a reformed Latinate culture that might bolster and complement the powerful propaganda being produced in the vernacular. After the union of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon in 1479, interest in Roman Hispania and Spain’s classical heritage became even more acute as a fundamental aspect of that same royal propaganda and because of the need to solidify political union ideologically. Castilian humanism would now shift more purposefully and decidedly towards the recovery of ancient textuality in its most pristine form. Given that one of the primary approaches to Nebrija’s philological corpus is to stress that his work was overwhelmingly dedicated to Latin and that his vernacular works, including the GC, should be regarded as peripheral to his primary concern, it is worth reiterating this point: until the late fifteenth century Castilian humanism had primarily been a vernacular humanism and it was only at the behest of the Monarchs, during the last two decades of the century that this vernacular textuality would be enhanced by the promotion of classical humanism (essentially pristine Latin textuality) entrusted to classically trained philologists like Nebrija, and intended, ultimately, for an

114

Companion to Empire

international audience amongst the ruling classes of Christendom.16 Latin humanism did not, therefore, replace vernacular humanism, but complemented it as a vehicle of royal ideology and propaganda. And, as we shall see, the vernacular would continue to grow in prestige as a language of power despite the prestige of the Latin, which Nebrija had introduced to Castile.17 We need only recall, for example, the fact that the Siete Partidas were printed as an incunabulum by the Monarchs in 1491 and reprinted on several other occasions in the early sixteenth century, thus demonstrating the centrality of vernacular legislation to government administration. We might also note that, rather curiously, the advent of the printing press had made little difference to the initial emphasis on textual production in Romance rather than Latin in the Iberian Peninsula. This was a result of the fact that, in comparison with other European printing centers, the Iberian Peninsula showed “escaso desarrollo” by the beginning of the sixteenth century, both in terms of the number of presses established in the different Iberian kingdoms and in terms of the productive capacity of each (Marsá 2001: 18). This relatively limited development meant that the Iberian presses were largely devoted to a national market and hence to the production of texts in Romance rather than in Latin, the language of exportation to the international market. Most Latin books in Spain were imported from presses located in the major European centers, save a limited number produced for the erudite readership at university centers like Salamanca and Alcalá (ibid.). Not surprisingly, one such exceptional example would of course be Nebrija’s Introductiones Latinae, which was printed in Salamanca. In any event, what we can deduce from Marsá’s contention about the restricted nature of Iberian printing in this respect is that, at least initially, the presses increased and facilitated the circulation of vernacular texts within the confines of the Peninsula, thus further securing its consolidation as a language of culture and political power. Excavating Ancient Letters The growth of the prestige of Castilian throughout the sixteenth century and its increasing importance as a second language in other European kingdoms, would again suggest that both Latin and the vernacular were employed as forms of writing which, although

The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

115

performing distinct functions, still shared a common purpose: they both served to disseminate royal ideology and to facilitate the exercising of monarchical power. Yet, before embarking on a more detailed consideration of how Nebrija’s corpus transmits specific examples of the monarchs’ political theology (Nieto Soria 2001), I will first establish how Nebrija’s conceptions of language change and, in particular, the history of the origins of writing and letters (in any language) were typical of the age in which he lived. For while Nebrija continued to embrace ancient notions of (imperial) historical ascent and decline, he had also absorbed the humanists’ tendency towards historical distancing which, as we know, is generally identified as a point of rupture with a more stagnant, medieval historical consciousness. The sense of chronological distance between an ancient past, a more recent period of barbarism and a modern present was exemplified and bolstered by the humanists’ pioneering interest in the archaeological study of ruins, inscriptions and coins to ascertain historical change. That the advent of these scientific disciplines indicated a new emphasis on establishing accurate historical evidence is attested in Nebrija’s allusions to his own use of epigraphy and numismatics: in Book 1, Chapter 2 of the GC, for instance, Nebrija concludes that the Romans, rather than the Greeks or the Phoenicians were the first to introduce alphabetic letters into Spain since: por que si alguno delos que arriba diximos: traxera las letras a españa: oi se hallarian algunos momos alo menos de oro y de plata: o piedras cauadas de letras griegas y punicas: como agora las vemos de letras romanas. (Nebrija 1992: 119)

This interest in archaeology might be said to also subsume the humanist concern with language origins and original languages and the subsequent emergence of classical philology as another archetypal discipline of the Renaissance. Where philology and archaeology coincide most unequivocally is in Nebrija’s proposed history of the antiquities of Spain, the Muestra dela Istoria delas Antigüedades de España (1499).18 This vernacular work reflects Nebrija’s concern with an historical precision which, predictably, he himself took pleasure in contrasting with his medieval forebears, and which, in his opinion, emerged as a result of the humanists’ ability to excavate and study ancient textual authorities with a ‘modern’ critical acumen (Tate 1970).

116

Companion to Empire ¡Ombres perdidos i agenos de todas letras i artes de humanidad, que quieren presuponer por verdadero lo que nunca fue, i que aquello en que todos los sabios acuerdan, les creamos que esta corrompido! Si estos leieran a Estrabon, i Plinio, i a M. Varron, i de los poetas a Silio, i Lucano, i a todos los otros que desto escrivieron, pudieran saber que los celtas, pueblos de Francia la de Leon, vinieron algun tiempo a poblar en España, i mezclado su nombre con los iberos, llamaronse todos celtiberos. (Nebrija 1926: 211)

Here, in Book 1, Chapter 1, subtitled ‘Delos hechos de España que por antigüedad están mezclados con ficiones i fabulas’, as if to make no bones about the fact that the aim behind this initial chapter of the history was to correct past historiographical errors, Nebrija ridicules both his predecessors’ lack of sound philological knowledge in accounting for the etymology of the term Celtiberia and also their failure to read the ancient fontes who would have provided them with the authoritative explanation. On the other hand, we should not forget that the excavation of ancient languages as sacred languages (namely Hebrew, Greek and Latin), rather than as sources of pagan wisdom, whose mastery was the goal of the humanists’ ideal homo trilinguis, characterized the decidedly Christian humanism of philologists like Nebrija. Indeed, in this respect, one need only recall Nebrija’s controversial, conflictive and, ultimately, short-lived role in the production of Cisneros’ Polyglot Bible at Alcalá de Henares, while his dedication to the recuperation of the original (pronunciation of) sacred languages is manifested in contemporaneous works like De vi ac potestate litterarum [On the value and pronunciation of letters](1503), a treatise on the comparative phonetics of Hebrew, Greek and Latin.19 While Nebrija mused on the introduction of alphabetic letters into Spain, he also pondered the nature of their invention, and it is in works like this that he would cite the authority of Quintilian to underscore the hackneyed belief in the divine origin of letters: “munus hoc litterarum quo nullum maius ab homine vel potius divina quadam providentia est inventum” [nothing greater was invented by man, or rather by some kind of divine providence, than this gift of letters] (Nebrija 1987: 34).20 Moreover, Nebrija goes on to explain that the divine word, as set down in scripture, was entrusted to grammar (in the sense of ‘letters’) so as to guarantee that the original meaning of God’s utterances would be preserved as long as the original written version

The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

117

was preserved, presumably because of the equivalency between spoken word and the letters representing it: Voces illae quas Deus per Mosem imprimis aliosque prophetas et hagiographos auctores deinde per apostolos et evangelistas protulit, ne temporis diuturnitate oblitterarentur, grammaticae, hoc est rei litterariae, sunt creditae atque commendatae. (36-7) [So that those words which God first made known through Moses and other prophets and hagiographers and then through the apostles and evangelists would not be erased by the long passage of time, they were entrusted and commended to grammar, the preserve of letters.]

In the prologue to this treatise, therefore, Nebrija underscores a preoccupation which characterized many of his philological works: his desire to reform orthography so as to create what he considered to be an indispensable natural equivalency between grapheme and phoneme and hence to comply with Quintilian’s maxim that one should write as one speaks and speak as one writes. In the case of the three sacred languages, Nebrija was convinced that if the original ancient pronunciation of these languages was not recuperated, the natural relationship between letter and sound would be lost and, by extension, the primordial meaning intended to be communicated by sacred texts would be obfuscated. Consequently, during a period in which classical philology would have such a controversial impact on the interpretation of sacred texts and, particularly, their translation, Nebrija wasted no time in hinting at the sacrosanct nature of the grammarian’s art in establishing the original meanings of such texts and the divine origins of the alphabet. The Ascent and Descent of Languages and Kingdoms If, ironically, this preoccupation with the three biblical languages might indicate the legacy of Isidore of Seville as much as the impact of Renaissance humanism on Nebrija’s language theories, it evidently did not prevent him from demonstrating a clear awareness of the innovative conclusions drawn by thinkers of the Italian quattrocento with regard to the history of the Latin/vernacular relationship (Sarmiento 1992). For, it goes without saying that Nebrija’s development of humanistic philology is what allowed him to conclude in the GC that:

118

Companion to Empire no es otra cosa la lengua castellana: sino latin corrompido. Assi que passala .au. en .o. como en el mesmo latin de caupo copo. por tavernero. y de latin en romance como de maurus moro. de taurus toro. (Nebrija 1992: 143)

While corromper in other contexts would of course designate the notion of ‘corruption’ and thus reflected the ancient linguistic theory that linguistic change basically meant progressive decay from an originary state of perfection to a state of destruction (Read 1977), the term could, as is the case here, simply mean ‘transform’ or ‘mutate’ with no negative connotation. The notion of linguistic corruption was also expressed as ‘kinship’ (parentesco) between the two languages by Nebrija (Sarmiento 1992: 409). In effect, Nebrija implies an awareness of the internal history of Castilian’s evolution from Latin, which would be both championed and challenged throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (Read 1977; Binotti 2000). Nevertheless, as Navarrete (1994) points out, we cannot but notice the striking contrast between the innovative elements of the description of Spanish grammar as outlined within the main text of the GC and the mythological, messianic and millenarian character of the prologue to the same work. Clearly, the parallel between the typological destiny of languages and empires in the prologue is unequivocally couched within a conception of historical change as cyclical and, hence, as characterized by ascent and inexorable descent. Descent, by extension, cannot but be understood as suggesting decay, collapse, and of course ‘corruption’ of a pristine political and linguistic purity. This notion of linguistic and historical decay rather than evolution or simply change, coincides with ancient conceptions of history as a series of cycles, each beginning with a Golden Age of linguistic purity in which language and referent were indistinguishable, followed by a flourishing of the arts which counterbalanced, but could not prevent the inevitable degradation of the Golden Age which was to follow (Read 1977: 61). Similarly, this conception of linguistic and historical decay is present within the medieval Christian conception of the Babelian confusion: for if Adam’s ability to name the contents of creation might be likened to a primordial age of linguistic purity, then the confusion of tongues after Babel can be conceived of in terms of an inexorable corruption of languages distanced from their single original (Hebrew) source. And even though those same humanists might not always interpret corruption in terms of degradation, and could conceive of languages

The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

119

as reaching their own state of perfection, it was only on the understanding that such perfection signaled the end of all change for the language in question, rather than any contemporary notion of continuous evolution (Read 1977: 66). Bearing these considerations in mind, we might then concur with Navarrete (1994) that Nebrija’s celebration of a potential Golden Age of artistic production under the Catholic Monarchs (“no queda ia otra cosa sino que florezcan las artes de la paz”) in the prologue to the GC is tempered by an “apocalyptic anxiety” that, just like the kingdom itself, the Castilian language has ascended to its apogee after which one can only fear decline (“por estar ia nuestra lengua tanto en la cumbre que mas se puede temer el decendimiento della: que esperar la subida”) (Navarrete 1994: 23). This fear, however, is mitigated precisely by Nebrija’s conviction that grammaticalizing the language will guarantee its stability at its apogee and prevent its decay and corruption. In effect, while the actual text of the GC reveals an awareness of internal language change, the prologue maintains the traditional mythological understanding of such change in terms of cyclical ascent and descent and, thus parallels medieval notions of imperial renovation. Whether Nebrija’s understanding of the grammaticalization of the vernacular suggests, once again, a residual medievalism in his thought, there is no doubt that his views on language were typical of the age in which he lived. On the one hand, Nebrija’s philological method was driven by the humanists’ desire for historical and linguistic precision, and for the textual uniformity and mass dissemination of ancient knowledge, which the printing press permitted. At the same time, those innovative elements in Nebrija’s thought cannot be separated from his simultaneously abiding by premodern (biblical) explanations for language origins and change, nor, for that matter, from his loyalty to the medieval imagery of empire which just happened to characterize contemporary royal propaganda. Millenarianism, Messianism and World Empire We might recall that the notion of proto-national unity, while seemingly antithetical to the idea of imperial universality and renovation, was invariably celebrated amongst Castilian court humanists, as it had been in the case of their Italian counterparts, using the classical formulae of empire which humanistic study had fostered. Similarly,

120

Companion to Empire

despite the humanists’ emphasis on the re-cuperation of pagan learning to promote the notion of a cosmopolitan community founded on classical textuality, we cannot overstate the extent to which humanism was to be employed at the service of a spiritual renovation of a unified Christendom. This combination of an apparently outmoded imperial rhetoric, the advent of an early nation-state form and the desire for a universal pax Christiana meant that humanists like Nebrija could: use pagan imperial rhetoric concerning periodic renovations of the Empire, or returns of the Golden Age, of medieval emperors, thus retaining something of the cyclic view of history which such expressions imply, though in a Christianized form. A renovatio of the Empire will imply spiritual renovation, for in a restored world, in a new golden age of peace and justice, Christ can reign. (Yates 1975: 4)

The prologue to the GC is, of course, perhaps the superlative illustration of Nebrija’s debt to such rhetoric and of his preoccupation with Christian humanism, but let us not forget that his engagement with imperial imagery had begun some years before 1492. The examples I am thinking of in particular are the lesser-known Latin poems that Nebrija composed during the previous decade. These poems are revealing, not only because they serve as characteristic illustrations of the royal ideology promoted by the Catholic Monarchs during the war for Granada (1482–1492), but they demonstrate how Nebrija’s support for that unmistakably expansionist propaganda was a common feature of his textual corpus in both Latin and the vernacular right from the beginning of his association with the Royal household until his death in 1522. Apart from the prologue to the 1488 bilingual edition of the Introductiones Latinae (Rico 1981), Nebrija’s early commitment to a mythologized discourse of holy war is also evident in these poems. In that same year, for example, at the behest of Hernando de Talavera, Nebrija composed the Peregrinatio Regis et Reginae ad divinum Iacobum, a poem which celebrated the Monarchs’ recent pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint James in Santiago de Compostela, and which was read before Isabel during their stay in Salamanca (Esparza Torres 1995: 50). The poem emphasizes Isabel’s renowned virtue and piety, Fernando’s military might and the providential nature of the war for Granada. It ends with an entreaty by the Queen, which is also unmistakably a prediction of a Christian victory:

The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

121

Quod si forte mei manibus superata mariti Atque tuo metu Granatae moenia cernam Ipsa meis oculis, media tunc urbe dicabo Templa tibi, ritusque sacros, gentemque nefandam Cum Mahumete suo nostris pellemus ab oris.21 [Because if, by chance, I myself should see with my own eyes the walls of Granada overthrown by my husband’s hands and by my enemies’ fear of you, then I will dedicate temples and sacred rites to you in the middle of the city, and we will drive that wicked people with their Mohammed from our shores].

Nebrija demonstrates here that he was at the time toeing the line as far as contemporaneous gender ideology was concerned in the humanists’ depictions of the distinct roles of the King and Queen. Despite Isabel’s role as legislator, administrator, reformer of religion and morals, and even ‘warrior queen’ given her presence at Santa Fe during the fall of Granada, her image-makers often conceived of her in terms of a female virtue associated with passivity and hence as posing no threat to patriarchal values. In that sense, barred by her gender from active military pursuits and thus from the military prowess necessary to be considered the true heiress of Visigothic kingship, Isabel’s ‘feminine’, ‘passive’, and religious traits were extolled as is the case in this particular poem.22 This gender ideology and its concomitant royal ‘division of labor’ is present in another prophetic poem, Salutatio ominalis ad ferdinandum / regem in die Calendarum Ianuarii, which Nebrija dedicated to Ferdinand on New Year’s Eve, 1489, to wish him a prosperous and successful year as a warrior king. Again, the ideology of religious purity as the goal of a divinely-sanctioned holy war is reiterated in terms which prefigure those included in the prologue to the GC: “Cui mahumeteos portendunt fata triumphos / Atque repurgandae religionis opus” [You, to whom (Ferdinand) the fates predict triumphs over the Muslims and the work of purging religious beliefs] (quoted in Olmedo 1944: 213). That Nebrija wishes to claim the role of messianic ruler over a universal empire for Ferdinand is equally apparent in this poem: “Cumque tuis pedibus nostrum subieceris orbem / Atque satis patriae vixeris, astra petes” [When you have subjugated our whole world beneath your feet and you have lived long enough for the fatherland, you will seek the stars] (quoted in Olmedo: 213). The Epithalamium (‘wedding song’) from 1490,

122

Companion to Empire

composed to celebrate the marriage of the Infanta Isabel to Prince Alonso of Portugal, repeats this prophetic and imperial sentiment while also, once again, projecting the official, but skewered image of Isabel as being exclusively concerned with the domestic affairs of legislation, morality and religious piety, in contrast to Ferdinand’s domain of overseas military conquest. In the first part of this latter poem, Nebrija reframes the stock motif of Castilian historiography of the period – that the anarchy and chaos of the civil wars had been miraculously removed by the Catholic Monarchs and order imposed – by using classical symbols, figures and images. Astraea, for example, the virginal goddess of justice, who had appeared in Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue to inaugurate a Golden Age of peace, also appears in Nebrija’s poem to consolidate the new order brought about by the end of the civil wars.23 Just as Virgil had transposed the ancient myth of an originary golden age into his own present so as to transform myth into millenarian prophecy for Augustan rule, the image-making humanists employed at the Castilian court strove to associate Isabel with the new Astraea under whom an era of harmony and justice would prevail in Spain (Liss 2003). The renewed Reconquest of the 1480’s was thus written for contemporaries using a combination of tropes and images like this one derived from classical (pagan) sources, and others from a traditional body of Christian prophetic textuality. While many aspects of such propaganda were common in the promotion of other Christian kingdoms of the period, it is important to stress that what we witness in Castilian humanism is a specifically Iberian messianism: the neo-Gothic theory. This homegrown ideology had been given coherent form in the histories of Lucas de Túy and Jiménez de Rada in the thirteenth century, and would be taken up again by fifteenth century historiographers to demonstrate that under Ferdinand and Isabel, contemporaries were witnessing the fulfillment of the long prophesied reintegration of Visigothic Hispania (Weissberger 2004: 96-133). In that sense, the Golden Age described by Nebrija here is nothing less than a classical trope representing the realization of this specifically Iberian prophecy. The use of classical images like Astraea and the advent of a Golden Age to describe Hispanic political affairs was not simply to establish an imperial precedent for Isabel, but also to establish a more general parallel

The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

123

between the incipient Roman empire under Augustus and the potential imperial greatness of Spain: Reliquias belli postquam confecerit ille, Quod bene susceptum pro patria fuerat , Quod bene pro sociis et nostrae gentis honore Quod bene pro Christi religione fuit, Haec pia victori persolvet vota Iacobo. Divis templa dabit, mascula thura Deo. Dum tamen ille parat bellum, reficitque cohortes Quas vehat Herculeum traiiciatque fretum, Haec mores tandem patriae desuetaque corda Componet certis legibus atque modis. Dumque oras Libyae cursim peragraverit ille, Atque sui iuris utraque Syrtis erit, Denique dum victor totum lustraverit orbem, Deque triumphatis hostibus arma refert, Haec intenta novis rebus regnisque futuris, Extruet immensum posteritatis opus. Utque domus ratio constet sibi totaque quadret, Rem geret ille foris, res aget ista domi. Sed cum longa dies senio confecerit ambos, Dulcibus in natis omne levamen erit. Uxores regum natas regesque nepotes Conspicient laeti, sideribusque pares. Ioannesque suus tantae pietatis imago Imperii consors et moderator erit. Et procul ex oculis evanuit, has modo voces Urania fudit; presserat ora deus. Atque ego, qui fueram auditurus plura libenter, Destituor subito lumina fixus humi. (quoted in Olmedo: 210) [After he (Ferdinand) has brought an end to the war (for Granada), A war that had been taken up for the good of the fatherland, For the good of our allies and the honor of our people, A war which was for the good of the religion of Christ, She (Isabel) will offer up pious vows to James the Conqueror, She will give temples to the saints and potent incense to God. While he however prepares for war and refurbishes those Cohorts which he will transport and ship across the straits of Hercules, She will put the customs and values of the fatherland, obsolete For so long, in order with trusty laws and ways. And when he crosses quickly through the shores of Libya and Syrtis, both will be subject to his rule. Then, when he has traversed the whole world victoriously And brings back the arms of conquered enemies,

124

Companion to Empire She, attentive to new things and future kingdoms, Will erect an enormous work for posterity. And, so that everything is correct and the whole country Works, he will deal with foreign affairs and she will occupy Herself with home affairs. But when the long day has brought both to old age, Every comfort will be found in their sweet children. Happily, they will admire their daughters as the wives of kings And their grandchildren, kings equal to the stars. Their own Juan, the image of so much piety Will be a partner and ruler of the empire. Urania had just poured out these words, when she disappeared Far from sight for God had closed her lips. And I, who had been gladly prepared to hear more, Am suddenly abandoned with my eyes fixed on the ground.]

In this particular section of the poem, the prophetic nature of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue is reproduced in the form of a prophecy uttered by the Muse, Urania. Nebrija employs this poetic voice, ultimately, to confirm that the marriage will indeed serve to cement the peace and order in the Peninsula for which it was designed, but also to transmit the official vision of the workings of monarchical rule under Ferdinand and Isabel. Furthermore, just as Virgil’s writings had served to establish a dynastic conception of a worldwide Roman empire, Nebrija predicts the continuation of the nation that Isabel and Ferdinand have built through the strategic use of marriage to cement alliances with other kingdoms. We might recall that the Virgilian Golden Age was one in which the arts and cultural pursuits flourished, thus further confirming its suitability for framing the composition of works dedicated to the Monarchs, particularly Isabel, as patrons of their own propagandistic culture of letters. The Virgilian Golden Age of peace was complemented by other Christian and messianic figures that Isabel in particular had employed to mold a millenarian image of her reign. In this respect, Liss (2003) has stressed Isabel’s deliberate courting of a self-image to coincide with the eschatological and millenarian conceptions of history and the end-times notion of a global Christian empire, which had been inherited from medieval and classical sources. The question of history as a self-fulfilling prophecy was of course of special importance to royal propaganda: the apocalyptic message of the Book of Revelation, the myth of four great world empires as presented in the Book of Daniel and Joaquin de Fiore’s tripartite

The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

125

vision of universal history – especially in a manipulated version which claimed that the end of history would be ruled over by a ruler coming from Spain – all provided the brute material for a national ideology designed to equate the ‘recuperation’ of Spain from the Moors with the advent of a Golden Age when Jerusalem would be recovered for Christianity. While Nieto Soria (1999) insists that such messianic millenarianism was central to conceptions of royal propaganda during the period, Milhou (1983) had previously argued that belief in such prophecies and the possible restoration of a mythical Golden Age under one world empire were not entirely propagandistic, but “sincere” (Milhou 1983: 170). Whether sincerely or not, Isabel, in Liss’s estimation, made the Book of Revelation in particular her text and from the beginning of her reign, used the vivid apocalyptic imagery of the work to frame her aspirations as Queen (Liss 2003: 61). The figures and symbols included in this imagery were prominent not only in writing but in the art, architecture and pageantry of the period. The message was hence clear: under Isabel, history would “culminate in a millennial, messianic Golden Age, synonymous with the last and greatest of the world’s empires” (Liss 2003: 63). We might reiterate the fact that Nebrija’s poems of this period serve to illustrate the impact that the classical humanism of the 1480’s and 1490’s had had on a royal ideology formed by medieval messianic millenarianism and a home-grown Neo-Gothic theory of reconquest: the existing prophecies regarding the reign of the Catholic Monarchs and their dynasty were transformed in letters, poetry and historiography into a more markedly classical and imperial vision of the reign as a Golden Age resembling that prophesied by Virgil (Liss 2003: 66). However, we should note that even though there is no denying that Granada would eventually fall to the Christians in 1492, many of Nebrija’s other prophecies regarding the Monarchs would prove to have been in vain: any permanent imperial expansion into North Africa, for instance, would still be unfulfilled at the time of Isabel’s death in 1504 as the famous entreaty for such expansion in the Queen’s last will and testament demonstrates. And, as regards the Epithalamium in particular, both Prince Alonso and the Infanta Isabel would die prematurely before the fifteenth century came to and end, while Prince Juan, a key figure in the prophetic literature of the time, would also be outlived by both his parents. Moreover, given that the Epithalamium was written in April 1490 after the final stages of the

126

Companion to Empire

military movement towards the actual city of Granada were completed and the famous royal encampment at Santa Fe set up, to predict the fall of Granada was hardly prophetic, but more of a foregone conclusion embellished in the language of prophecy. Barbarians and Barbarism The ideal complement to the myths propagated by imperial rhetoric, which Nebrija had inherited from his predecessors, was of course the figure of the barbarian and the condition of barbarity: Barbarismo es vicio no tolerable en una parte de la oracion. y llama se barbarismo por que los griegos llamaron barbaros a todos los otros sacando a si mismos. A cuia semejança los latinos llamaron barbaras a todas las otras naciones: sacando a si mesmos y alos griegos. I por que los peregrinos y estranjeros que ellos llamaron barbaros corrompian su lengua cuando querian hablar enella: llamaron barbarismo aquel vicio que cometian en una palabra. Nos otros podemos llamar barbaros a todos los peregrinos de nuestra lengua sacando alos griegos y latinos y alos mesmos de nuestra lengua llamaremos barbaros si cometen algun vicio enla lengua castellana. (Nebrija 1992: 4. 5. 287)

As the quotation above suggests, Nebrija was primarily concerned with barbarity in the traditional linguistic sense of an erroneous form of pronunciation in the spoken language or orthographical errors in the written language, and his aim in his grammar was thus to create a prestige standard from which such variation had been eliminated. Even then, however, his explanation of the ancient Greek origins of the word barbarian in terms of a binary opposition between a pure Self and a contaminating Other still serves as a brief illustration of the analogy which had been more fully developed in the prologue to the vernacular grammar: the parallel between a homogeneous linguistic identity and a uniform proto-national identity and the threat to that same identity and linguistic purity from foreign peoples and languages. Nebrija’s objective, in making a symmetrical comparison between the stability of a proto-national language and the stability of material empire was, then, primarily to demonstrate that a uniform pure language – free of barbarisms - would reinforce the ideological image of a unified pure nation – free of barbarians or of a universal empire - free from non-Christians This tendency to complement the critique of linguistic barbarism with a rhetoric in which the figure of the barbarian was a recurring

The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

127

motif had, as we have noted, become a common feature in the works of the Renaissance humanists by the fifteenth century. The concept of the barbarian had a long history, however, and had gone through significant mutations over the years from its etymological origins amongst the Greeks when, as Nebrija himself explains, ‘barbarian’ simply meant ‘non-Greek’ in the sense of one who stammered or was unable to speak Greek properly. During the medieval period, barbarian had gained popularity in its Ciceronian form equating the term with the homines sylvestres (Jones 1971; Pagden 1982; Bartra 1992; Delacampagne 2000): civilized, urban Christian men of the Middle Ages saw themselves as the antithesis of the wildman who through lack of reason, law, civility and discipline, was incapable of virtue. This wildman was at times also associated with the nonChristian as is clearly exemplified in Nebrija’s GC where Moslems are referred to as pueblos barbaros. By the fifteenth century, the term was often employed as a means for asserting cultural patriotism by humanists like Valla: the recuperation of pristine Latinate textuality was the yardstick by which humanists of the Italian city-states might measure their potential for cultural unity and, ultimately, their superiority over barbarous rival cultures. This patriotic pride was combined with a pride at being considered ‘modern’ and identified with a recuperation of Roman civilization: for, the condition of barbarity was also identified with the medieval institutions which had corrupted those of classical antiquity and, by the same token, the barbarians were those medieval grammarians who had written in a Latin quite bereft of the eloquence associated with the classical languages. Having said that, there is no denying that this traditional understanding of the classical humanists’ disdain for medieval Latinists reinforces the simplistic conception of a definitive binary between the medieval and early modern periods and, more importantly, reinforces the notion that the principal criterion for defining the Renaissance might be the supposed triumph of a rediscovered culture of classical letters. While the early modern period might be equally understood as a period in which national vernacular languages were consolidated to challenge the cosmopolitanism of the humanists’ Latin, we should also remain aware of the conflictive nature of this period in socio-political terms rather than simply as a period of ‘bookish’ effervescence. I am thinking here particularly of

128

Companion to Empire

Gramsci’s argument that “the Humanists’ contempt for medieval Latin and the refined gentleman’s haughtiness towards medieval ‘barbarity’” should not be turned “into historical facts” (Gramsci 1991: 229). Yet, if it is clearly beyond the scope of this study to enter into a wider discussion of the precise nature of ‘the Renaissance’, it is precisely to the rhetoric employed by such ‘haughty’ and ‘refined gentlemen’ like Valla and Nebrija that we must turn our attention to discern the emergence of a discourse that was destined to have a very real impact on material conquest in both the Iberian Peninsula and in overseas territories. More specifically, what I am thinking of here is that in the prologue to the first book of the Elegantiae, Valla had described his humanistic endeavors using the imagery of warfare against barbarians. This stylistic cry to battle, which derived from biblical and classical sources, was intended to appropriate the language of bellicose imagery and empty it of its association with political power. What was at stake for Valla, then, was the restoration of the cultural legacy of Rome, rather than any fantasies about restoring the political unity of the ancient empire during the period of crisis in which he and his contemporaries lived (Regoliosi 1993). In the Iberian Peninsula, however, this divorce between rhetoric and political power becomes a moot point: Nebrija’s inheritance of the image of the barbarian and the use of bellicose imagery to describe the purpose behind his own Latinate humanism cannot be understood without taking into account the specificity of Castilian patriotism and expansionism of the period.24 In Nebrija’s hands, the war against the barbarians is presented in its most extreme form during those years in which the Catholic Monarchs had waged a war against the Moors of Granada, a war to subjugate the Canary islands, and yet another war in which Castile and Aragon would face France to dispute Aragonese possessions in Italy. This was also a period in which Castilian incursions into North Africa remained a real possibility. Nebrija’s rhetoric of the period is, needless to say, hardly a simple, innocent call for the reform of the Castilian university system, but an acknowledgement of the role that such cultural reform might perform in consolidating and complementing the military might of a kingdom destined for further territorial expansion. It is for this very reason that Nebrija’s fellow humanist at the Castilian Court, Peter Martyr D’Anghiera, would dub

The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

129

Nebrija the debelador de la barbarie: while the monarchs conquered other barbarians militarily, Nebrija would do so with his philology. Not surprisingly, in the years following the initial colonization of the Caribbean, Nebrija was encouraged to imitate Seneca by depicting his own interdisciplinarity in the language of exploration and colonial possession: Ast ego qui hanc provinciam mihi desumpsi temerarius vocor, propterea quod sola arte grammatica duce fretus audeo per reliquas omnes artes et disciplinas penetrare; sed non tanquam transfuga: sed ut excubitor et explorator quid rerum quisquam in sua possessione agat. (Apologia earum rerum quae illi objiciuntur [argumentum ad lectorem])(1507) [But I who have taken on this command, am called rash for the very reason that I dare to penetrate all other arts and disciplines depending only on the art of grammar as my leader; however, I do not do this as a turncoat, but as a watchman and an explorer who will make certain things his own possession.]

On other occasions, Nebrija would celebrate his educational reforms in equally hyperbolic terms: as a holy war or crusade against intellectual backwardness (‘barbarism’). An emblematic example of this imagery is found in the introduction to the Vocabulario de Romance en Latín from 1516. Here Nebrija would describe his early attempts at Latinate reform in Castile as a crusade against ignorant pagans so as to draw an analogy between his task and that of the apostles Christianizing the ancient pagan world (Di Camillo 1976: 272). On the other hand, while Nebrija might condemn his fellow countrymen as barbarians for their relative ignorance of classical Latin and hence, might assume a subject position which allowed him to align himself with those intellectuals of the Italian Peninsula who aimed similar critiques at Hispanic humanism (Round 1962; Tate 1970; Navarrete 1994), Nebrija declared his patriotic loyalty by also defending his homeland from such criticism. In other words, if Nebrija’s lengthy sojourn in Italy obviously revealed the reverence with which Italian humanism was held by Hispanic men of letters, it was also clear that Nebrija’s emulation of the Italians was intended to allow Castile to rival and eventually surpass the apparent cultural superiority of the Italian city-states. This cultural rivalry with Italy hence demonstrates another aspect of the patriotic sentiment underwriting Nebrija’s philological reforms. The textual corpus produced by Nebrija in Latin, the vernacular or in both languages, might

130

Companion to Empire

thus be viewed as a defiant response to the Italian humanists’ charges of barbarism against the Spaniards themselves. Similarly, we might bear in mind the view that in countries outside Italy where a Renaissance culture emerged, it did so within the context of a national anxiety over the legitimacy of national claims to an equivalent ancient Roman cultural heritage and, simultaneously, like the Italians themselves, the added anxiety over historical “belatedness”, in the sense of inhabiting a present time which could not match the cultural ideals of the ancient cultures being imitated (Navarrete 1994: 16). Ironically, any importation of Italian humanism into other countries could not avoid notions of the superiority of Italian civilization and disdain for the barbarians who lived beyond the Alps in France and Spain (ibid.). These ambivalent attitudes towards Italian humanism manifested themselves overtly in Nebrija’s Latin histories after he was named royal chronicler in 1509 (Tate 1970; Hinojo Andrés 1991). On the one hand, it is during this period that Nebrija encouraged Martyr D’Anghiera to write his chronicle of the conquest, the De Orbe Novo, Decades, and actually edited the 1516 edition himself (Cro 2004). Yet, on the other hand, Nebrija wasted no time in using his own role as chronicler (which essentially involved re-writing propagandistic vernacular histories in Latin) to condemn Italian envy of Castilian and Aragonese political power – particularly the power held by Aragon over Italian territories - and to claim that the writing of Castilian history could not be entrusted to foreigners.25 If Castilian attitudes towards Italian humanism were hence not apparently exempt from contradiction, we should remain aware that the discourse of power produced by both homegrown and Italian humanists at the Castilian court was, without a doubt, unequivocal and homogenous in its promotion of Hispanic cultural prowess and political power before other kingdoms and cultures. And central to that same discourse was of course the figure of the barbarian (both external and internal) identified either with the non-Christian or with an ignorance of classical letters. With the conquest of the Americas, this trope, along with other topoi of Renaissance rhetoric would be put to use in the invention of the Americas and the identification of new barbarians. Perhaps the most striking and curious illustration of how the barbarism trope was mobilized by the humanists at the Castilian Court prior to the

The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

131

conquest of the Americas and which also exemplifies the extent to which Nebrija and Martyr D’Anghiera inhabited similar subject positions with regard to an emergent colonial discourse, is Martyr D’Anghiera’s poem De Barbaria Fugata (‘On the Flight of Barbary’). This was basically a poetic homage to Nebrija and written with the express purpose of congratulating him on the publication of his first Latin–Castilian dictionary in 1492. In the poem, Martyr D’Anghiera genders the philological barbarity that had existed in Spain prior to Nebrija’s Latinate reforms in the personified shape of a grotesque, fat, dirty and disheveled woman who stutters and stammers: De ambulanti mihi per littus gaditani freti anno Quo venit Almeria in imperii hispani potestatem: dedit se Mihi obviam corpulentissima incultaque et balbutiens quaedam Mulier laniatis comis et lachrimis largo flumine per Ora et pullam vestem cadentibus.26 [In the year when Almeria came under the sway of the Spanish Crown, When I was walking along the shore of the strait of Cádiz, A certain slovenly and obese woman with disheveled hair Came up to me stuttering and with a long stream of tears Falling down her face and onto her black mourning dress.]

When Martyr D’Anghiera meets the woman, she claims that her name is ‘Barbary’ and that, though in fact a woman, she is ‘not a friend of poets’ (nomine Barbaries: mulier nec amica poetis) and wont to producing ‘unrefined verse’ (inculto sermone). She is distraught, in tears and dressed in mournful black as she plaintively recounts to the humanist how she has been driven from Spain after being beaten in battle by “Antonio”, the son of Mercury: Nec ultra Me sinit has penitus terras habitare potentes; Desertos igitur Libyae zonaeque furentis Saxosos montes nigri et vasta aequora Bocchi Pulsa peto. [He (Antonio) absolutely forbids me from dwelling in these now conquered lands even a day more; Driven out, I now seek the deserts of Libya And the Torrid Zone,

132

Companion to Empire The rocky mountains and the vast plains of black King Bocchus (of Mauritania).]

Now she is condemned to wander the territories of another barbarous space: the inhospitable deserts, mountains and plains of North Africa. What is immediately apparent about Martyr D’Anghiera’s imagery is the analogy between the expulsion of barbarity in the form of philological backwardness from the confines of Castilian territory and the expulsion of the Jews and the defeat of the Moors in the same year. More important for my purposes here, however, is simply the association of cultural barbarity with a hostile geographical space. Even though Martyr D’Anghiera identifies that same hostile space most immediately with the territories of North Africa, he thus makes use of a trope which would come to both counter and also complement the utopian visions of American geography in the near future. In this same respect, the most striking image of all is that of the condition of barbarity – in the sense of an unrefined use of letters and an uneducated approach to the composition of verse - gendered as a wild woman. Clearly, what we are reminded of is the stock, allegorical image of America as a savage woman to be tamed and civilized by a patriarchal western empire, which was soon to emerge in the European imaginary. Some have suggested that the prologue to the 1488 bilingual edition of the Introductiones Latinae is also ‘the prologue’ to the Spanish Renaissance in the sense that it represents the first attempt to introduce classical Latinate eloquence back into the Peninsula. Others have interpreted the prologue to the Gramática castellana as ‘the prologue’ to the linguistic colonization of the Americas. We might add that the messianic imperial imagery and the tropes of warfare against barbarism, which I have detected in a range of the works analyzed in this chapter, should surely be regarded as another such prologue - a ‘prologue’ to the mythologization of transatlantic colonial expansion.

The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

133

Notes 1

The year 1992, the quincentenary celebrations of both the conquest of the Americas and the publication of Nebrija’s vernacular grammar, witnessed renewed interest in Nebrija’s work and its impact on the Spanish language and on European colonialism in the Americas. Emblematic of this tendency were the international congresses held in Salamanca (Antonio de Nebrija: Edad Media y Renacimiento) and Murcia (Nebrija V Centenario), Spain, for the express purpose of discussing the quincentenary exclusively in terms of Nebrija. A large number of the presentations were dedicated to the question of the prologue to the Gramática Castellana as well as the impact of Nebrija’s Latin works in the Americas. In Mexico, the question of Nebrija’s impact on the grammaticalization of Amerindian languages was also a key factor in symposia like La Obra de Antonio de Nebrija y su recepción en la Nueva España held at the Museo de Antropología in August 1992. 2 One significant strain of humanism embraced the tendency to critique Roman imperialism in favor of Roman Republicanism after the manner of ancient Roman critics of empire, while those who promoted the Holy Roman Empire were considered to be still entrenched in a medieval mind set (Izbicki and Nederman 2000: 30). 3 In this regard, we might ponder Maravall’s contention that: “De todos modos, los españoles, alrededor de 1500, poseían, aunque vacilante, un repertorio de formas políticas de posible aplicación al caso nuevo con que se enfrentaban, formas que, como hemos dicho, se articulaban en una concepción política del mundo. Se empieza, como es obvio reconocer, por aplicar estas formas hechas, conocidas, establecidas por la tradición […] Dentro de aquel Imperio universal cristiano, los países particulares con sus propios príncipes, las tierras conocidas, los hombres, los grupos sociales tenían una posición que no va a ser ya, ni dentro ni fuera, la que tienen en su relación con los Imperios modernos. Ni en uno ni en el otro extremo puede, sin duda, catalogarse el Imperio español en América, y de ahí precisamente su interés como fase decisiva en el cambio” (Maravall 1952: 235-6). 4 All references to the Gramática castellana will now be expressed simply as GC. All direct quotations from the actual text will be taken from the Esparza and Sarmiento edition of 1992. 5 On the history of Castilian, Catalan, Basque and Galician during this period, and, in particular, the history of state and regional language policies, see Lodares’ study (2002). 6 Amongst the notable studies of colonial Latin America and Spanish imperialism which deal with such issues, we might include Elliott (1963), Rama (1979), Todorov (1984), Rafael (1988), Leinhard (1992) and Kamen (2003). All of these authors namecheck Nebrija in conjunction with his quotation, but without entering into a detailed examination of how his works were used in the Americas. 7 A recent bibliography of all Nebrija’s published works to date has been compiled by Esparza Torres and Niederehe (1999). 8 Lodares (2002), on the other hand, has argued that support for a common language for a unified Spanish state was not only voiced by those on the far right of the political spectrum during this period. He also suggests that Ibañez Martínez’s sentiments in this respect should not be regarded as representative of a consistent ideology of language throughout the regime’s thirty-six years in power, especially with regard to other Iberian languages, but of a particular imperial ideology which

134

Companion to Empire

was most prominent during the 1940’s and claimed the continued existence of Spain’s American ‘empire’ as a spiritual and verbal entity. 9 There has been debate over the years as to whether Nebrija was born in 1444 or 1441; the 1944 celebration of the quincentenary of his birth obviously reflected support for the former possibility. 10 The propaganda of this period would also of course affect the writing of history with much emphasis being placed on histories of the Catholic Monarchs as if to stress the parallels between the supposed religious, linguistic and ethnic unity of Spain in 1492 and that of 1939, while ‘Spanish’ histories would largely eclipse regional histories (Tate 1970; 1994; Sánchez Marcos 1999). The exultant celebration of empire in such histories is illustrated by the editor of a 1945 anthology of Bernáldez’s histories who, in the introduction, claims that Bernáldez tells the history of an époque in which “el corazón de Isabel y el cerebro de Fernando remataron la epopeya de la reconquista, unificaron a España y echaron valerosamente en tierras de Italia y de América la fecunda semilla de un Imperio cuya influencia espiritual no desaparecerá jamás, a menos que un cataclismo universal destruya para siempre el planeta en que vivimos” (Octavio de Medeiros: 10-11). 11 In a previous work dedicated to Nebrija and Latin Humanism, Rico virtually ignored the imperial ‘question’, dedicating only a footnote to the infamous phrase. See Rico (1978a). 12 In contrast, we need only consider Navarrete’s contention that the GC was “the first document of Spanish cultural belatedness and thus of the Spanish Renaissance” (1994: 19). 13 Valla discussed the themes of imperial power, language and linguistic purity in his hugely influential Elegantiae Linguae Latinae (1441-1448), a Latin grammar presented in six books, each with its own individual prologue. The impact of this particular work on the evolution of Castilian humanism, particularly as it manifested itself in the work of Nebrija cannot be overstated. Indeed, Hispanists have frequently identified the prologue to Valla’s first book of Elegantiae as the source for Nebrija’s celebrated phrase. In some recent cases, the phrase had been accepted simply as a direct derivation from Valla’s thoughts on language and empire (Mignolo 1995; Alconchel 2001; Kamen 2003) even though Asensio (1960) and Rico (1981) had already approached the question with more depth and subtlety that would tend to steer us away from such a conclusion. Similarly, Italian scholars like Mazzocco (1992) and Regoliosi (1993) have stressed the fact that, rather than promoting the inextricability of political power and linguistic expansion, Valla was arguing for a conception of a transnational textual culture divorced from political empire. In that sense, Mazzocco (1992) is justified in rejecting the claims of those studies, which have asserted a direct link between Valla’s prologue and Nebrija’s famous contention. Having said that, a close reading of Asensio’s study from 1960, which Mazzocco cites as particularly culpable in this respect, reveals a much more nuanced relationship between the two prologues than Mazzocco would give him credit for. Rather than identifying Valla as Nebrija’s primary model tout court, Asensio had wisely pointed to the historical mutability of the phrase in question, and, in a broader sense, to the historical mutability of the relationship between language and empire: “El concepto de relación entre la lengua y el imperio se desplegaba en abundantes permutaciones según el fondo histórico a que se aplicaba” (Asensio 399). For a recent revisionist reading and critique of Asensio’s thesis, see Lledó-Guillem (2008).

The Renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”

135

14 On Nebrija’s part in the development of the motto, see González-Iglesias (1994) and Weissberger (2004). Of particular interest, is the adoption of such symbolism by the Falangists during the Franco period. In this respect, also see Abellán (2003). 15 Despite the tendency of contemporary historians to demythologize the image of the Queen, especially after the excesses of the national historiography of the Franco period, her own personal investment in book culture, both as a patroness to court humanists and as a collector of books and manuscripts in her own right, continues to be largely accepted (Boruchoff 2003; Weissberger 2004). Nowadays, however, the traditional stress on the Queen’s role as promoter of the arts and ‘culture’ gendered ‘feminine’ and the complementary, but contrasting image of Ferdinand as a statesman concerned with the ‘masculine’ domains of war and foreign affairs, has been eclipsed by an emphasis on the Queen’s role as ideologue and propagandist. 16 Symptomatic of this promotion of the vernacular rather than Latin in the early fifteenth century is the fact that perhaps the greatest literary figure of the Castilian fifteenth century, Iñigo López de Mendoza, Marquis of Santillana (1398-1458), relied heavily on vernacular translations (usually in Italian) of the classics while maintaining that his literary mentors were Cicero and Horace (Weiss 1990). 17 In asserting that Nebrija was responsible for introducing Latin humanism into the Peninsula, I am not of course overlooking Alfonso de Palencia’s role as precursor to Nebrija. Palencia (1423-1492), as court historian to Enrique IV and then to the Catholic Monarchs, had also been trained in Italy, had produced a monumental history in Latin (Gesta Hispaniensia ex annalibus suorum diebus colligentis), and, more importantly, had compiled a Romance-Latin dictionary (Vocabulario universal en latín y en romance) in 1490. Yet, given Nebrija’s voluminous Latinate corpus and the importance of his Introductiones to the linguistic colonization of the Americas, he has been more generally identified with the advent of classical humanism in the Peninsula than his contemporaries. 18 This text, along with the Reglas de Ortografía, is included in Llubera’s 1926 edition of the Gramática castellana. 19 It is this work - an elaboration of his end of year lecture from 1486 (the Repetitio secunda) at the University of Salamanca - that Nebrija presented one of his most aggressive defenses of grammar before his detractors, following the relative failure of the GC in 1492 (Quilis and Usábel 1987: 18). 20 On the persistence of this belief in a divine origin for letters, see Drucker (1995). Nebrija had previously speculated on such an origin in the GC, Book 1, Chapter 2 when he claims that letters may have been “por revelación divina [nos fueron] demostradas” (Nebrija 1992). Mignolo (1995), meanwhile, has argued that Nebrija’s evolutionary understanding of the historical transition from the use of ideographic images to alphabetic writing as expressed in Book 1, Chapter 3 of the GC and in Book 1, Chapter 2 of the Reglas de ortografía (1517) demonstrates Nebrija’s desire to merge “the invention of letters with the origin of history” (Mignolo 1995: 41). 21 Several of the Latin texts in this chapter are reproduced and translated into Spanish in Olmedo’s study (1944), as is the case here with the Peregrinatio (Olmedo 235). Both Olmedo (ibid.) and Esparza Torres (1995: 52) tell us that Nebrija published a collection of his Latin poems including the Epithalamium (1490), the Salutatio ominalis ad ferdinandum regem in die Calendarum Ianuarii (1489), and the Peregrinatio in 1491. These same poems, along with Martyr D’Anghiera’s letter to Nebrija, De Barbaria Fugata (1492), and Ad Artem suam auctor, the poem which

136

Companion to Empire

appeared for the first time in the introduction to the Introductiones Latinae of 1495, would all then appear in a 1496 collection entitled, In vafre dicta philosophorum (Olmedo 205-206). On the doubts over the actual year of the first edition of the collection, see Esparza Torres (1995: 60 -1). 22 Weissberger’s study (2004) provides a compelling account of how Isabel’s court humanists strove anxiously to come to terms with the fact that the Neo-Gothic myth of a recuperated Hispania was based on a conception of the nation which identified it with a virile, male body. Their solution was to employ Marian imagery to conceive of Isabel as an ‘unbroken’, virginal body, renowned for her religious piety and virtue and hence, opposed to all negative associations with a corrupting femininity. Half a century before Elizabethan England, then, the humanists at the Castilian court invented their own sanctified ‘Virgin Queen’. As in the case of Elizabeth I, Isabel’s figurative corporal integrity was intended to mirror that of a reconstituted national body and, in effect, gendered her body male. 23 On the revival of the figure of Astraea in other national traditions during the Renaissance, see Yates (1975). 24 While Italian humanists denounced the Goths as the destroyers of ancient Roman culture, Castilian humanists recuperated the Hispanic Gothic myth to bolster royal doctrines of pan-Hispanic absolutism in their vernacular histories (Lawrence 1990). However, Castilian humanists like Nebrija himself, did not refrain from identifying the Goths with the decay and transformation of a pristine Latin into the ‘barbarous’ Latin of the Middle Ages. 25 I am of course thinking here of the prologue (divinatio) to his adaptation in Latin of Fernando del Pulgar’s (1436-1493) vernacular history Chronica de los muy altos y esclarecidos Reyes Catholicos Don Fernando y Doña Isabel: “Non tamen opinor satis tuto peregrinis hominibus historiae fides concredetur, Italis maxime, nullius rei magis quam gloriae avaris. Invident nobis laudem, indignantur quod illis imperitemus, coniurarunt inter se omnes odisse peregrinos, nos que barbaros opicosque vocantes infami appellatione foedant” [However, I do not suppose that the truth of history can be trusted to foreign men with sufficient certainty, especially in the case of Italians who are greedy for nothing more than their own glory. They envy us our praiseworthy reputation, they are angry because we hold power over them, they have sworn to each other to despise foreigners, and, calling us barbarians and uncultured, they offend us with their disgraceful name-calling] (quoted in Hinojo Andrés, 1991: 126-8). 26 This poem and Nebrija’s response appear in In vafre dicta philosophorum (1496).

Chapter 4 Age of Iron, Age of Writing […] in Illo a quo imperia et dominationes ac bona cuncta procedunt confidentes, quod, dirigente Domino actus vestros, si hujusmodi sanctum et laudabile propositum prosequamini, brevi tempore, cum felicitate et gloria totius populi Christiani, vestri labores et conatus exitum felicissimum consequentur. [Trusting in Him from whom empires and kingdoms and all good things proceed, that, with the Lord guiding your courses of action, should you pursue a holy and praiseworthy purpose of this kind, your labors and endeavors will, in a short time, obtain the most favorable of outcomes to the joy and glory of the whole of Christendom.] The Bull Inter Caetera (1493)

The international prestige of the Castilian vernacular grew substantially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with Castile’s transformation into a transatlantic colonial power.1 In Spain itself scholarly eulogies of the vernacular were to reach dizzying heights during the same period: in 1601, for instance, during the controversy over the Plomos del Sacromonte found in Granada, Gregorio López Madera used the opportunity to claim that Castilian, rather than being a corrupt derivation of spoken Latin, was in fact one of the original seventy-two languages formed from the tower of Babel and should hence be regarded as equal in grandeur to Latin (Binotti 2000: 268).2 Similarly, as regards the more specifically imperial prestige of the vernacular, the tendency was to both perpetuate the comparison with Latin and also to again suggest the superiority of Castilian, primarily because the Spanish empire had achieved a greater territorial extension than anything the ancient Romans could ever have

138

Companion to Empire

imagined. Two early seventeenth treatises dedicated to such eulogies of the vernacular, Bernardo de Aldrete’s Del origen I principio de la lengua castellana o española (1606) and Juan de Solórzano y Pereira’s Política Indiana (1646), are unequivocal in their support for a language policy enforcing the use of the Castilian vernacular among the conquered peoples of the Americas (Guitarte 1986; Mignolo 1995). Ironically, however, while hyperbolic analogies between the imperial destiny of the vernacular and that of the Latin of the ancient Roman empire had gained increasing popularity amongst nationalistic Iberian intellectuals, the Crown had actually failed to impose spoken Castilian as an ‘imperial’ lingua franca in the Americas.3 Even though there is sufficient archival evidence to suggest that the Crown supported a policy (albeit inconsistent) for imposing the use of the Castilian vernacular throughout the colonies, this was a policy which was constantly sidelined by the realization that the Castilianization of a large indigenous population was not necessarily conducive to either the mass evangelization or government of that same population (Moreno de Alba 1988; Lodares 2002, 2007).4 A linguistic policy was thus adopted whereby the gospel would be spread in the multiple languages of non-Christians. Missionarygrammarians, who had to first alphabetize and then master those same languages, would endeavor to indoctrinate Amerindian neophytes in their own languages. Indeed, it would not be until 1770 that Carlos III would issue his celebrated Cédula de Aranjuez, the definitive decree by which it was ordered that “de una vez se llegue a conseguir el que se extingan los diferentes idiomas de que se usa en los mismos dominios [América y Filipinas] y solo se hable castellano” (quoted in Moreno de Alba 1988: 48). By then it was of course too late to implement such a drastic policy successfully, and pre-Hispanic languages would continue to survive alongside the official language of Castilian, despite subsequent efforts to the contrary (Moreno de Alba 1988: 48; Lodares 2002: 72). In effect, linguistic policies in the Americas would initially be dominated by the Church in such a manner that the policies, and, in particular, the alphabetization of pre-Hispanic languages, might be regarded as yet another tool of empire. This becomes an even more appropriate assumption when we recall that the early colonization of the Americas would ensure that empire became more closely identified with the sense of a Christian mission to universal evan-

Age of Iron, Age of Writing

139

gelization and the propagation of the faith. The fact that conquest was predicated upon the authority of the papal bulls issued during the first years of colonization appeared to confirm the ‘translation’ of the ancient Christian Imperium Romanum to the Iberian West, underscored the deceptive nature of the supposed separation between ‘spiritual’ and ‘military’ conquests, and, instead, confirmed that Christianity itself became “empire’s most valuable ally” (Pagden 2003: 62). Indeed, the papal notion of supreme spiritual authority over universal temporal rule - extra ecclesiam non est imperium legitimated the military expansion of Christian civilization to lands ruled by non-Christian kings. The Church’s large-scale attempts to alphabetize non-European languages constituted a critical moment in early modern linguistic consciousness as well as in the disciplining of cultures employing non-alphabetic systems of communication. The history of the written language in this period cannot, therefore, be limited to an assessment of the exportation of the Castilian vernacular as a language of this Christian empire, but has also to deal with the question of its alphabetic form as another aspect of the process of linguistic colonization. For the transatlantic journey of the written languages used at the court of Isabel and Ferdinand in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries signified, not only the expansion of both Castilian and Latin as languages which might transmit millenarian and mythic conceptions of early modern colonialism, but it also heralded the complex confrontation between a[n] (Roman) alphabetic writing system identified with Christian civilization and American writing systems often identified with satanic abomination (Mignolo 1995). The dual irony in the colonial history of the Spanish language, then, is the fact that on the one hand, it failed to become the spoken lingua franca in the colonies, and that on the other, the imperial prestige of the written form was, at least in part, simply attributed to the fact that, like Latin, it was alphabetic. Consequently, during the period in which protonational languages in Europe would come into their own as rivals to Latin in most prestige areas of scriptural production, and hence, as symbols of homogenous cultural unification (albeit illusory) within national political boundaries, it could be argued that Castilian would also inaugurate its entrance onto the transatlantic stage simply because it was writing or letters rather than Castilian writing or letters.

140

Companion to Empire

Following the methodological precedent set by Mignolo (1986, 1989a, 1989b, 1992, 1995), I will be devoting this and the next chapter to a consideration of letters in this general sense as a tool of imperial expansion during the Renaissance. Unlike Mignolo, however, I regard the question of the so-called tyranny of the alphabet as a neglected thematic area in standard histories of the (Castilian) language, and hence, a thematic area which I have included here so as to provide a more comprehensive and complex understanding of the historical development, not only of Spanish, but also of other languages transformed by colonialism. More specifically, I will focus on the functions and conceptions of alphabetic writing (in Latin, Castilian and Nahuatl) as an element within a colonial discourse designed to support the universalist ideology of a militant, expansionist Christian culture. Given the breadth of this topic, I limit my focus in this particular chapter to a consideration of how the stereotype of the ‘letterless Indian’ emerged as an element within the wider tropological context of the Golden and Iron Ages in early sixteenth century historical discourse. In effect, I trace specific examples of how the imperial rhetoric and classical tropes of the humanists actually circulated as a means for recording early colonization in terms of a symbolic confrontation between culture (writing) and nature (orality). My analysis ends with a discussion of the extent to which those same tropes reflected a colonial fetishization of the (alphabetic) written word (in any language), which, ultimately, derived from a hyperbolic privileging of sacred textuality in the Christian tradition. Bearing this premise in mind, we might ponder González Echevarría (1995) having quite rightly bemoaned the fact that the text generally regarded as the ‘first’ Renaissance history of the conquest, Martyr D’Anghiera’s De Orbe Novo, Decades (1530 [1516]), is overlooked in traditional histories of Latin American literature quite simply because it was composed in Latin and not in Castilian. Yet, if we once again take into account the prestige attributed to alphabetic literacy in early colonial discourse in either Latin or the vernacular, the importance of this history as evidence of that same prestige cannot be overstated. It is precisely, therefore, the Latinate De Orbe Novo that will serve as a point of departure in this chapter for a meditation on the place of the ‘letterless Indian’ in the history of those languages affected by transatlantic expansion.

Age of Iron, Age of Writing

141

The Other Golden Age Aurea prima sata est aetas, quae vindice nullo, sponte sua, sine lege fidem rectumque colebat. poena metusque aberant, nec verba minantia fixo aere legebantur, nec supplex turba timebat iudicis ora sui, sed erant sine vindice tuti. nondum caesa suis, peregrinum ut viseret orbem, montibus in liquidas pinus descenderat undas, nullaque mortales praeter sua litora norant. [The first age that was brought forth was the golden age, which spontaneously cultivated honesty and virtue, with no overlord and without laws. Punishment and fear were unknown, nor were any menacing words to be read in immutable bronze, nor did an entreating crowd fear the countenance of their judge, but all were safe without any overlord. No pine tree, felled from its mountains, had yet plunged down into the flowing waves so that it might travel to the outer world, and mortals knew of no other shores beyond their own.] Ovid, Metamorphoses 1

In the last chapter, I proposed that a wide range of Nebrija’s philological and historical works reflect a conception of alphabetic letters, history and empire, and the relationship between the three, which was typical of the specifically Iberian humanism promoted at the court of an expansionist Castile. It may come as no surprise, therefore, given the humanists’ preoccupation with the origin, invention, reform and preservation of alphabetic letters, that among the first images of the Americas disseminated by court historians was that of peoples living in a period pre-existing the invention of books and writing. What will be a surprise, however, (or, at least, initially), especially when we recall Martyr D’Anghiera’s De Barbaria Fugata, is the fact that Martyr D’Anghiera himself would actually conceive of this lack of books and letters as a moral advantage of this paradisiacal culture. The trope of the ‘bookless’ Golden Age derived most directly from the (Four) Ages of Man described in Ovid’s first book of Metamorphoses, rather than from the Golden Age trope associated with Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue. The millenarian element, so central to

142

Companion to Empire

Virgil’s Golden Age and Nebrija’s employment of the trope, is generally absent from Renaissance adaptations of Ovid’s rhetorical set-piece: instead, emphasis is placed on the use of metals as chronological metaphors to eulogize the past (gold) and to critique the moral laxity of the present age (iron) rather than explicitly looking forward to a utopian future (Levin 1969; Tanner 1993; Graziano 1999). Having said that, the multiple interpretations of the Ovidian Golden Age, either in the Christianized version that equated the myth with the recuperation of Eden or in the strictly Greek version that could be traced back to Hesiod’s (Five) Ages of Man, pointed, in varying degrees, to a better future by the very fact that they established a tension between a present reality and a past ideal. Most frequently, the Ovidian topos depicted a world free from the corrupting influence of private property and money; an egalitarian world where no written laws, judges or rulers were necessary, and a world – as in the case of many other Golden Age myths from other cultures – where the land spontaneously provided foodstuffs for a labor-free population. The antithetical Iron Age of the present, meanwhile, is characterized, predictably, by vice, corruption, war between nations, the eclipse of natural law, and the insatiable desire for gold as a precious commodity. Many of these contrasting characteristics of the two ages do, it is worth noting, also feature in Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, but Virgil had placed much more of a suggestive emphasis on the re-emergence of new Argonauts and a new Argos to sail the seas with belligerent intentions prior to the advent of a cosmic era of peace and the establishment of a new Troy. This heady combination of the Golden Age trope, the symbolism of the Golden Fleece myth and the fabulous Trojan genealogy claimed by Renaissance monarchs, would enjoy great currency for imperial image making during the reign of Charles V (Tanner 1993). And while such symbolism perpetuated an understanding of history in terms of the cyclical supercession of empires, much like that presented by Nebrija, the moral intention underlying the Golden Age trope in particular signaled a continuation of the parallel understanding of history in terms of the degeneration and corruption of an originary cultural purity. If the Graeco-Roman preoccupation with primitivism in their literature had allowed them to imagine a Golden Age from which to distinguish their contemporary culture and thus, to measure that same

Age of Iron, Age of Writing

143

culture’s vices and virtues, we should not forget, as humanists like Martyr D’Anghiera pointed out, that Renaissance culture could do the same, but with territories which – however insufficiently understood and however much they were subjected to invention – were actual material realities rather than imagined ‘primitive’ spaces. In other words, the recuperated Golden Age of the ancients, identified primarily with chronology, was transformed into a spatialized concept, which, while permitting a fanciful explanation for the existence of the ‘new’ territories in the European imaginary, nevertheless, also served to locate the aboriginal peoples of these territories in Europe’s ‘primitive’ past. Ultimately, this shift from time to place and from place to time not only allowed historians of transatlantic expansion to further underscore their identification with Graeco-Roman antiquity, but also to circumscribe the specificity of the present age, and even its superiority over that of the ancients. Indeed, Martyr D’Anghiera appears to revel in the fact that the Golden Age has been realized as a physical space by comparing Hispaniola to ancient Latium, the place where the Golden Age is generally located in Roman versions of the myth: varios ibi esse reges hosque illis atque illos his potentiores inveniunt, uti fabulosum legimus Aeneam in varios divisum reperisse Latium, Latinum puta Mezentiumque ac Turnum et Tarchontem, qui angustis limitibus discriminabantur et huiuscemodi reliqua per tyrannos dispartita. (Martyr D’Anghiera 2005: 1. 2. 64-66) 5 [They found various kings there with some more powerful than others, just as we read that the mythical Aeneas found Latium divided amongst various kings, like, for instance, Latinus, Mezentius, Turnus and Tarchon, all of whose lands were separated by narrow borders, and the remaining territories divided up amongst tyrants in a similar fashion.]

This comparison of the division of Hispaniola’s territories amongst different caciques to the division of Latium among warring kingdoms in Virgil’s Aeneid serves, by extension, to underscore Martyr D’Anghiera’s belief that recent historical events of his own era have surpassed any imagined by the ancients: for Martyr D’Anghiera considers Latium’s kings to have been less ‘content’ than the Caribbean caciques because the latter live in a truer Golden Age as I shall go on to discuss.

144

Companion to Empire

In this same respect, it is worth remembering that Roman primitivism, as manifested in Ovid’s poem, was also the source for the apparent mistrust and moral critique of ‘modern’ technologies so characteristic of Renaissance adaptations of the Golden Age theme.6 Ovid’s metaphor of ‘pine’ for ship signified commerce between distant lands, overseas travel, and ironically, territorial expansion accompanied by armed conflict and war. The Golden Age was a time, and for readers of the De Orbe Novo, now a place, where technological development had not yet afforded the possibility for such conflict. By the same token, the inhabitants of the Golden Age, unlike the Renaissance colonizers, had not ‘brutalized’ the earth by mining gold as a precious metal and hence, had not yet unleashed the turpitude which could not but follow this transformation of gold from metaphor of terrestrial paradise into a material source of corruption. We cannot, then, overlook the irony of the intimacy between the circulation of the Golden Age trope during the period of early colonization and the material exploitation of the Caribbean in the search for tangible wealth: Throughout conquest and early colonization, the mythologized search for gold as commodity tended to intermingle with the quest for restoration of a golden age. […] This indigenous golden age was constructed only to exploit it, however, to mine and undermine it, with the gold of the age demetaphorized as bullion. The natives’ golden age ended when they were enslaved to extract the gold from within it, and the golden attributes were transferred to the empire. (Graziano 1999: 157 - 8)

Rather than reiterating here the brutality and depredations of the material conquest of the Caribbean, or repeating the scholarly indignation at ethnocentric mis-representations of American reality, which has characterized certain approaches to early colonial textuality, especially in the case of Columbus’ writings (Todorov 1984; Greenblatt 1991; Wawor 1997), I am more interested here in highlighting how the Americas was invented as an idyllic scene of primitive nature awaiting its transformation and domination by culture in the form of Christian indoctrination. Of course, there is no denying that such tropes also complemented and legitimated the material transformation of the Americas: for the mobilization of this “thesaurus of New World motifs” was inherent to the rhetorical invention of America and, by extension, of the emergent “colonial process” (Rabasa 1993: 6). In that sense, while literary scholars have

Age of Iron, Age of Writing

145

decried the fact that Martyr D’Anghiera’s writings have been overlooked as foundational texts of the Latin American literary tradition, or that the early colonial textual corpus in general should be viewed as an indispensable precursor to Golden Age literature (González Echevarría 1990; 1995), it is more useful to my argument here to underscore how the discourse made manifest in such foundational texts represents an emergent construction of orality as a category denoting the idolatrous ‘primitive’ and alphabetic literacy as a category denoting (Christian) civilization. De Orbe Novo If, in the Iberian literary tradition the mythical and moralizing opposition between Golden and Iron Ages culminates in Don Quixote’s railing against his own Iron Age, and hence, an age coextensive with the extraction of precious metals from the Americas, then it is in the De Orbe Novo, that the Ovidian Golden Age is presented explicitly for the first time as a trope for inscribing the ‘New World’ in the European imaginary.7 Indeed, the paradox implicit to this construction of ‘newness’ using ancient discursive categories is immediately evident in the dedicatory remarks prefacing the 1516 edition of the work.8 Martyr D’Anghiera equates transatlantic expansion with entry into an exotic world of adventure and shocking ‘newness’, where the myths of the past have become tangible realities: Hic nova multa videbis, / Oceani magnas terras, vasta aequora, linguas / hactenus ignotas atque aurea saecula nosces / et gentes nudas expertes seminis atri / mortiferi nummi, gemmisque auroque feracem, / torrentem zonam. (Martyr D’Anghiera 2005: 30) [Here you will see many novelties: great lands of the Ocean, vast seas, languages hitherto unknown and you will know the golden ages and naked peoples free from the black seed of doom-laden money, and the torrid zone, rich in gems and gold.]

Even though Martyr d’Anghiera’s history is probably now better known for his admiring descriptions of Mesoamerican writing systems in the later decades, and, particularly, his related anecdote about the case of an Amerindian who showed no surprise whatsoever at the Spaniards’ possession of a writing system (Hill Boone 2000; León Portilla 2003)9, he would also make use of this Golden Age trope to

146

Companion to Empire

inscribe Caribbean peoples as ‘peoples without writing’ in his accounts of the earliest colonial expansion in the region: Sed Hispaniolos nostros insulares illis beatiores esse sentio, modo religionem imbuant, quia nudi, sine ponderibus, sine mensura, sine mortifera denique pecunia, aurea aetate vivientes, sine legibus, sine calumniosis iudicibus, sine libris, natura contenti, vitam agunt, de futuro minime soliciti. (Martyr D’Anghiera 2005: 1. 2. 66) [Yet, I feel that our islanders of Hispaniola are happier than these others - and, especially if they were to be instructed in religion - because, living in the golden age, they go around naked, without weights, measures, or doom-laden money. They are content with nature and, without laws, abusive judges, or books, they live life in the moment, free from the least care about the future.] Aetas est illis aurea […] apertis vivunt hortis, sine legibus, sine libris, sine iudicibus, suapte natura rectum colunt. (1. 3. 94) [For them it is the Golden Age […] they live in open gardens without laws, books or judges and by their own nature they follow the path of righteousness.]

Referring to Hispaniola and Cuba respectively here, Martyr D’Anghiera evokes a primordial, pre-lapsarian, bucolic scene where the written word is not yet known. In this way, an opposition emerges between an innocent nature (before the invention of writing) and the corrupting influence of culture (the domain of writing), which preempts both Las Casas’ discourse of the mid-sixteenth century, and De Bry’s evocative visualization of such an opposition in his propagandistic engravings by the end of the sixteenth century.10 The absence of oppressive laws or rhetorical artifice (denoting deceit and falsehood) characterizing the Iron Age could not be more emphatically underscored in such a scene than by mentioning the absence of the written word, the tool of oppression and conveyor of a rhetorical artistry unknown in the ‘natural’ Golden Age. In short, like other technologies, the written word ruins the ‘natural’ state of humanity. This, then, is the vision of an age of simplicity, blissful ignorance and nature rather than culture or reason, and a place with little use for written knowledge and law. As commentators have noted over the years, Martyr D’Anghiera thereby lays the Renaissance foundation (derived ultimately from classical models) for the development of the idealized noble savage, first by Montaigne and then by Rousseau (Hodgen 1971; Cro 1990; Grafton 1992).

Age of Iron, Age of Writing

147

It is worth noting, however, that in mentioning a lack of books in such an Age, Martyr D’Anghiera abides by the Ovidian version of the classical myth more meticulously than the writers of the earliest European accounts of the conquest from which his own account was derived. The earliest texts, written by colonizing expeditions about or in the Americas, and which are not specifically designed for producing ethnographic or linguistic information with any great precision, make no overt allusions to the question of writing. Indeed, we find that the earliest reports by Columbus, Vaz de Caminha and Vespucci (Morales Padrón 1991), for instance, appear to be more concerned with producing their own writing than bothering to mention the presence or lack of any form of writing amongst the peoples they encounter. The Golden Age trope (and the concomitant discourse of lack - of iron, clothes, money, private property, ‘organized religion’, ‘government’, etc. amongst indigenous peoples) as well as its inverted rhetorical reflection – the world of the savage antropophagi - are of course standard discursive elements in such accounts, but a lack of writing is not mentioned explicitly.11 Instead, these letters and works of the very first colonizers underscore the authors’ frequent capture of a number of Amerindians to serve as potential interpreters, their having resorted to deciphering signs and gestures to be understood, and their gauging the possibility of mass conversion to Christianity, rather than condemning Amerindians outright for not possessing their own alphabet. Having said that, if, in the specific case of the Carta a Santángel (1493), books are not mentioned, Columbus still appears to believe, at least initially, that there is a single language spoken by all peoples of the paradisiacal cultures he depicts and thus to suggest the existence of a pre-Babelian, originary language: Ellos no tienen fierro ni azero ni armas […] Ellos de cosa que tengan, pidiéndogela, iamás dizen de no, antes convidan la persona con ello […] En todas estas islas no vide mucha diversidad de la fechura de la gente, ni en las costumbres, ni en la lengua, salvo que todos se entienden que es cosa muy singular para lo que espero que determinarán Sus Altezas: para la conversión d’ellos a nuestra sancta fe, a la cual son muy dispuestos. (Colón 1997: 221-223)

Consequently, while Columbus makes no mention of writing or books or the lack of the same, his belief in a single unifying language amongst the peoples of the Caribbean (a belief he would, of course,

148

Companion to Empire

soon admit to having been erroneous) would implicitly add to the image of a past (Golden) Age in which language had not yet been ‘corrupted’ and fragmented or affected by the ‘falsity’ associated with writing in the platonic tradition. Of Martyr D’Anghiera’s other sources, we should also take into account Fray Ramón de Pané’s Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios from 1498, a proto-ethographic work, and indeed, celebrated by some scholars as the initiation “de la alfabetización en el Nuevo Mundo” (Barón Castro quoted in Arrom (2001) [1974]: xii), which was actually written in the Indies at the behest of Columbus. In this relatively brief work, under fifty pages in the Arrom edition (2001), the lack of writing, reading and counting amongst the peoples of Hispaniola, as well as the Friar’s own lack of paper, are all alluded to in the first twenty pages to excuse the unpolished style of his work: “Y como no tienen letras ni escrituras, no saben contar tales fábulas, ni yo puedo escribirlas bien” (Pané 2001: 13). Pané's intention was both to explain the lack of coherence of his own text by attributing it to the fact that he had no indigenous written texts to work from and to claim that indigenous history could not but be approximated or constructed in his report as a result of this same lack of writing; indeed, the implication is that only with written records can an ordered account of historical events be gathered with any degree of credibility (López Maguiña 1992). If anything, then, Pané’s work represents the initiation of the ‘peoples without history’ paradigm that would emerge in later years. Given the fact that Martyr D’Anghiera’s allusion to the ‘letterless’ Golden Age does not appear in his earliest letters on which the first Decade would be based, and that Pané had been a primary source in his own description of Taíno religious practices (Chapter nine of the first Decade), it is entirely possible that his emphasis on the Golden Age as a ‘bookless’ age in the Decades was inspired by Pané’s complaints. Whatever influence Martyr D’Anghiera’s sources had on his decision to employ the bookless Golden Age trope to his readers, his use of the figure illustrates the extent to which he mined the thesaurus of images from classical mythology which would have been most familiar to his reading public. Indeed, Martyr D’Anghiera’s allusion to the lack of writing and books should perhaps be viewed as a recognizable element in a series of traits characterizing peoples of such an Age. After all, the lack of books was invariably presented

Age of Iron, Age of Writing

149

schematically alongside a lack of weights, money and judges, etc., as we have seen. These traits are also often accompanied by allusions to a lack of iron in such an age. While we could explain each one of these traits as tropes characterizing a colonial ‘discourse of lack’, we should also bear in mind Levin’s (1969) observation that the absence of iron itself amongst Caribbean peoples simply served as evidence of the fact that the age being evoked was ‘golden’ rather than an age of corrupting iron like the present. The lack of writing would, in the same way, simply become synonymous with ‘nature’. In effect, Ovid’s poetic version of the myth in which specifically written law was absent in the Golden Age rather than all writing and books, had thus become so well-known that it had been reduced to this series of generic traits (including the absence of writing, of course) which would have been immediately recognizable to Renaissance readers. In addition, we might suggest that Martyr D’Anghiera’s employment of the trope is characteristic of the poetic quality inherent to the Decades and of his motivation for informing his readers of conquest history in a fashion that might provoke wonder. In this respect, it is worth repeating the fact that the first three decades were based on Martyr D’Anghiera’s epistolary correspondence with officials and dignitaries in the Italian city-states at the time of the initial navigation to the Americas, while the last five decades, written in subsequent years, and published for the first time in 1530, still bore the mark of the author’s journalistic and relatively perfunctory style, not to mention of his factual imprecision and apparent lack of scholarly rigor.12 Even though Martyr D’Anghiera chose to write in Latin rather than the vernacular, presumably to reach an international audience and to commemorate the conquest in the most prestigious language available to him, his simplistic Latin prose and his insertion into his work of Latinate neologisms from the vernacular, earned him the opprobrium of humanist pedants amongst his contemporaries (Cro 1990). Meanwhile, modern scholars continue to have doubts over how to classify Martyr’s work in terms of genre, and over how to challenge the common notion that Martyr D’Anghiera was the first historian of the conquest (Mignolo 1995: 179-80). The fact is that the De Orbe Novo does not coincide with the Roman model for the writing of history employed by other Italian humanists, and instead, through the use of eye-witness testimony, the temporal proximity of the events described, and the inclusion of (often sensationalist) protoethno-

150

Companion to Empire

graphic information dealing with peoples distant from the historian’s own culture, it appears to more closely resemble the ancient model of history identified with Herodotus (O’Gorman 1989; Grafton 1992; Mignolo 1995). However we wish to critique the scholarly rigor of the De Orbe Novo, or to classify its style and consider its ‘novelty’, the important issue here is that Martyr drew on a series of classical myths and ancient models for the writing of history about inter-cultural contact which, nevertheless, have established his work as an enduring textual authority in the evolution of modern constructions of the ‘letterless primitive’, and, as we have noted, in the emergence of the noble savage. Indeed, commentators have even been sufficiently seduced by the De Orbe Novo to discern a certain “objectivity” and “impartial curiosity” in the history (Rowe 1965: 74-76). Such an assessment of Martyr D’Anghiera’s ‘favorable’ primitivism may strike us as somewhat surprising when we take into account his depiction of aboriginal cultures as stagnant, unchanging and dwelling eternally in a temporal and cultural space isomorphic with his own culture’s distant past.13 We should also remain aware that given Martyr’s penchant for rhetorical clichés in the classical mold, such objectivity and impartiality might be understood simply as that: stylistic derivations from classical precedents.14 What I intend here is the fact that, like other humanists writing ‘New World’ historiography, Martyr D’Anghiera could adopt one of a whole series of approaches to describing inter-cultural contact which had been inherited from the ancients: for there is not a single ideological perspective that governs such writings in the works of the classical canon. We should remember that one such perspective was that of a favorable primitivism, in the sense that barbarians were often viewed as virtuous inversions of the corruption and decadence of ‘civilized’ Graeco-Roman cultures. An implied cultural relativism was thus another topos of the most ancient writings about other cultures and hardly Martyr D’Anghiera’s own invention. In this respect, we might simply recall the fact that Tacitus’ Germania became more widely read in the Renaissance and admired for its contrast between the primordial virtue of the savage Germans and the corruption of the decadent Roman Empire (Grafton 1992: 45-8). Martyr D’Anghiera absorbs such models with great aplomb, and so much so that a favorable primitivism and serious moral intentions appear to be the

Age of Iron, Age of Writing

151

overriding factors governing his interpretation of the colonization of the Americas. In that sense, his history appears to be typical of the tendency in Renaissance historiography towards moral instruction and example (Kristeller 1990). Tabulae rasae Given the fact that Martyr D’Anghiera himself was court chaplain to the Catholic Monarchs, and later, nominated Abbot of Jamaica, we might also read the De Orbe Novo as a ‘utopian’ history derived from a millenarian conception of early colonization. For all its poetic armature, the history was intended to transmit a Christian interpretation of early modern expansion in the Americas. The sporadic condemnation of the carnage resulting from military conquest, the conquistadores’ lust for gold, and the allusions to the historian’s own apparent personal disdain for gold as a commodity, might then be viewed as instances of an acknowledgment of the official justification of colonialism as a mission to evangelize. His tendency to moralize in the history thus reflects the tenor of the early legislation that expressed a concern with the Christianization of aboriginal populations. And here I am thinking initially of the Inter caetera papal bull issued in 1493, Isabel’s last will and testament from 1504, and the Laws of Burgos (1512-13). Similarly, we might view this Christian tenor as a reflection of the contemporaneous Christian humanism devoted to spiritual renovation and the hope of a universal pax Christiana to which we alluded in the previous chapter. In effect, we might conclude that while Martyr D’Anghiera’s favorable primitivism and moral critique of his own society in the Decades derives from classical methodological models, he is of course teaching his readers a lesson in Christian morality. Bearing this in mind, Martyr D’Anghiera’s primitivism invites a comparison between the simplicity of the Golden Age inhabitants and the apostolic virtue associated with early Christians, especially when we take into account his assertion that the inhabitants of Hispaniola would be even happier “modo religionem imbuant” [if they were instructed in religion] (Martyr D’Anghiera 2005: 1. 2: 66). Despite, therefore, the purely pagan imagery evoked in the Golden Age trope, we can also discern an implicit Christian message: the scene of blissful ignorance identifies the inhabitants of the Caribbean both with

152

Companion to Empire

primitive Christians (innocent, impoverished and virtuous) and, simultaneously, with peoples (ignorant of God) awaiting their evangelization and hence, the coming of the gospel. In other words, while Martyr D’Anghiera presents the Golden Age inhabitants as worthy of admiration for their primordial ignorance and innocence, he also tends, as I shall demonstrate further, to view those same traits as an impediment to be overcome through Christian indoctrination. That docility and unlettered simplicity might also be regarded negatively and even ridiculed as a source of amusement is revealed in the often jocular and trifling tone of the work: Nunc insulares illusiones accipito Veris Luciani Narrationibus tanto superiores, quanto haec in usu hominum sunt, licet infantalia; illa vero conficta ioci tantum gratia vel ea credentium irrisui condonata. (Martyr D’Anghiera 1. 9. 39) [Now hear about the islanders’ illusions, which are better than Lucian’s True Stories. And although the former are the stuff of children, they (actually) function as customs amongst the inhabitants, whereas the latter were invented by Lucian for the sake of a joke or contrived to allow those believing them to be ridiculed.]

In this particular extract from a longer account of Taíno religious beliefs and originally recorded by Pané, Martyr D’Anghiera is encouraged to draw an analogy with yet another ancient work: Lucian of Samosata’s (125–195) satirical True Stories. The latter work enjoyed great popularity amongst Martyr D’Anghiera’s contemporaries from Northern Europe (notably in the case of Thomas More and Erasmus) and, most tellingly, because Lucian parodied mythological accounts of sea travel to unknown lands in the West, to the Elysian Fields and even to the moon. Even more relevant, is the fact that Lucian’s Saturnalia was also a celebrated source of yet another version of the Golden Age myth. By drawing such an analogy, the implicit intention was to present Taíno religion as a series of nonsensical fantasies that would soon be eclipsed by the universal truths, associated with sacred textuality. In a similar vein, Martyr D’Anghiera would be amongst the first Renaissance writers to depict Caribbean peoples as so simple as to believe that written communication was a kind of sorcery or magic: Arborem esse hanc existimandum est, cuius foliis Chaldaei, litterarum primi repertores, conceptus mentis absentibus significabant priusquam usus chartae reperiretur […] Risu dignum est, quae insularibus nostri de folio persuadeant:

Age of Iron, Age of Writing

153

nostrorum imperio folia loqui putant boni homines. (Martyr D’Anghiera 2005: 3. 8. 414) [It is thought that this tree is the one on whose leaves the Chaldeans, the first inventors of letters, expressed the thoughts of their minds to those who were not present before the use of paper was invented […] It is worth a laugh to think what our explorers have convinced the islanders about this leaf: These good people think the leaves speak in obedience to the command of our men.]

In describing the leaves of the copey tree, Martyr D’Anghiera explains how the leaves might be used as writing materials in the absence of paper, ponders the ancient origin of writing amongst the Chaldeans and then mocks the indigenous bewilderment when the Spaniards use the leaves for such a purpose. This ‘primitive’ proto-writing on leaves thus comes to symbolize a return to the ‘technological’ origin for the Spaniards in a fashion, which also underscores the stagnant, unevolving indigenous culture by comparison. However, the important point to remember here is the fact that, rather than simply ridiculing indigenous gullibility, Martyr D’Anghiera’s anecdote is entirely congruent with the notion that the imagined childlike traits of oral peoples would make them ideal converts to the religion of sacred scripture If Martyr D’Anghiera’s employment of the Golden Age trope, his paternalistic praise for the natural ‘goodness’ of indigenous peoples, and his Christian morality make his a prototype for utopian history, this utopian conception of colonization hardly precluded the use of discursive forms of violence to achieve its ends. For, just as the Golden Age inhabitant might be admired for his/her docility, innocence and passivity, s/he was also being conceived of in dehumanizing terms, which underscored their negation as subjects. They were, in effect, as malleable as ‘wax’: Algunas veces me paro a pensar en este grande aparejo que veo, y me admiro, cierto mucho conmigo […] de verles, cuasi en todo, en aquella buena simplicidad, obediencia y humildad […] siendo, como son por otra parte, de tan ricos ingenios y prompta voluntad y docílisimos y muy blandos u hechos como cera para cuanto dellos se quiera hacer. (Vasco de Quiroga, Información en derecho [1535], quoted in Subirats: 1994: 116).

Beyond the employment of the Golden Age topos in Renaissance histories like the De Orbe Novo, then, the Christianized trope found favor amongst utopian ecclesiastics directly involved in the evan-

154

Companion to Empire

gelization effort in the Americas, again as a means for establishing a certain equivalency between pagan indigenous cultures and the apostolic simplicity of the primitive Church. The prevailing tendency was to view Amerindian cultures in terms of a potential ChristianIndian millennial kingdom protected from the avarice and corruption associated with the secular Iron Age culture of lay Spaniards.15 Given that this Christianization of the trope served, more than anything, to draw attention to a brutish nature requiring Christian civilization, and a tabula rasa beseeching the imprint of sacramental doctrine, it has even been regarded as eclipsing the classical version of the Golden Age trope (Subirats 1994: 113-4). Moreover, if Martyr D’Anghiera’s original use of the figure is primarily identified with the classical model, there is no denying that, as we have noted, he himself also preempts this emergent Christianization of the Golden Age inhabitants. This, for instance, could not be more overt than in the exhortation to Pope Leo X, which opens the Second Decade: quo intelligat quantum nostra tempestate, foelicibus Hispanorum Regum auspiciis, et humano generi decoris et militanti ecclesiae augmenti accesserit. Gentes nanque illae nudae, veluti rasae tabellae, religionis nostrae ritus facile induunt nostrorumque commercio efferam nativamque rusticitatem excutiunt. (Martyr D’Anghiera 2005: 2. 1. 186) [with which (copy of my work) you might understand how much has been undertaken in our era under the happy leadership of the Spanish Monarchs for the glory of the human race and for the expansion of the Militant Church. For these naked peoples are like tabulae rasae [rasae tabellae]; they easily take on the customs of our religion and, after contact with our people, they discard their savage and primitive rusticity.]

In other words, the Golden Age trope was never intended simply to provoke admiration in the reader for the natural virtue of the Amerindian and to condemn Renaissance cultural degeneration in the process: the use of the trope was designed to also present an image of a people which, despite living in a state of blissful ignorance, must be disciplined for their own salvation. The Illiterate Wildman in Paradise In pondering this understanding of the Golden Age trope in terms of a Christian morality derived from the doctrine of the ecclesia militans and the expansion of a universal Christian imperium, we might

Age of Iron, Age of Writing

155

wonder at the extent to which Martyr D’Anghiera’s idealized conception of the Golden Age was, quite apart from the threatening presence of the satanic cannibal, also haunted by the residue of another bogeyman inherited from the medieval imaginary: the rustic wildman. That the wildman may, paradoxically, be in some ways conflated with the simple, innocent and virtuous inhabitants of the Golden Age, may be borne out by the fact that the wildman was also generally imagined as lacking in letters, and, for that reason, as also lacking reason and an orthodox knowledge of God. Both the wildman and the people of the Golden Age were required, therefore, to be brought knowledge of that same doctrinal orthodoxy and hence, by extension, of reason and civility through a process of indoctrination, which was dependent on the canonical interpretation of sacred textuality. The imaginary wildman, which appeared as a recurring figure in medieval art, literature and folklore as a means for re-asserting the civilized values of medieval urban-dwellers, was frequently also associated with madness. While the wildman’s hirsute appearance, formidable sexual prowess and brute strength are well known, Bartra (1992: 104) also points out that the solitary nature of this figure contributed to his fall into madness. The medieval savage was, in effect, thought to be living his lamentable bestial existence either because he had lost his mind, because he had been condemned to be raised amongst animals far from the cities, or simply because of an ‘unnatural’ solitary nature which had driven him to such a state (Bartra 1992: 89). Furthermore, and more importantly, given his solitary nature, the wildman was thought to be incapable, not only of harnessing natural reason, but of dominating the faculty which served as the principal distinction between man and beast and the means by which men might communicate with each other in civil society: the use of language. Like a beast, the wildman communicated with signs, gestures and mutterings, which, bereft of literal meanings, were thought to represent a ‘natural’ language of ‘the wild’ whose meanings were inaccessible to the rational men of the cities. Invariably, the wildman’s ‘savage’ language was deemed to be a nonsensical expression of irrational drives that stood in stark contrast to the language of reason and abstract concepts possessed by the rational world of the (orthodox) Christian community (Bartra 1992: 116). It is thus worth noting that the demands for ecclesiastical reform

156

Companion to Empire

by heterodox preachers were often compared to the nonsensical babbling of a savage and irrational wildman. We might also consider how this mad, irrational or misguided heretic was assimilated to the lack of a reasoning ability and interpretative power associated with the literacy of the clerical elite. For it cannot be a coincidence that medieval heretics were also often referred to as idiotae, illiterati and rustici and hence, identified with unlettered simplicity (Moore 1987). In short, while Martyr D’Anghiera’s employment of the Golden Age trope appears to present an idealized conception of the Amerindian as a virtuous ‘nature dweller’ who contrasts dramatically with the corrupt and decadent inhabitants of early modern Europe’s Iron Age, the Golden Age ‘simpleton’, is also an illiterate rustic, bereft of reason, and lacking knowledge of God in such a way that his conflation with more sinister ‘outsiders’ – the raving heretic and the wildman – becomes more than inevitable. All these figures, then, are united by their ‘orality’ and their lack of the reason that derives ultimately from their ignorance, or distortion of a Christian doctrine dependent on sacred textuality for its authority. Thus, in the confrontation between these figures and the colonizing Christian culture we are also presented with an opposition between a chaotic orality and the symbolic order relying on written laws, both secular and canon, for its maintenance. The fate of the Golden Age dweller, then, was intended to be a process of conversion that “podia ser redefinida como la entrada del neófito en un orden auténticamente racional: el grandioso amanecer de América bajo el logos cristianooccidental” (Subirats 1994: 110). The Alpha and Omega Having said that, we should also be wary of understanding the colonization of the Americas simply as the confrontation between alphabetic (Christian) and non-alphabetic cultures. Even though Christianity was obviously a religion for which sacred textuality was paramount as the receptacle of God’s will and thus, as the foundational authority behind Christian principles, the evangelization effort and the concomitant divulgation of those same principles was predicated upon the use of the spoken word to bring about that same divulgation. So, while sixteenth-century missionary-ethnographers recognized the fundamental importance of grammaticalizing ind-

Age of Iron, Age of Writing

157

igenous languages and of coordinating the distribution of Christian reading materials in those same languages, it was on the understanding that such materials, in their turn, would facilitate the inculcation of doctrine and Christian rites primarily through a variety of ‘oral’ activities: preaching, sermons, religious plays and the ritualized speech acts accompanying the performance of the sacraments. In that sense, while underscoring the fundamental importance of the written word to the conquest of the Americas and of literacy as a means for assimilating indigenous populations to Christian norms and social behaviours, we should bear in mind that, as in early modern Europe, only a minority were literate in the modern sense, and that the vast majority accessed the authority of alphabetic textuality as members of textual communities or through secondary literacy. Indeed, the Franciscan friar, Alonso de Molina, left no doubt that, in writing the first dictionary of a Mesoamerican language - his Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana (1571 [1555]), his aim, like that of the other missionary-grammarians, was to facilitate the learning of spoken Nahuatl so that his fellow missionaries would not have to rely on potentially deceitful interpreters in performing their duties: la falta de la lengua nos estorva. Y no es pequeño inconveniente que los que los han de governar y regir, y poner en toda buena policía, y a hacerles justicia, remediando y soldando los agravios que reciben, no se entienden con ellos, sino que se libre la razón y justicia que tienen, en la intención buena o mala del Nauatlato o interprete. (Molina 1970: Prólogo al lector)

Molina goes on to underscore the quintessentially oral nature of evangelization most emphatically by quoting Saint Paul and the contention that the universal diffusion of the gospel should be a multilingual operation rather than, for example, achieved through the imposition of the Castilian vernacular: pues como dice San Pablo escriviendo a los Romanos. La fe se alcança oyendo, y lo que se ha de oyr, ha de ser palabra de Dios, y esta se ha de predicar en lengua que los oyentes la entiendan, porque de otra manera [como lo dize el mesmo san Pablo] el que habla, sera tenudo por barbaro. Y para declararles los mysterios de nuestra fee, no basta saber la lengua como quiera, sino entender bien la propriedad de los vocablos y maneras de hablar que tienen: pues por falta desto podria acaecer que aviendo de ser predicadores de verdad, lo fuesse de error y de falsedad. Por esta causa [entre otras muchas] fue dado al Spiritu sancto a los

158

Companion to Empire Apostoles el dia de penthecostes, en diverdidad de lenguas: para que fuessen de todos entendidos. (Prólogo al lector)

Molina’s fear that, although priests might learn the meanings of words, they would not necessarily be aware of the tropological complexities of given lexical items when used in context, was also a preoccupation of Molina’s contemporary, and fellow Franciscan, the much celebrated Bernardino de Sahagún. Sahagún’s magnum opus, his Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España (1578-80), designed as a thesaurus or contextualized dictionary of classical Nahuatl, was intended to help missionaries learn the aboriginal language in such a way that they would have the wherewithal, not just to preach or perform the sacraments, but also to decipher the preHispanic sentiment in the songs and chants which the recently converted Nahua continued to perform: De esta manera ellos cantan cuando quieren y cantan los cantares antiguos que usavan en el tiempo de su idolatría, no todos, sino muchos y nadie entiende lo que dizen por ser sus cantares muy cerrados. Y si algunos cantares usan que ellos han hecho después acá de su convertimiento, en que se trata de las cosas de Dios y de sus sanctos, van embueltos con muchos errores y heregías, y aun en los bailes y areitos se hazen muchas cosas de sus supersticiones antiguas y ritus idolátricos, especialmente donde no reside quien los entiende. (Sahagún 1997: Book 10: 28. 582)

As far as Sahagún was concerned, it was precisely because his predecessors, the earliest ethnography-missionaries (most notably in the case of Motolinía) who had arrived in Mexico in 1524, had had an imperfect mastery of Mesoamerican languages that idolatrous beliefs continued to be expressed without being noticed, and even passed off as manifestations of Christian sentiments. Sahagún’s proposed solution to this state of affairs was, then, to compose a written text that contained the necessary linguistic knowledge for oral comprehension of otherwise hidden idolatrous speech and which would therefore provide the possibility of its extirpation. Of course, rather than viewing the proposed method for the eradication of idolatrous practices as the eclipse of indigenous orality by writing, it should, given the emphasis on spoken religious performance, be regarded as the combination of speech and writing to produce new forms of nonheretical orality.

Age of Iron, Age of Writing

159

Nevertheless, even though Christian ritual was practiced largely through oral performance, the equally important point here is that the written word was identified with a civility based on Christian principles in opposition to a barbarity identified with a lack of, or a distortion of knowledge of God. The central importance of alphabetic writing to sixteenth century scholars, historians and theologians as a fundamental marker of cultural difference when confronted with the radical alterity of heterogeneous Amerindian cultures cannot, therefore, be overstated. Indeed, almost a half century after the publication of Martyr’s initial three decades in 1516, when the Dominican friar, Bartolomé de Las Casas and the humanist, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, another rhetorician and official historian, presented their arguments in the debates at Valladolid of 1550-1, the possession of alphabetic writing would be cited by both men as a criterion for determining the degree of barbarity to be attributed to Amerindian cultures (Pagden 1982; Root 1988; Seed 1991; Subirats 1994; Mignolo 1995; Cañizares Esguerra 2001). In Sepúlveda’s case, the absence of alphabetic writing served to locate the indigenous peoples of the Americas beyond the pale of humanity as Aristotelian natural slaves and thus contributed to the justification for their subjugation. For Las Casas, meanwhile, the lack of writing served to locate the Amerindians amongst the second of four categories of barbarian which he had inherited from Aquinas’ interpretation of the ancient theory of natural slavery: these nonChristians and non-Europeans, though ignorant of the liberal arts, demonstrated a natural talent for the mechanical arts and thus might be ‘instructed’ in the ways of true civilization (Pagden 1982: 126-32; Seed 1991: 8 n.5). The point for Las Casas, as it perhaps had been for Martyr D’Anghiera, was to prove to detractors that the indigenous population were not only convertible, but ‘civilizable’ and could hence be taught to live as ‘men’ should. And, since the knowledge associated with this civilized (Christian) way of life was thought to be inextricably linked to textuality, (alphabetic) writing – regarded as being equivalent to the wisdom which it simply conveyed as it had been in the Middle Ages (Maravall 1967a [1953], 1967d [1966]) - was indispensable for the acquisition of that same knowledge (Pagden 1982: 129-30). Amerindians were perfectly capable of acquiring this scientia and a concomitant knowledge of God once they relinquished their own writing systems and became members of the alphabetic

160

Companion to Empire

textual communities, which would facilitate access to that same knowledge. In the context of this isomorphic relationship between writing and scientia (secular and sacred) we might recall that letter symbolism and mysticism, not unlike the veneration of individual Hebrew letters in the Kabbalistic tradition and the fundamental importance of ornate calligraphy in the Islamic tradition, also enjoyed a long history in both the classical and Christian traditions (Drucker 1995). For, even while recognizing that pre-modern Christianity was heir to the Greek antipathy towards writing, and thus, after Saint Paul, asserted a mistrust of the carnal, literal letter, while expressing a preference for the spirit (the canonical meaning) contained by that same letter, the centrality of letters to Christian doctrine could not be better expressed than in the constant use of scriptural metaphors to describe the knowledge of fundamental religious principles, and even to describe God himself (Curtius 1948; Drucker 1995; Kendrick 1999).16 Most emblematically in this regard, is the association of Christ with ‘the alpha and omega’ as presented in Saint John’s Apocalypse and to which I alluded in Chapter One, when considering the role of letter symbolism in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies. This identification of Christ with the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet suggests indebtedness to the ancient Greek association between stoicheia (elements) and letters. Christ was thus identified with cosmological totality even if Greek atomistic conceptions of the universe ultimately ceded to a Christian image of wholeness in the universe (Drucker 1995: 87). Moreover, since the doctrine of the Incarnation combined the notions of human flesh and temporal language as likenesses of God and his eternal Word, the Bible itself became identified with the body of Christ. In effect, in pre-modern Christianity, the material graphemes of the Bible represented the carnal (letter/literal) meaning (Christ), while their interpretation represented a path to their (spiritual) meaning (God’s will) (Smalley 1941; Colish 1969). Age of Iron, Age of Writing When considering these examples of the extent to which written letters had a long history of sacred significance for Christians, we can better understand why, when confronted with non-Christians in the Americas, the apparent absence of any kind of system of inscription

Age of Iron, Age of Writing

161

was identified with ignorance of God and why, even when confronted with non-alphabetic writing systems, a tendency existed to deny such writing systems any association with ‘true’ writing. This identification of a writing system with a culturally-specific religious ethos and the faith in the possibility of converting to that same religion by absorbing a moral code of behavior transmitted by a sacred textual tradition was what led to the initial destruction of Amerindian books which took place in the early colonial period: Los europeos, convencidos - por su propia práctica - de la existencia de un vínculo orgánico entre la escritura y un sistema ideológico-religioso, no tardaron, en efecto, a considerar los sistemas de notación autóctonos como invenciones del demonio, fundador, según ellos de las “idolatrías” indígenas. (Leinhard 1992: 41)

The zeal for book-burning must be seen in the context of a Christian scriptural tradition predicated upon an indispensable link between textuality and access to divine illumination or demoniac error. Moreover, when this identification of culturally-specific writing systems with the presence or absence of divine favor is considered within the context of the recent development of the printing press, the fundamental role of textual scrutiny and translation in calls for religious reform, and the humanists’ so-called ‘re-discovery’ of ancient textual worlds, we might not be surprised by the fact that the same period would witness a more generalized tendency to equate the possession of letters in a culture simply with the ‘human’ condition. I am thinking here specifically of the consequences of the exaltation of an abstract universal ‘Man’ (dignitas hominis) which had informed the early humanistic conception of textual activities as the basis for the betterment of early modern Christian society. After information regarding the inhabitants of the Americas became more readily available in Europe, this exaltation of abstract (European) ‘Man’ assumed the more specific form of eulogies to letters (laudes litterarum). And, as Rico (1978b) has argued, such eulogies were frequently found in the works of Iberian scholars of the sixteenth century. These Iberian humanists became more entrenched in their conviction that the absence of alphabetic letters (as the foundation of the studia humanitatis) in a society indicated, not only the lack of the foundations of civil society, but even a concomitant lack of the ‘true’ human condition (humanitas) as manifested in the case of indigenous cultures of the Americas (Rico 1978b: 906). Moreover, for these

162

Companion to Empire

humanists, civil society was not a passive concept, but could only be achieved if ‘Man’ was energetic enough to make use of the liberal arts to reach his true calling: to dominate the earth and to thereby truly become a semi-divine reflection of the image of God (1978b: 901). It is reasonable, therefore, to interpret such sentiments as compatible with the contemporaneous justification of the expansion of a universal Christian imperium as a civilizing enterprise. This civilizing process would of course imply the exportation of letters and lettered culture the prerequisite for a universal ‘human condition’ found in civil society. Needless to say, Ginés de Sepúlveda’s previously mentioned anti-primitivism and support for the natural slavery theory constitute a salient example of such a posture in the Iberian tradition described by Rico. While the favorable primitivism associated with the ‘bookless’ Golden Age trope would continue to find favor as a stock manner for inscribing indigenous cultures in the European imaginary, the tendency to associate the possession of letters with the human condition reflected this more common tendency in the sixteenth century to adopt a condemnatory attitude towards American aboriginal cultures (Hodgen 1971). In other words, what we also witness during the early colonial period is an inverted image of the Golden Age trope, which, rather than celebrating primitivism, would celebrate the technological sophistication of the Iron Age in contrast to what was perceived as the despicable and sub-human condition of indigenous peoples. A ‘sub-human’ condition that could be redeemed and rectified, precisely through the introduction of Christian doctrine and culturally specific sign-carriers like alphabetic writing. The association of indigenous cultures with a contemptible barbarism was not limited to the discourses legitimating Iberian expansion in the Americas, but was also a common feature of the textual production by other imperial powers. Greenblatt (1991) and Cañizares Esguerra (2001), for example, have examined the association of a lack of alphabetic writing with barbarism in the writings of the English travel writer, Samuel Purchas (1575-1626). Levin (1969), meanwhile, detects the eclipse and negation of the Golden Age trope in the seventeenth century by alluding to Hobbes’ (1588–1679) frequent condemnatory allusions to America in his Leviathan (1651). Allusions which, quite predictably, identify alphabetic literacy with the advanced civilization governed by a centralized state and the absence

Age of Iron, Age of Writing

163

of the same with an ‘unruly’ nature which can only ever afford human beings a life that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Hobbes 2002: 96). De Certeau’s (1975) reading of the Swiss Calvinist Jean De Léry’s (1536-1613) Histoire d’un voyage en terre de Brésil (1578) provides a seminal analysis of the emergence of indigenous ‘orality’ in the French tradition. While Montaigne’s (1533–1592) essay Des Cannibales (1580) confirms the persistence of the Golden Age trope well into the late sixteenth century in that same tradition, and hence, provides a startling contrast to the association of non-alphabetic cultures with barbarism (Lestringant 1990), it is Léry’s history which serves as a salient illustration of the Calvinists’ equating the possession of writing in a culture with divine favor. That is, the possession of alphabetic script is regarded as a gift of divine origin that has divided the world up into peoples ‘with’ and ‘without’ writing and by extension, ‘with’ and ‘without’ divine illumination. For de Léry, the ‘orality’ of the Tupinamba is sufficient proof that they have been abandoned by God (de Certeau 1975: 215). Not surprisingly, official chroniclers of the Iberian conquest of the Americas who promoted germane sentiments in their works and who were unquestionably anti-primitivists, had, by the mid-sixteenth century, established Martyr D’Anghiera’s original image of the ‘letterless Indian’ as a stock trope in the discourse of imperial exultation. In the emblematic case of Francisco López de Gómara’s (1511–1559) controversial magnum opus, the two-part Historia de Indias (Hispania Victrix) and the Conquista de México (1552), the author displayed his role as a distinguished humanist with unequivocal opinions about the fundamental role of alphabetic letters in the constitution of civilized polity: “(a los indios) les han mostrado las letras, pues sin ellas los hombres son como animales, y el uso del hierro, que tan necesario es al hombre” (1954: 385). In effect, what López de Gómara does here is to invert the Golden Age topos so as to stress the desirability of alphabetic writing and iron as markers of ‘civilization’ and even humanity, rather than choosing to condemn them as symbols of a decadent Iron Age. Further elaborations on this theme appear in the work to underscore the emergence of the ‘lack of letters’ as a convention of official historiography: Mas (los indios) no tienen letras, ni moneda, ni bestias de carga: cosas principalísimas para el buen orden y modo de vivir del hombre; que ir desnudos,

164

Companion to Empire siendo la tierra caliente y falta de lana y lino, no es novedad. (‘Carta al rey’)(Part 1: 1954: 5) Hicieron también mucho efecto las letras y las cartas que unos a otros se escribían los españoles, pues pensaban los indios que tenían espíritu de profecía, pues sin verse ni hablarse se entendían o que hablaba el papel, y estuvieron con esto embobados y corridos. (‘Milagros de la conversión’) (1954: 59)

In the first of these extracts, López de Gómara continues his inversion of the Golden Age trope by bemoaning the absence of markers of societal order and industry in the Caribbean and championing the conception of alphabetic writing as a marker of cultural advancement in this same respect. In the second extract, the author simply repeats the anecdote first told by Martyr D’Anghiera as a means for deriding the apparent superstitious gullibility and lack of technological sophistication of non-alphabetic peoples. Magic Writing El oro es exçelentísmo; del oro se haz thesoro, y con él, quien lo tiene, haz cuanto quiere en el mundo. (Colón 1997: 497)

At this point we might wonder, however, who was being superstitious and gullible here? For, bearing in mind the combination of the centuries–old privileging of the sacred written word in Christianity with the humanists’ equating the possession of writing with the human condition, surely it is the alphabetic culture which had an inflated and even exaggerated sense of the importance of its own culturallyspecific sign-system? Was this, then, not a case of the colonizing Christian culture projecting its own illusions about its scriptural practices onto supposedly superstitious non-alphabetic cultures? If that was in fact the case, we might wonder whether this privileging of alphabetic writing in the sixteenth century was an early form of a European writing fetish. While the association of the concept of the fetish and the practice of fetishization with Renaissance colonialism might strike us as rather anachronistic, we would be advised to consider the genesis of the terms as explained by William Peitz in a series of articles some years ago (1985, 1987).17 Needless to say, Peitz’s work has proven to be indispensable to the following examination of the argument that the ethnocentric privileging of alphabetic writing over other comparable modes of expression reached such

Age of Iron, Age of Writing

165

extremes in the early period of colonization in the Americas that it might indeed be conceived of in terms of a fetishization of the written word (Kadir 1992; Leinhard 1992; Logan 1994; Lagos 2002). In alluding to a fetishization of the written word, I am of course primarily interested in the sense derived from Marxist commodity ideology and hence, an ideological conception of writing as a reified practice which naturally possesses some magical or supernatural power allowing it to transmit universal truths quite transparently. This is of course particularly relevant to the use of documentation to authorize the annexation, division and administration of territories during the earliest periods of contact between expansionist European powers and non-European peoples. Indeed, it was precisely these early colonial contact zones that provided the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the fetish in its sense of reification. When radically different cultures with distinct social, religious and economic values, not to mention epistemologies, came crashing into each other’s acquaintance during the early modern period, the context was set for the emergence of the fetish in the sense applied to it in commodity ideology (Pietz 1985: 1. 7). Pietz explains that when fifteenth century Portuguese sailors came across West Africans traders, adamant that by wearing or using amulets, talismen and other objects they could ward off evil or bring themselves luck, the Portuguese referred to these objects as feitiços. This essentially signified portable objects that were thought to be the embodiment of a sacred power which was directly accessible to the bearer of that same material object. According to Pietz, the word fetish had shifted in form and meaning during its evolution from Latin to Romance: Latin facticius, while simply meaning ‘manufactured thing’, also had idolatrous implications and associations with witchcraft, and hence, subsequently became feitiço ‘idolatrous or demoniac object’ in early Luso-Romance. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, fetisso was employed in reference to those previously mentioned material objects to which non-Europeans attributed special powers and excessive value.18 As far as the notion of attributing excessive value to material objects regarded as trifles to early modern Europeans, we are immediately reminded once again of the Golden Age trope as a means for depicting the ‘natural’ simplicity and naïve ‘generosity’ of Caribbean peoples. More specifically, the earliest letters by Columbus, Vespucci and Vaz de Caminha serve as illustrations of how

166

Companion to Empire

the different culturally-specific values attributed to material objects became apparent during these initial clashes of cultures, not least of all in terms of the distinct social meanings attributed to the exchanging of objects by both cultures, and, most significantly, in the apparent disregard for gold as a precious commodity by nonEuropeans. On the other hand, just as indigenous peoples were also reported to overestimate the economic value of the objects received in initial exchanges with Europeans (glass beads, crockery, shoelaces etc.) and hence, what basically amounted to worthless items in Iberian terms, so the colonizers perceived non-Europeans as attributing quasireligious power to trifling objects of equally-limited worth and value (Pietz 1987: 2. 41). Non-European value systems were not just ridiculed and exploited, then, but the colonizers saw non-European traders as superstitious and delusional to the extent that their value measures were regarded as hindrances to ‘universal’ reason and ‘sensible’ commercial strategies. European colonial ideology attributed the fetishistic mentality to the African and Amerindian as if they remained ignorant of the true nature of the world, the value of the material objects in it and, for this reason, remained bereft of the tools of civilization (Pietz 1985: 1. 7). What is apparent, however, is that such condemnation of indigenous systems of exchange itself reveals an obvious irony: in privileging the values they themselves attributed to material objects as universally valid, the colonizers were indulging in their own fetishization of those same values, while all the time reserving the epithet superstitious exclusively for the other cultures they encountered. In this same respect, we might also recall that it was probably an early modern European fetishization of precious metals, which provoked the disastrous inflationary effects of the massive accumulation and importation of gold and silver bullion from the Americas in the sixteenth century (Pagden 2003: 77). Bearing this premise in mind, then, we can appreciate why, as far as the possibility of a writing fetish is concerned, Kadir (1992) underscored how the authority inherent to juridical documents like the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe (1492-3) and the Requerimiento (1512) was based on the inextricable link between such documents and the ideology of a militant, universal Church as expressed in papal bulls of the period. In other words, a lineage was established between writings sanctioned by Holy Writ and the writings of conquest, which ultimately served to convince explorers of their universal right to

Age of Iron, Age of Writing

167

conquest. Similarly, according to Leinhard (1992), a pseudo-magical power, predicated on this lineage to Holy Scripture, was attributed to the written word by the early conquerors when performing such rituals of possession or of ‘notification’: Ningún precedente tenía, en cambio, una innovación mayor impuesta por los europeos en la esfera de la comunicación y de la cultura: la valoración extrema, sin antecedente ni en las sociedades más “letradas” (Mesoamérica), de la notación o transcripción gráfica – alfabética – del discurso, especialmente del discurso del poder […] La atribución de poderes poco menos que mágicos a la escritura permite hablar, en un sentido estricto, de su fetichización. Los primeros actos de los conquistadores en las tierras apenas “descubiertas”, en efecto, subrayan el prestigio y el poder que aureola, a los ojos de los europeos, la escritura. (Leinhard 1992: 26) (My emphasis)

Yet, despite the plausibility of Kadir and Leinhard’s observations, we cannot forget that, particularly in the case of ceremonies of territorial possession and the reading of the Requerimiento, the written text depended on its oral performance as a speech act to mobilize its illocutionary force and, hence, its uncontested authority (Rabasa 2000: 11). It would therefore be just as plausible to argue that such rituals were predicated upon documentation, which fetishized, if anything, the European legal (both secular and canonical) institutions which were transmitted through such performances rather than the ritual (scriptural or otherwise) itself (Vidal 1987: 31). The documents which register these early rituals do of course suggest a preference for written law over oral usos y costumbres – just as we saw in the formation of a legislative system based on writing rather than the spoken word in Alfonsine Castile, and in a more sophisticated form, after the advent of printing, at the court of Ferdinand and Isabel. This hardly means attributing ‘magical’ powers to the written word, however, especially when such documents, as we have noted, were designed to be read out loud and authenticated in the presence of a notary. In this same respect, Greenblatt (1991) argues that the scriptural documentation of conquest and colonization demonstrated the extent to which writing had become a reassuring convention and a symbol of familiar cultural structures rather than being regarded fetishistically. The obsessive ‘writing up’ of conquest, particularly as regards these legal formulae (speech acts combined with written documentation) for taking possession of territories, functioned as a means whereby the

168

Companion to Empire

colonizers might keep the threat of radical alterity at bay. In other words, the initial speech acts and written documents of conquest, (the naming of lands, the ritualistic taking possession before a scribe and notary), not only served (in the case primarily of Columbus) to prove the presence and actions of the explorers before their royal patrons, but also served as reassuring signs of the administrative order and bureaucratic formulae (those familiar scriptural and spoken conventions) which had already been established on earlier campaigns in Europe and Africa (Greenblatt 1991: 54). These juridical conventions, served, in effect, to distance these early expeditions from all that was “unsettling, unique and terrible” (ibid.) about the Americas by functioning as metonyms for the order of state bureaucracy. And, most importantly, written documentation was a fundamental vehicle for “the intellectual and organizational structures” (ibid.) which might function as an existential anchor in unknown waters.19 In that sense, although such documents were, by convention, believed to be performed on behalf of an absent sovereign or Pope, and hence, served to invoke royal or holy authority, they were not necessarily thought to carry some other mystical power simply because their written form afforded them this authority in such circumstances. Indeed, the more important issue here is that the focus is not on the means (writing) by which a culturally specific logic is communicated, but it is on the logic (canon and secular law, for instance) itself. If, then, Greenblatt’s thesis would steer us towards an understanding of ritualized scriptural acts of conquest as ‘soothing’ conventions and symbols of the familiar institutions of ‘home’ in the face of unknown seas and territories, we cannot entirely dismiss the notion of an early modern fetishization of the written word, and hence, once again, the possibility that the medium of communication was indeed venerated as much as the cultural logic being communicated. The earlier allusions in this chapter to Christian ‘letter mysticism’ and the centrality of sacred textuality to Christian belief would suggest, at the very least, a certain mystification of the alphabetic written word as a receptacle of divine illumination and bearer of a divine presence. Moreover, the traditional identification of the possession or lack of writing in a culture with corresponding levels of civilization or barbarity again indicates a hyperbolic privileging of alphabetic writing as a symbol of a universal Christian culture. If the written word was thus viewed as a universal system of exchange of meaning, it was

Age of Iron, Age of Writing

169

thereby no less fetishized than gold, the universal measure for commercial exchange and value. Ironically, the most unequivocal example of a European fetishization of alphabetic writing is illustrated in the popular motif of the Amerindian marveling and dumbstruck when first confronted with the written word as if such writing were a form of sorcery or magic. Such representations of native ‘awe’ were invariably a projection of the colonizers’ own ‘magical’ view of their writing system onto American cultures and hence, more of an indication of their own conviction that alphabetic writing should be revered (Logan 1994). While it is accepted that scenes of indigenous ‘marveling’ before the written word did actually take place all over the Americas during the early contact period between Europeans and Amerindians, this topos of the non-European marveling at European writing as if it were a supernatural presence, however, was clearly not a monolithic norm inherent to all colonial encounters or all representations of such encounters (Logan 1994: 422). Although this perception of an indigenous reaction to writing has come to dominate the contemporary lay understanding of such encounters, (precisely because of a continued ethnocentric obsession with western technologies in the modern period), and, although this perception was also common to the representations of such encounters beyond Spanish America, very different reactions were obviously also attested as I previously noted in my reading of the Decades.20 In his discussion of this particular question, León Portilla (2003), for instance, has identified a template for three distinct reactions, which are most commonly found in colonial historiography. Two of these had been inaugurated by Martyr D’Anghiera: first, the story of the indigenous messenger and errand- carrier (usually some kind of food) who, before completing his task succumbs to temptation and eats part of the food entrusted to him, only to be dumbfounded and terrified when reproached by the reader of the message who has discovered the crime by contemplating the ‘magic’ paper proffered to him; secondly, the Amerindian, who, rather than being surprised and even less frightened by writing, is simply amazed that the Spanish have a writing system which performs the same operations as that of his own culture and hence, a calm familiarity with the concept of writing; and finally, the apparent disdainful rejection of writing as an incomprehensible system that does not ‘speak’.21 As far as the last

170

Companion to Empire

image is concerned, León Portilla might have added that the indigenous rejection of alphabetic writing could at times take on an even more disdainful form, precisely when indigenous scribes adopted alphabetic writing themselves to narrate their versions of the conquest in their own languages. In the sixteenth century play, the Tragedia del fin de Atahualpa, from Colonial Peru for instance, and originally composed in alphabetized Quechua, alphabetic writing is ridiculed as a nonsensical semiotic system, which symbolizes the lack of intercultural understanding between Christian and Inca cultures (Chang-Rodríguez 1994). This then is hardly the story of a material sign-carrier that overawes superstitious peoples without writing. If the aboriginal peoples of the Americas had no homogenous series of reactions to alphabetic writing and certainly, were not overawed by its existence, the Christian invaders did not exhibit a uniform response to the non-alphabetic writing systems they found in the Americas either. How the Christians reacted to specifically Mesoamerican sign-carriers and how, on the other hand, Mesoamericans employed the imported alphabetic writing system, are the questions to which I will now turn.

Age of Iron, Age of Writing

171

Notes 1

Notable milestones in the debate over the stature of the vernacular are of course Juan de Valdés’ Diálogo de la lengua (1533) and the prologue to Cristóbal de Villalón’s Gramática castellana (1558), both of which were amongst the most renowned critiques of Nebrija’s vernacular grammar. 2 See also Read (1977) and Woolard (2002) on the relics and lead books (plomos) of Sacromonte which gave rise to López Madera’s claims. 3 Contrary to popular belief the analogies with imperial Latin began from a false premise anyway: the ancient Romans did not in fact impose Latin on the peoples they conquered (Herman 1997: 10). The Romans had no calculated policy of linguistic conquest to enhance material conquest and it is for this reason that in large expanses of the former Roman empire bilingualism was the norm, and that is also why languages which pre-existed imperial subjugation to Rome continued to be spoken (Ostler 2005). 4 On language policies in the Americas, see the archival documentation provided for the whole colonial period compiled by Francisco de Solano (1991). See also historians of the language and of language policies in the Americas like Heath (1972), Moreno de Alba (1988), and Acevedo (2000). 5 The Latin text reproduced here is taken from the Latin/Italian edition of the De Orbe Novo Decades prepared by Mazzacane and Magioncalda (2005). 6 On the other hand, even when the Golden Age trope appears to present a condemnation of the corrupt contemporary Iron Age, just as the future noble savage trope of the Enlightenment would appear to condemn notions of cultural progress and favor primordial ‘nature’, there is always a certain ambivalence towards the question of technology underlying such condemnation. This ambivalence reveals itself in the inverted celebration of the fact that Euro-Christian cultural progress might be gauged in comparison to supposedly stagnant ‘primitive’ societies. In this respect, we might recall Derrida’s deconstruction of Lévi-Strauss’ own condemnation of writing in ‘The Writing Lesson’: “Non-European peoples were not only studied as the index to a hidden good Nature, as a native soil recovered, of a “zero degree” with reference to which one could outline the structure, the growth, and above all the degradation of our society and our culture. As always this archaeology is also a teleology and an eschatology; the dream of a full and immediate presence closing history, the transparence and indivision of a parousia, the suppression of contradiction and presence” (Derrida 1976: 114-115). 7 O’Gorman’s (2004 [1958]) discussion of the epistemological distinction between the ‘discovery’ and the a posteriori (interpretative) ‘invention’ of America remains a key text in any scholarly consideration of the earliest chronicles of the Indies. Rabasa’s (1993) reading of O’Gorman’s initial thesis remains equally critical to a more contemporary understanding of ‘invention’ within the context of semiotic and deconstructive approaches to colonial studies. Furthermore, despite his less than positive appraisal of Martyr D’Anghiera’s skills as a historian, O’Gorman views his coining of the term novus orbis in 1493 as evidence of a healthy skepticism regarding Columbus’ belief that he had actually reached the Indies. For O’Gorman, novus orbis is used with vague and ambiguous intentions initially and implied, most probably, the

172

Companion to Empire

notion of “(hitherto) unknown hemisphere” (O’Gorman 1989: 19-35; 2004 [1958]: 91-92). 8 The first three of the eight ‘decades’ (or, individual books made up of ten chapters), which focus solely on Spanish voyages in and around the Caribbean prior to any contact with the scriptural cultures of Mesoamerica, were composed over a period of nineteen years, largely concurrent with the events being described (1493–1516). The first decade, which includes his best-known letters about the events of 1492 written to Ascanio Sforza (Chapters 1 and 2), was composed between 1493 and 1510 and published in an earlier edition in 1511. The second and third decades, dedicated to Pope Leo X, were composed between 1514 and 1516. Nebrija himself oversaw the editing of these first three decades when they were finally published together in 1516. Decades 4 to 8, meanwhile, which deal with the conquest of Mexico, were composed between 1521 and 1525, and were published along with the initial three decades in the edition of 1530. For more detailed information about the different editions of the decades see Mazzacane and Magioncalda’s introduction (2005), and also Cro (2004), particularly for the latter’s discussion of the controversy surrounding the earlier publications of 1504, 1507 and 1511. 9 Martyr D’Anghiera mentions a certain Corrales, appointed to an administrative position in what today is the coast of Panama, who relates how an Amerindian from the inland territories had expressed surprise, not at seeing Corrales writing, but at the fact that the Spaniards too had a writing system: “En quid, et vos libros habetis, en et vos characteres, quibus absentes vos intelligent, assequimini?”. Oravit una ut apertus sibi libellus ostenderetur, putans se litteras patrias visurum: dissimiles reperit esse” [“What, really? So you too have books and characters with which you get absent people to understand you?” And at once he pleaded that the open booklet be shown to him, thinking that he would see his own culture’s letters there: (instead) he found them to be different] (Martyr D’Anghiera 2005: 3. 10. 436). León Portilla identifies this Amerindian who explodes the ‘letterless Indian’ trope, as a “nahua-pipil, tal vez del Huanacastle en lo que hoy es Costa Rica” (2003: 28). 10 For a more detailed discussion of the Christianization of the nature/culture opposition in the work of Las Casas, Vasco de Quiroga and De Bry, see Subirats (1994: 105-117). 11 We should be wary, therefore, of regarding the ‘letterless Indian’ trope as a consistent element in colonial discourse with little or no variation throughout the first century of colonization as might be inferred from Mignolo’s contention that: “The lack of alphabetic writing was one of the most significant trademarks, next to lack of clothing and the eating of human flesh, in the construction of the image of the Amerindians during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (Mignolo 1992: 15). 12 Martyr D’Anghiera’s history has been critiqued by modern historians for its dependence on an epistolary style, for its factual imprecision, and, in general, its lack of historiographical rigor (O’Gorman 1989; Iglesia 1990). While Martyr D’Anghiera claims to abide by the Renaissance historian’s standard purpose of writing history to rescue ‘noble deeds’ from oblivion and, hence, to only record those deeds worthy of memory, he still struck O’Gorman as a writer who demonstrates a certain “indiferencia de hombre de mundo y de cortesano que lo mantiene a distancia de los hechos y sobre todo de los protagonistas” (O’Gorman 1989: 16), and his work, as a work that “respira un ambiente de aristocrático humanismo” (ibid.). It is of course precisely this ‘aristocratic’ air which would perhaps best describe the poetic quality of

Age of Iron, Age of Writing

173

the Decades and, hence, its appeal to a public schooled in the classics and anticipating allusions to classical literary images. 13 That aboriginal cultures might be depicted as essentialized and unchanging entities, moreover, serves to illustrate Fabian’s notion of a ‘denial of coevalness’ (Fabian 1983). In other words, by locating native customs, rituals and practices in an unchanging present, the narrator simultaneously relegates them to his own cultural past so as to re-affirm a hierarchical evolutionary distance between the knower and the known. 14 Martyr D’Anghiera is often celebrated as having influenced the apparent cultural relativism present in Montaigne’s Des Cannibales. Consider the following observation, for instance, as regards the notion that each culture views its own as a universal barometer for judging other peoples and other customs: “Existimat Aethiops nigrum colorem esse candido pulchiorem putat et candidus aliter” […] “tendit genus humanum ad ineptias huiuscemodi regiturque suo sensu quaeque provincia” [The Ethiopian thinks that the color black is more beautiful than white and the white thinks exactly the opposite […] the human race tends towards foolish thoughts of this kind and each region is governed by its own viewpoint] (Martyr D’Anghiera 2005: 4. 7: 498). 15 While the utopian and millennial thrust of the mendicant orders’ evangelization effort in Mesoamerica in the early sixteenth century is best known in this respect, and particularly that of the Franciscans (Phelan 1956; Baudot 1995), we might also make mention of that most utopian of the early figures of the colonial Church, and emblematic exponent of the Christianized Golden Age: Vasco de Quiroga (1470– 1565). As first Bishop of the Mexican state of Michoacán, and, initially, member (oidor) of the Second Audiencia (1531–1535) of New Spain, Quiroga is generally remembered for his passionate opposition to Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, President of the First Audiencia, and, more importantly, for his use of More’s Utopia (1516) as a model for the establishment and administration of Christian-Indian communities (los hospitales de Santa Fe) in both Mexico City, and Michoacán. In his Información en derecho (1535), a work dedicated to condemning the encomenderos of New Spain, Quiroga revealed his belief that More had perfectly understood the customs and condition of indigenous peoples of the Americas as inhabitants of a time and place resembling the ancient Golden Age “en todo eran conformes y semejantes a aquéllas de aquella gente de oro de aquella primera edad dorada” (quoted in Morán Álvarez 1990: 130). More, in fact, in collaboration with Erasmus, had previously translated several of Lucian’s works from Greek into Latin in 1506, thus revealing yet another variation of the Golden Age trope as expounded upon by this late classical satirist. It was both Lucian’s version of the trope as rendered in More and Erasmus’ translation, as well as More’s Utopia that had had such an impact on Quiroga’s understanding of the peoples under his pastoral care: “(estas obras) me hicieron acabar de entender esta a mi ver tan mal entendida cosa de las tierras y gentes, propiedades y calidades de este Nuevo Mundo y edad dorada de entre sus naturales” (ibid.). Quiroga’s Christianized Golden Age, then, rather than functioning simply as a literary artifice by which historians might promote the understanding of America as a scene of primordial nature bereft of civilization, came to be regarded as an epistemological grid through which the pastoral care and organization of newly-converted Amerindian communities might actually be devised.

174

Companion to Empire

16 Indeed, the Bible itself abounds with metaphors of writing: for instance, sacred law of is inscribed in stone and “written with the finger of God” (Exodus 31. 18) while “the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll” (Isaiah 34. 4) and “whosoever was not found in the Book of Life was cast into the pool of fire” (Revelation 20. 15). Furthermore, according to both classical and Christian traditions, even in cases where human writing is disparaged as untrustworthy or as deceptive, such attacks are often coupled with the topos of a metaphorical writing which is the equivalent of truth: the ‘inscription of the soul’. This concept is generally associated with Plato’s use of the term to distinguish between specious and genuine knowledge in the Phaedrus. However, Christian doctrine takes full advantage of this notion so as to underscore the fact that once God is found in the writing of his Book, true illumination and faith will be inscribed in the heart of the believer. In this regard, we might consider Paul’s comparing the Christian congregation to a letter: “Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart “ (Corinthians 2. 3. 3). For other biblical and secular examples of these metaphors, see Curtius (1953: 310-326). 17 While, as I argue, the emergence of the concept of the fetish in the sixteenth century is indeed perfectly feasible, given the concomitant emergence of inter-cultural variations on the values attributed to material objects amongst the different peoples involved in early modern colonial contact zones during the same period, scholars have used the term in relation to a much earlier medieval veneration of the (sacred) written word. Kendrick (1999), for instance, reminds us that medieval scribes used elaborate pictorial designs to transmit the impression of a divine presence in sacred writings. Such aesthetically contrived manuscripts functioned in a fashion similar to that of holy relics in the sense that by endowing alphabetic inscriptions with the power of a living presence, the scribes fetishized verbal and visual representations (Kendrick 1999: 154). We might also note that where relic and written word became unequivocally conflated in the form of an even earlier example of a ‘fetish’, was in the tendency of early Christians to believe that by wearing a small imitation codex of the Gospel around their necks, they would be protected from evil spirits and bad luck (Lane Fox 1994: 126-48). 18 Marx's subsequent incorporation of the fetish image into the religious motifs which characterized his economic and political discourse was a deliberate attempt to stress the ‘mystical’ nature of commodity exchange: “we must have recourse to the mistenveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands” (Marx 1915: 83). 19 My reading (2006) of Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios is germane in this respect. I argue that the former shipwreck uses his report to identify himself with the institutions at ‘home’, and, hence, to forge a rupture between his acculturation to native customs and his restoration as a unified writing subject who is loyal to the imperial ethos. 20 In the French tradition, meanwhile, an illustration of an Amerindian who was hardly ‘awestruck’ by the wonder of European writing is found in the Jesuit, Joseph Lafitau’s Moeurs des Sauvages americains compareés aux moeurs des premiers temps from 1724. Lafitau describes an encounter with an Amerindian woman in New

Age of Iron, Age of Writing

175

France who calmly draws a parallel between the semiotic power of European writing and that of Amerindian fire ‘reading’ or divination through fire (Motsch 2001: 245). In the British tradition, see also Bhabha’s relevant analysis, ‘Signs taken for Wonders’ (1994). Although writing is received as a ‘marvel’ by Indians, the universalism of British colonial discourse is undermined by their refusal to regard the Bible as anything other than a divine gift and hence, a refusal to see it as inextricably linked to European civilization in particular. 21 This last reaction has received much attention as the primordial illustration of how the hackneyed representation of indigenous awe might be well and truly overturned. And the emblematic example is that which took place at Cajamarca in 1532 (MacCormack, 1989; Seed 1991; Subirats 1994, 2004; León Portilla 1996, 2003; Restall 2003). Far from marvelling at Spanish letters, Atahualpa is traditionally portrayed as disdainfully dismissing them. On being offered a copy of the Bible, presumably to show an acceptance of the terms of the Requerimiento, Atahualpa supposedly threw the text to the ground because it did not ‘speak’. Yet Atahualpa’s ‘failure to marvel’ is treated by the earliest Spanish histories as a justification for conquest.

Chapter 5 The Task of Translators Past and Present Yum e mac to ah bouat Mac to ah kin Bin tohol cantic U than uooh lae [O Father, who will be the prophet? Who will be the sun priest Who will correctly interpret The word of these glyphs?]1 The Chilam Balam of Chumayel

One of the most striking sights for visitors to modern-day Mexico City’s Templo Mayor, the archaeological remains of the principal temple of pre-conquest Tenochtitlán, are the three quotations from conquest era works (by Cortés, Motolinía and Bernal Díaz respectively) etched in the wall to the rear of the site on Justo Sierra Street, adjacent to the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso. While each of the three inscriptions presents an epic depiction of the pre-Hispanic city which Cortés encountered prior to the overthrow of Moctezuma, and are hence intended to celebrate the grandeur of pre-Hispanic civilization as well as to underscore the alterity of Nahua religion, it is nevertheless rather conspicuous that that same celebration should be undertaken solely by three representatives of the invading culture (Cortés – the military leader, Motolinía – the paradigmatic symbol of the ‘spiritual conquest’, and Bernal Díaz – the ‘awestruck’ common soldier), and more importantly, in a language and writing system alien to the scribal culture of the pre-conquest Nahua peoples. Of course, those same imposing quotations etched in stone symbolize, by their

178

Companion to Empire

form as much as by their content, the conception of conquest as the (attempted) substitution of one cultural logic for another, and, simultaneously, the nationalistic use of pre-Hispanic ruins to assert the contemporary culture’s transition to a modernity dependent on Castilian literacy. Moreover, we might note that one block southeast of the Templo Mayor, at the intersection of Moneda and Calle Lic. Primo Verdad, stands the Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América. Here, in the small museum that has been set up at the site of the first printing press in post-conquest Mexico, visitors might contemplate a replica of the actual press that was used from 1539 onwards by the first master printer, Juan Pablos (Giovanni Paoli). Under the patronage of the Cromberger family, Pablos began the work of reproducing the cartillas (manuals for learning the alphabet), grammars and dictionaries of indigenous languages, as well as sermons, confessionaries, catechisms and other works, which served the evangelization effort during the post-conquest period (Castañeda 2004: 47). Today the cacophony of competing sales pitches which, on most days, rises up from the throng of street vendors congregated on the pavements around the museum still provides testimony to the power of centuries-old popular oral traditions. Similarly, brightly colored plaques bearing painted glyphs to accompany and explain a selection of Nahuatl street names in the historic city center pay homage – albeit superficial – to pre-Hispanic scriptural traditions. Nevertheless, the close proximity of the printing-press museum and the three enormous stone inscriptions on either side of the Templo Mayor cannot but remind us of the fundamental role that alphabetic writing was intended to play in the colonial process. Indeed, the museum and the inscriptions, located in the ancient heart of the city and in no less than the center of the universe for the Mexica, stand as monumental testimonies to the continued inextricability of letters and the foundations of kingdoms, which we have witnessed in previous chapters. In the Americas, the conflation of the pre-modern study of the origins of the alphabet and the origins of kingdoms would now be transformed: alphabetic writing was to be employed to inscribe ‘new’ subjectivities and ‘new’ overseas territories. It is worth reminding ourselves, however, that alphabetic writing was not simply an instrument facilitating imperial domination and the Christianization of indigenous communities: it obviously also provided the conditions of possibility for the negotiation of colonial subjectivities when the

The Task of Translators Past and Present

179

former tlacuilos of pre-Hispanic writing became masters of the imported writing system. Indeed, throughout the colonial period, Amerindian writers would retrace the ancient origins of indigenous cultures as preserved in oral and American writing systems, and record those same histories in alphabetic form. Bearing this premise in mind, in this chapter I concern myself with gauging the extent to which any early colonial mystification of alphabetic writing was either enhanced or, on the other hand, compromised by the Christians’ encounter with pre-Hispanic writing systems, and also by the indigenous adoption of alphabetic writing during the post-conquest period. From the outset, then, I highlight the fact that Amerindian semiotic traditions provoked a variety of reactions when first encountered, rather than simply being dismissed as diabolic abominations. However, I also ponder the fact that even when indigenous sign-stems were regarded as reliable media of communication, Christian chroniclers often still conceived of indigenous peoples as lacking writing or, at best, integrated them into a universal hierarchy of non-Christian barbaric cultures. Yet, since alphabetization cannot simply be equated with a process of indoctrination, I present a reading of the Anales de Tlatelolco to illustrate the use of the alphabet by Nahua scribes to record nonalphabetic and non-Christian traditions in alphabetic Nahuatl. In my reading, I propose that such texts do not necessarily need to be viewed either as evidence of a straightforward preservation of pre-Hispanic oral and painted traditions, nor, on the other hand, as evidence of the complete erasure of pre-Hispanic modes of conceptualization. Instead, I stress the possibility that such texts provide a transformative after-life for non-Christian signifying practices and knowledge. Although my approach to the text is thereby largely informed by Walter Benjamin’s radical theory of translation, a constant point of reference for framing my arguments here and indeed, throughout the chapter, are the often divergent opinions amongst modern researchers of colonial Latin American ‘literacies’. I make selective use of the theories and methods proposed by such scholars – particularly historians like James Lockhart and the cadre of New Philologists - to both reaffirm the demystification of alphabetic writing undertaken in the previous chapter, and, more importantly, to argue that the decolonizing gesture implicit to scholarly analyses of colonial documentation in Nahuatl might be further enhanced.

180

Companion to Empire

Imagined (Scriptural) Communities In 1516, the same year in which Martyr D’Anghiera published the first three Decades of his De Orbe Novo, Thomas More published his Utopia. Any detailed knowledge or familiarity with the scriptural cultures of the Valley of Mexico was not yet available, but that did not prevent More from imagining Americans as peoples with writing. If More’s ‘cultured’ Utopians were thus diametrically opposed to Martyr D’Anghiera’s ‘letterless’ dwellers of the Golden Age, the commonalities between the two communities were not difficult to discern. Like his Italian counterpart, More made use of familiar rhetorical models from classical textuality and to a lesser extent from the early reports of European navigators, to locate his fantastic society in the Americas. Once again, then, the classical heritage enabled a humanist to inscribe the apparently ‘new’ geographical space in Europe’s past. Indeed, if More’s fictional Portuguese traveler, Raphael Hythlodaeus (‘dispenser of nonsense’) claims to have participated in three of Vespucci’s voyages, thus enabling him to locate the island of Utopia in the recently colonized Americas, the vision of an idealized society derives from a noticeably Greek tradition. Plato’s Republic and Timaeus are the most obvious influences in this respect, and hence, influences which distinguish More’s approach from that of Martyr D’Anghiera, who, as we have seen, was more directly indebted to Herodotus, Ovid, and Virgil. Lucian’s satirical works and the Elder Pliny’s Natural History, however, once again draw attention to the shared textual heritage of both humanists. As in the case of the De Orbe Novo, Utopia is also generally assumed (at least in standard interpretations) to provide the author with a rhetorical platform from which to comment on the moral degeneration of contemporary Christendom. In More’s case in particular, this meant that the information received about the Renaissance ‘New World’ functioned merely as a framework around which to construct his satirical critique of contemporary European society and as a point of reference for reviving well-known ancient conceptions of imagined ideal societies. Utopia, then, despite its own basis in Christian morality, and, despite its impact on Vasco de Quiroga in Mexico, was hardly conceived of as a serious attempt to describe the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas or, indeed, to prescribe the organization of a Christian-Indian kingdom there. On the

The Task of Translators Past and Present

181

contrary, the Americas served as a topical point of departure for More to indulge in a humanistic eulogy of ancient Greek civilization (albeit in a Christianized form revealing More’s apparent admiration for the monastery as an institution and hence, by extension, another reason for its appeal to churchmen like Quiroga) with which the Utopians appear to be identified in the work (Turner 1965; Logan and Adams 1975; Jameson 2005). This ‘Greek’ element, as one of several “representational languages” proffering an interpretative grid for a reading of Utopia, would not only permit More to muse enthusiastically on the Humanists’ rediscovery of ancient textuality and, hence, the “discovery” of an “alternate conceptual universe” (Jameson 2005: 25), but would also most certainly dissuade More from depicting his Utopians as ‘peoples without writing’. Indeed, Utopia, perhaps still the most widely read work of Northern Renaissance Humanism, offers a complex variation on the question of writing and cultural identity. The peoples of this imagined society, while regarding the pursuit of knowledge as a pleasure, also possess an admirable thirst for textual knowledge and, once exposed to European (classical) erudition in ancient Greek by their European visitors, they are amazingly quick to learn whatever is shown to them (More 2003: 71-77). If More’s vision is an ironic inversion of Vespucci’s bestial, cannibalistic savages into lettered aesthetes much like More and his humanist colleagues, he cannot resist celebrating the advent of the printing press as a technology unknown to the Utopians: Utopiensium itaque literis ingenia mire valent ad inventiones artium, quae faciant aliquid ad commodae vitae compendia. Sed duas tamen debent nobis, Chalcographorum et faciendae chartae; nec solis tamen nobis sed sibi quoque bonam eius partem. Nam quum ostenderemus eis libris chartaceis impressas ab Aldo literas, et de chartae faciendae materia, ac literas imprimendi facultate loqueremur aliquid magis quam explicaremus (neque enim quisquam erat nostrum qui alterutram calleret), ipsi statim acutissime coniecerunt rem: et quum ante pellibus, corticibus, ac papyro tantum scriberent, iam chartam ilico facere et literas imprimere tentarunt.2 [With such learning, therefore, the minds of the Utopians are wonderfully capable of inventing those skills which might add some advantage in making life more agreeable. Two such skills, however, they do owe to us: the art of printing and that of making paper; well, not entirely to us, but in good part also to themselves. For, while we were showing them Aldine letters printed in paper books and ‘talked’, rather than explained in detail (since none of us was well-versed in either

182

Companion to Empire skill), about the material from which paper is made, and about the craft of printing letters, the Utopians immediately and most keenly, surmised how the thing might be done. And, while previously they only wrote on vellum, bark, and papyrus, they right then and there tried their hand at making paper and printing letters.]

In effect, mass-produced writing remains a symbol of the difference between the two cultures despite the apparent equivalence between European humanists and Utopians with respect to the possession of writing and textual knowledge. In other words, even though the Utopians are not imagined as ‘letterless’, the practice of writing and the technologies allowing its reproduction are all definitely present as yardsticks by which to measure societal progress. Ultimately, More thereby appears to combine an acknowledgement of the Renaissance celebration of the classical heritage, but without overlooking the contemporary ‘advances’ (the so-called nova reperta) over the ancients in technological terms. The question of writing, whether produced in manuscript or printed form is of such importance as a cultural marker for More that several early editions of the work included an explanation of the Utopian alphabet and a quatrain in the language transcribed into the Roman alphabet. The inclusion of an imaginary alphabet in this first and most emblematic of the literary genre of satiric Utopias was, however, not without precedent as a technique for demonstrating the authenticity of works dealing with foreign travel. The inclusion of alphabets and even phrases in foreign languages was a common feature of medieval and early modern travel narratives and demonstrates the extent to which foreign cultures might be identified by the writing system they employed. As a canonical example, we might consider the fourteenth century work known as The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, which, in several of its manuscript copies, included transcriptions of alphabets from different parts of the known world to which the author had supposedly traveled. Though corrupt and defective, these alphabets are authentic (Greek, Hebrew, Coptic, Saracen, Persian, and Chaldean amongst others) and hence, were intended to convince readers of the seriousness of the materials being treated (Moseley 1983). It is probable, then, that More followed this tradition and invented his own Utopian alphabet so as to give a further veneer of authenticity to his fictional society. Indeed, according to some commentators, in imitating authentic alphabets from previous travel accounts to produce an ‘ideal’ Utopian writing system, More inaugurated his own literary

The Task of Translators Past and Present

183

trend (Firmage 1994: 226). He thereby revealed, not only the Humanists’ contemporaneous preoccupation with the actual forms of material graphemes in an age in which ancient textuality could now be reproduced in multiple copies after the advent of the printing press, but perhaps also a reflection of the centuries-old desire to invent an ‘ideal’ universal language.3 Given the fact that Europeans still had little definitive knowledge about the scriptural cultures of Mesoamerica and, quite simply, as we have seen, because the Americas serve as a convenient rhetorical vehicle by which More might ponder socio-political and cultural questions with, as yet, little direct relation to the Christianization of Mesoamerica, we would be hard-pressed to argue that Utopia reflects a eurocentric commentary on the encounter between a Renaissance culture of letters and the non-alphabetic scribal cultures of the Americas. Having said that, there is certainly no doubt that More’s meditation on a Utopian writing system and the absence of print technology to enhance its reproduction reflects the contemporaneous belief that non-Christian cultures might be identified by the writing system they kept. It also pre-empts the conviction that pagan cultures might be evaluated by their ability to assimilate European scriptural production and technologies, and by extension, their ability to convert to the religious doctrine identified with that same production. In this respect, it is tempting to draw an analogy between the depiction of the Utopians as ‘quick learners’ with an insatiable desire for knowledge, and the paternalistic depictions of Nahua ‘mechanical skills’ which would come to characterize standard ethnographies by mendicant missionaries in early colonial New Spain. For instance, we might recall Motolinía’s reaction to the emergence of alphabetic literacy amongst select indigenous translators and scribes in 1541: (Los indios) Deprendieron a leer brevemente, así en romance como en latín, y de tirado y letra de mano. Apenas hay carta en su lengua, de muchas que unos a otros se escriben, que como los mensajeros son baratos, andan bien espesas: todos las saben leer, hasta los que ha poco se comenzaron a enseñar. Escribir se enseñaron en breve tiempo, porque en pocos días que escriben luego contrahacen la materia que les dan sus maestros, y si el maestro les muda otra forma de escribir, como es cosa muy común que diversos hombres hacen diversas formas de letras, luego ellos también mudan la letra y la hacen de la forma que les da su maestro. (Motolinía 2001: 259–60)

184

Companion to Empire

With this example, we are reminded most immediately of the Utopians adapting to writing and printing on paper. The ability to learn was stressed by missionaries like Motolinía with respect to Amerindians, however, so as to ‘excuse’ their perceived lack of civilization in other areas and, more importantly, to stress their capacity for cultural and religious conversion before their critics. In effect, although Motolinía’s admiration is intended to deflect the charges of sub-human barbarism from sixteenth century antiprimitivists, his own utopian primitivism recalls the dehumanizing scriptural image of tabulae rasae or malleable ‘wax’. Letters, Characters and Hieroglyphics If Thomas More, the quintessential man of Northern Renaissance letters, could imagine American writing prior to the arrival of Spanish forces in the Valley of Mexico, it would be the lay and clerical members of the earliest military expeditions to the region who would first come into contact with actual Mexican scriptural traditions. These non-alphabetic writing systems caused a combination of repulsion, consternation, wonder, and fascination, but also of somber acceptance as culturally specific sign carriers. Military leaders like Cortés would be the first to send examples of pictorial codices back to the Castilian court as exotic curiosities and would attempt to describe the culturally specific utility of the codices in his official reports. These reports appear to confirm that the Christians accepted codices devoted to non-religious/idolatrous representation, such as the recording of history, land distribution and tribute payments, as reliable sources of information. Cummins (1995: 153-158), for instance, cites the 1531 case in which Cortés’ lawyer made use of pictographic evidence to defend his rights against the members of the First Audience of Mexico who laid claim to the territories that had been ‘granted’ to him years before by the local native nobility of Huejotzingo. We might add that this self-interested trust in indigenous modes of expression on Cortés’ part had already manifested itself in his early narration of the conquest of Mexico. In this respect, we might consider Cortés’ Second Letter (1522) as a canonical example, even though, at least initially, what we are most struck by are the author’s constant references to his own writing rather than any demonstration

The Task of Translators Past and Present

185

of interest in Nahua sign systems. What I intend here is that, rather than condemning the lack of alphabetic writing amongst the Nahua, Cortés’ primary preoccupation appears to be to demonstrate his having followed the stylistic norms associated with the composition of an official report (carta de relación): Y a su embajada le respondí que si en mi mano fuera volverme que yo lo hiciera por facer placer a Muteeçuma, pero que yo había venido en esta tierra por mandado de Vuestra Magestad y que de la prencipal cosa que della me mandó le hiciese relación fue del dicho Muteeçuma y aquella su grand cibdad, de la cual y dél había mucho tiempo que Vuestra Alteza tenía noticia; y que le dijesen de mi parte que le rogaba que mi ida a le ver tuviese por bien, porque della a su persona ni tierra ningún daño, antes pro, se le había de seguir; y que después que yo le viese, si fuese su voluntad todavía de no me tener en su compañía que yo me volvería. (Cortés 1993: 202)

In that sense, Cortés is consistent in his self-referential allusions to his own writing and in his appeals to other documents on which the validity of his report depends. Not only does Cortés mention ad nauseam that he read out the Requerimiento at all times when it was duly required and that other major events of engagement or of surrender were recorded in the presence of a notary, but on several occasions, as in the extract above, he also declares that it was essential for him to be there, in Mexican territory, on the verge of conquest, to write a report about Moctezuma and his possessions for Charles V, that is, the very report before his reader. In effect, the letter assumes the form of a meta-writing, or a text which alludes to its own condition as a scriptural convention.4 Cortés does eventually interrupt his apparent concern with his own scriptural formulae to comment on indigenous sign systems. Moreover, when he alludes to Nahua modes of representation, it is in a manner that coolly confirms the reliability of native sources and thus, presumably, serves his attempts to underscore the grandeur and sophistication of the culture, which is to fall under the sway of Christian rule. In the case, for instance, of utilitarian texts like the Matrícula de tributes 5, Cortés expresses a certain fascination with the accuracy of the ‘exotic’ script despite its being drawn up with ‘characters’ and ‘figures’ rather than letters: “Y había cuenta y razón de lo que cada uno era obligado a dar, porque tienen carateres y figuras escriptas en el papel que facen por donde se entienden” (Cortés 1993: 243). This acceptance of indigenous material sign-

186

Companion to Empire

carriers for such purposes would of course be reiterated by the bestknown official chroniclers of conquest (Martyr D’Anghiera, López de Gómara, Fernández de Oviedo, Cervantes de Salazar, Bernal Díaz, for example) but usually within the context of a hierarchy of writing systems at the apex of which alphabetic writing was obviously the most privileged. In this respect, it is also relevant to note Cortés’ clear satisfaction with the map-making capabilities of the Nahua when he pushes them for strategic territorial knowledge of lands under Moctezuma’s sway: el (Moctezuma) me respondió que […] me faría pintar toda la costa y ancones y ríos della, y que inviase yo españoles a los ver y que él me daría quién los guiase y fuese con ellos. Y ansi lo hizo, y otro día me trujeron figurada en un paño toda la costa. (Cortés 1993: 222)

Of course, Cortés’ praise for and trust in indigenous modes of representation served him in his attempts to guarantee the authenticity of the strategic information he was supposedly providing for future conquest and administration of Nahua territories. It would obviously not serve his cause were he to denigrate and dismiss indigenous representation as nonsensical. In effect, Cortés thereby ‘translates’ non-alphabetic indigenous knowledge into sources of information conducive to his own circumscription as an indispensable purveyor of such information for the Crown’s imperial policies and to his efforts to prove the veracity of his account. Consequently, we might view this transference of indigenous knowledge to alphabetic writing as a template for a more generalized attempt to ‘translate’ Amerindian cultures over the coming decades, thus confirming the primordial place of such writing as the dominant mode for signifying postconquest reality. The Nahuas’ own writing system consisted of a complex combination of pictographic, ideographic, logographic and partially phonetic signs (León Portilla 1961; Brotherston 1992; Galarza 1992; Gruzinski 1988, 1992; Lockhart 1992; Hill Boone 2000; Stone 2004). While it was not generally employed for transcribing complete spoken utterances as in the case of early Mayan writing, and hence, functioned as an aide de memoire for an embellished oral accompaniment, the early post-conquest Nahua scribes had no trouble in recognizing the relationship between alphabetic writing and the inscription of individual spoken words. Indeed, alphabetic script was viewed as ana-

The Task of Translators Past and Present

187

logous to the writing systems already in use in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, and hence, as I shall go on to discuss further, was adopted without much fuss (Lockhart 1992). Similarly, despite an apparent privileging of alphabetic writing, in practice colonial missionaries viewed the pictorial images in indigenous codices as analogous to European uses of illustration and hence, as a semiotic medium common to both cultures (Cummins 1995). In fact, following the Council of Trent, Counter-Reformation policy would incline even more emphatically towards the use of images in the propagation of catholic doctrine and as a result attitudes towards pictographic writing and images tout court became even more favorable (Grafton 1997). The initial reaction of Renaissance chroniclers of the conquest, however, was to inaugurate the tendency to compare Mesoamerican glyphs to the familiar, and yet ‘mysterious’ hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt. The same Martyr D’Anghiera, who had disseminated the tropes of the bookless Golden Age, of the Amerindian marveling at writing and also, on the other hand, of the Amerindian claiming a calm familiarity with writing as a practice, was also among the first historians to make this Egyptian analogy. During the conquest of Mexico, he had been amongst the first members of court to gain access to the examples of Mexican codices and maps which were to reach Castile during the same period.6 His exposure to these cultural ‘trophies’ amongst the war booty enabled him to disseminate a cluster of stereotypical impressions, which would be repeated in conquest histories for years to come: sunt characteres a nostris valde dissimiles, taxillis, hamis, laqueis, limis stellisque ac formis alterius modi, lineatim exarati more nostro. Aegyptias fere formas aemulantur: interlineatim hominum animaliumque species, regum praecipue ac procerum depingunt. (Martyr D’Anghiera 2005: 4. 8. 9) [Their characters are very different from ours in the shape of dice, round links, square panels, lines, stars and other forms. They inscribe them in straight lines as we do, however. They almost resemble Egyptian writing forms: they depict images of animals and men in straight lines, and especially images of their kings and nobles.] Libros esse puto characteresque illos ac imagines aliud aliquod significare, cum Romae viderim in obeliscis eiusmodi res, quae pro litteris habebantur legamusque Chaldaeorum fuisse quondam eum scribendi modum. (5. 10. 63)

188

Companion to Empire [I think that these are books whose characters and images have some meaning or other; since, on the obelisks in Rome, I have seen signs of this kind which used to be regarded as letters and since we read that this was once the writing system of the Chaldeans.]

While Mesoamerican scripts were thus often admiringly compared to ancient hieroglyphics, the fact that they were not employed to represent extended spoken utterances with word for word correspondence, meant that their status as writing was often doubted, and, as in the case of the second of the preceding extracts, had to be legitimated. Ironically, then, because Mesoamerican scripts were evaluated from within a hierarchy of world writing systems and, because they were described using the culturally-specific understandings of ‘book’ and ‘writing’, Amerindian cultures remained ‘peoples without writing’ in the minds of the chroniclers of conquest histories (Pagden 1982; Pellerey 1992; Eco 1995; Mignolo 1995; Cañizares Esguerra 2001): No se han hallado letras hasta hoy en las Indias, que no es pequeña consideración; solamente hay en Nueva España una especie de figuras que sirven de letras, con las cuales anotan y entienden toda cosa cualquiera y conservan el recuerdo y antigüedades. Se asemejan mucho a los jeroglíficos de Egipto, mas no encubren tanto el sentido, según he oído; aunque ni debe ni puede ser menos. Estas figuras que usan los mexicanos como letras son grandes; y así ocupan mucho. Las tallan en piedra y madera; las pintan en paredes, y en papel que hacen de algodón y hojas de metl. Los libros son grandes, cogidos como pieza de paño, y escritos por ambos lados; los hay también arrollados como piezas de jerga. (López de Gómara 1954: 372)

Like Martyr D’Anghiera before him, López de Gómara also exemplifies here how certain currents of Renaissance humanism regarded Egyptian hieroglyphics as a receptacle of arcane wisdom that could not be preserved in other sign systems.7 Clearly, such appraisals of hieroglyphics would appear to jeopardize the notion that the period was dominated by a faith in the supreme power of alphabetic writing. For, while one might argue that certain strands of Renaissance thought were characterized by a fascination with the written word and its mass reproduction, the avid preoccupation with pictorial symbolism in the same period must also be taken into account. Indeed, Marsilio Ficino’s fifteenth century Latin translation of the ancient books in the hermetic tradition had consolidated the popularity of ‘enigmatic’ or ‘symbolic’ hieroglyphics. This reflected the equally popular con-

The Task of Translators Past and Present

189

temporary belief that painted symbols were superior to both speech and writing since they were not identified with any one particular language.8 In effect then, non-Christian scripts and sign systems, including indigenous ‘figures’ were regarded as competent for registering certain kinds of information, and, in the case of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, even regarded as superior for encoding esoteric forms of knowledge. Indeed, in the preceding quotation, López de Gómara actually suggests that Mesoamerican writing was equally capable of encoding such knowledge, and doubts the accepted wisdom that Mesoamerican pictographs were easier to decipher than hieroglyphics. For Mesoamerican pictographs were generally thought to be inferior precisely because they were pictographic, and therefore appeared to merely represent individuals, events and objects quite transparently. Hieroglyphs, meanwhile, were supposedly superior due to their capacity for concealing arcane knowledge, and the difficulty of their decipherment (Dieckmann 1957; Pellerey 1992; Eco 1995; Drucker 1995). We should also note that the Renaissance witnessed a resurgence of interest in the work of Raimundo Lull, the thirteenth century Majorcan philosopher, and particularly in his attempts to devise a universal sign system based on alphabetic letters and numbers which might be comprehensible to all peoples and cultures (Eco 1995: 54). This neo-Lullism proved to be a major influence on the period’s preoccupation with steganographies and the development of techniques for composing coded messages, which might be used for political or military ends. Beyond this utilitarian use of letters, the humanists also spearheaded the trend towards Christian Kabbalism in the hope of discovering the mathematical rules governing the structure of the universe. For, if, as thirteenth century Iberian Kabbalists had argued, the universe itself had been created by formulaic combinations of Hebrew letters and numbers, the fifteenth and sixteenth century Christian Kabbalists believed that a mastery of this perfect language would allow them to penetrate the secrets of nature. Clearly then, if this was a period in which non-alphabetic sign-systems were revered for their enigmatic qualities, there is no doubt that alphabetic letters still held a privileged place in intellectual circles for the same reason. Having said that, I would be wary of the contention that this privileged place meant a generalized inversion of classical phonocentrism, that is, the inversion of the ancient preference for speech

190

Companion to Empire

over writing which dated back at least to Plato’s Phaedrus (Mignolo 1995: 46; 118). I would argue against this notion of a reversal of phonocentrism simply because Renaissance language theorists from Nebrija to Acosta continued the Aristotelian tendency to attribute the superiority of alphabetic writing over other forms of inscription precisely to the fact that it supposedly reproduced the spoken word immediately.9 My main point here, however, is simply that the resurgence of an early modern interest in Lullism, the Kabbala and steganographies would suggest an equal preoccupation with the knowledges accessible through alphabetic scripts and complex mathematically-formulated combinations of alphabetic letters as with hieroglyphics and other non-alphabetic (pictorial) sign systems.10 Missionary-Grammarians Beyond the standardized, but superficial impressions of Mesoamerican writing systems by official chroniclers, the scholarly engagement of those mendicant friars entrusted with alphabetizing indigenous languages obviously led to a far more profound appreciation and understanding of those same systems. In that same respect, it is important to recall that the early missionaries who destroyed indigenous codices made a distinction between those they considered to be idolatrous (calendars, books of feast days, divination and prophecy) and those regarded as ‘safe’ and hence, reliable modes of expression (annals and books of tribute) (Mignolo 1995; León Portilla 1996; Hill Boone 2000). The fact that the second of these two groups were not destroyed suggests that missionary zeal was stirred, not necessarily by a preference for alphabetic over non-alphabetic modes of expression, but more by the conviction that non-Christian (diabolic) message carriers in any form were a threat to the evangelization effort (Cañizares Esguerra 2001). That this was in fact the case is generally supported by Motolinía’s classification of Nahua books into five separate categories and his subsequent preference for annals or year-count histories: De todos éstos, del uno, que es el primero, se puede dar crédito, porque habla la verdad, que aunque bárbaros y sin letras, mucha orden tenían en contar los tiempos, días, semanas, meses y años, y fiestas, como adelante parecerá. (Motolinía 2001: 57)11

The Task of Translators Past and Present

191

Of course, it is also in grammars of indigenous languages and proto-ethnographic works that the topos of the ‘letterless Indian’ appears in its most consistent form. These were both colonial genres in which the confrontation between alphabetic and non-alphabetic cultures must unavoidably become a problematic to be overcome in the methodology chosen by the (alphabetic) ethnographer or missionary-grammarian. For instance, the pioneering Franciscan linguist, Fray Andrés de Olmos, would complain in 1547 that the first grammar of alphabetized Nahuatl, his Arte de la lengua mexicana, had been successfully completed, but not without the difficulty necessarily brought about by attempting to alphabetize a language which had no comparable alphabetic tradition: “Mayormente en cosa tan ardua como esta, que es querer poner cimiento sin cimiento de escriptura en una tan estraña lengua y tan abundosa en su manera y intricada” (Olmos 2002: 9). In other words, while we can argue that Olmos thereby privileges alphabetic writing by refusing to regard Mesoamerican writing as writing it is also clear that Olmos is simply stressing the difficulty of alphabetizing a spoken language that had never been registered with a word for word equivalency and hence, making the relatively simple task of translating from one alphabetic language to another an impossibility. Yet, if Olmos is most identified with the inception of the Franciscan efforts to alphabetize indigenous languages, it is in the monumental work of fellow Franciscan, Bernardino de Sahagún (1499 – 1590), that a positive appraisal of Mesoamerican representational traditions would appear to confirm their reliability as sources of information and to question the trope of the ‘letterless Indian’. In the prologues and various appendices that accompany the Florentine Codex (1578 – 80) Sahagún is unequivocal in recognizing the reliability of indigenous modes of expression as sources of historical knowledge, which might then be transcribed into alphabetic form (Klor de Alva 1988, 1989; Mignolo 1995; Cañizares Esguerra 2001). As far as Amerindian sources are concerned, Sahagún tells his readers that the origins of the Nahua can be ascertained through analysis of their own ‘paintings’: En lo que toca a la antigüedad de esta gente, tiénese por averiguado que ha más de dos mil años que habitan en esta tierra que agora se llama la Nueva España. Porque por sus pinturas antiguas hay noticia que aquella famosa ciudad que se

192

Companion to Empire llamó Tulla ha ya mil años o muy cerca de ellos que fue destruida. (Sahagún 1997: Libro 1. Prólogo, 3)

In other words, Sahagún regards the non-alphabetic modes of representation as guaranteeing the validity of this historical information.12 Curiously, however, Sahagún then asserts that his work should not be compared to Calepino's multi-lingual dictionary, given the fact that the alphabetic auctores available to Calepino were clearly not an option in his case, “por no haver letras ni escriptura entre esta gente” (ibid.). Yet, at the same time, since he trusts in the authority of his non-alphabetic sources, he believes he can claim as much authority for the contents of his work as if it were a work sanctioned by recognized textual authorities: hallarse han también en ella (la obra) todas las maneras de hablar y todos los vocablos que esta lengua usa, tan bien autorizados y ciertos, como lo que escrivió Vergilio y Cicerón, y los demás autores de la lengua Latina. (Libro 1. Prólogo, 67)

In effect, Sahagún claims textual auctoritas not just for the work he has produced in writing, but also for the oral and painted sources he has used as if they too were comparable to classical written auctores. Bearing this ambivalence in mind, we might also note that, having described the Nahua as people without writing and letters, Sahagún proceeds to employ the terms ‘books’ and ‘writing’ for those same modes of expression and to underscore his own willingness to employ even those books once identified with Satanic practices to serve his philological ends: De estos libros y escrituras, los más de ellos se quemaron al tiempo que se destruyeron las otras idolatrías, pero no dexaron de quedar muchas ascondidas que las hemos visto, y aún se guardan, por donde hemos entendido sus antigüallas. (Sahagún 1997: Libro 10. 32. 583)

While I would agree with Mignolo's thesis (1995) that this kind of labeling of indigenous modes of expression under the rubric of auctores just like the common tendency in colonial (ethno-) historiography to classify them in terms of libros and escritura and glyphs as caracteres or figuras, is yet another illustration of how indigenous cultural practices were simply translated into Euro-Christian categories of knowledge, we cannot overlook the fact that Sahagún's

The Task of Translators Past and Present

193

tendency to vacillate between considering indigenous modes of expression as textual auctores (and, of course, as reliable sources of historical knowledge) also represents a slippage in the discourse of lack and the privileging of letters (Cañizares Esguerra 2001). Indeed, as in the case of the previous examples, we can extrapolate from Sahagún's comments that the ‘lack’ of letters as a symbol of cultural inferiority in a wider colonial ‘discourse of lack’, though a constant discursive trope in certain colonial genres, did not always correspond to the employment of indigenous writing in practice. We can also infer that the sixteenth century conflict between literacies heightened consciousness about the production of meaning in culturally-specific sign systems and even made ethno-historians like Sahagún actually uncertain about the notion that writing should be exclusively associated with letters.13 In that sense, the privileging of alphabetic writing as the master signifying practice might appear to have been destabilized: for the fact remains that if non-alphabetic sources were deemed trustworthy as brute source materials to be transformed into knowledge by a productive writing practice, the discursive conception of the Amerindian as ‘lacking’ history, becomes seriously compromised. At the same time, we should remember that the fact that oral traditions and pictographic histories were transcribed alphabetically in the first place in works like Sahagún's still constituted an attempt to reinstate the superiority of the alphabetic word in a hierarchy of modes of expression. Indeed, in this regard, we might recall that approximately a decade after Sahagún had completed his Florentine Codex, another seminal colonial work which demonstrated this concern with culturally-specific writing systems was published: the Jesuit José De Acosta’s phenomenally successful Historia natural y moral de las Indias from 1590. In Acosta’s history we are not simply presented with an opposition between ‘peoples with’ and peoples without writing’, however, but with a hierarchical classification of writing systems from those parts of the world recently visited by the Jesuit order. In Book 6, for example, while praising American signsystems for their ingenuity, Acosta simply re-affirms the belief that Amerindian sign-systems cannot be regarded as writing because they are non-alphabetic. He is adamant, however, that once Amerindians adopt alphabetic writing, they will be more knowledgeable than any Chinese wise man with his own cumbersome system of inscription:

194

Companion to Empire sabe más un indio del Pirú o de México, que ha aprendido a leer y escrebir, que el más sabio mandarín de ellos (los chinos); pues el indio, con veinte y cuatro letras que escrebir y juntar, escrebirá y leerá todos cuantos vocablos hay en el mundo. (Acosta 1962: 288) 14

Such a paternalistic view of indigenous abilities to mimic the technologies of their colonial masters confirms, as I have previously noted, that the alphabetization of indigenous languages and the teaching of the alphabet to indigenous acolytes reflected the desire to assimilate non-Europeans to the customs, moral code and cultural logic of a religion deriving its authority from sacred alphabetic texts. Bearing this premise in mind, we might re-consider the contention that the alphabetization of indigenous languages was not somehow external to imperial expansion, but a practice which functioned according to the very logic and ethos of a wider colonial process since it led, ultimately, to the attempted “destrucción de un orden discursivo y su sustitución por otro, que lo vuelve dependiente de una situación social, tecno-económica e historia exterior” (Subirats 1994: 322-3). In other words, alphabetization, or the grammaticalization of Amerindian languages, does not simply represent a striking metaphor for material colonization, but functions metonymically as an indispensable element within the very process of the Euro-Christian colonization of indigenous consciousness. Alphabetization could thereby conflate the theological principle of conversion (‘translation’) and the logic of subjectification internal to such conversion (Subirats 1994: 322). That this was in fact the case is symbolized most overtly by the employment of Latin, the language of the Church and thus of universal empire, as the metalanguage for classifying Amerindian languages according to equally universal grammatical categories. Indeed, it is important to remember here that Nebrija’s Introductiones Latinae and his Latin–Castilian dictionaries were overwhelmingly favored as models for missionaries writing grammars and vocabularies of American languages (Bustamante García 1992; Briesemeister 1997; Suárez Roca 2000). Of course, this meant that missionary-grammarians would follow Nebrija’s precedent by adapting their grammars to the idiosyncrasies of vernacular languages, and hence, would recognize the inadequacy of certain Latinate categories just as Nebrija had done when describing the grammar of Castilian. Yet, the fact remains that the grammaticalization of an indigenous language according to the basic precepts offered by

The Task of Translators Past and Present

195

Latinate grammatical categories, was, in the minds of missionaries schooled in Renaissance humanism, no less than a means for dignifying those same languages and ridding them of their ‘barbarity’ (Suárez Roca 2000: 77). By extension, given the inextricable link between the grammaticalization of these languages and the evangelization of pagan communities, we can better appreciate how the ‘latinization’ of ‘barbarous tongues’ might serve as a metonym for the conversion of those same communities. Ultimately, we should therefore remain aware that, whether nonalphabetic indigenous sources were trusted or not, and whether the sixteenth century colony witnessed the production of hybrid textualities (pictographs juxtaposed with alphabetic texts in postconquest codices, for example) or not, the fact remains that the aim of early colonial ethno-historians and missionary-grammarians was to make indigenous modes of expression legible in a writing system identified with alien modes of linguistic classification and cultural logic.15 Whether the alphabetic transcription of indigenous traditions automatically resulted in the transformation of pre-Hispanic modes of conceptualization is, however, a question to which I will now turn as I consider some of the earliest textual production in alphabetic Nahuatl. Alphabetic Nahuatl: The Task of Transcription In recent years, one of the trends in the scholarship dealing with colonial Mexico has been to emphasize the fundamental importance of original alphabetic documentation in Nahuatl for a more balanced understanding of post-conquest cultural production. In that sense, unlike some of their contemporaries, these historians have hardly been interested in condemning the alphabetization of Amerindian languages as a form of colonial violence, of challenging logocentrism or questioning the sacrosanct role of the archival document in contemporary historiography. Instead, these historians - identified most closely with the pioneering work of James Lockhart - have striven to employ colonial documentation in Nahuatl as a means whereby the mythic conception of the clash of cultures might be rejected in favor of a more nuanced view of the survival and adaptation of virtually all aspects of pre-Hispanic culture to postconquest reality (Lockhart 1991, 1992, 1993).16 Of particular interest

196

Companion to Empire

in this regard is Lockhart’s contention that both cultures shared analogous rather than incommensurable systems of inscription: That the Spaniards had paper and ink and used them for recordkeeping caused the Mexicans no surprise or puzzlement, for following a centuries-old Mesoamerican practice they had long been doing the same thing, and they quickly made the identification between the two traditions. (Lockhart 1992: 326)

By mastering the alien technology, indigenous scribes and translators demystified any ‘magic’ identified with this culturally specific technology, and any notion of their being confounded by the new writing system. In short, indigenous writers revealed alphabetic writing for what it was: another material sign carrier among many others. Of course, analogous scriptural traditions constitute just one instance of a number of perceived similarities between the two cultures. Lockhart also dismissed a whole series of lay perceptions about the conquest of Mexico as a means for rejecting traditional emphases on the radical incongruence between European and American cultures of the period. Amongst these outdated misconceptions which we might mention are: the notion that the Nahua were shocked out of their wits by the radical alterity of the Spaniards; that the newcomers were considered gods by their ‘superstitious’ and ‘gullible’ hosts; that Moctezuma was a weak and hesitant ruler; that the myth of the return of Quetzalcóatl and eight omens determined responses to the arrival of the Spaniards. Instead, Lockhart (1993) proposed that the only conclusion for the reader of Nahua accounts of the conquest had to be that the communal structure identified with the altepetl (kingdom) determined a response to the arrival of the Spaniards which, rather than suggesting an encounter between gods and mortals or between Old and New Worlds, appeared to point to the understanding of the newcomers as simply another powerful altepetl to be confronted, and, hence, as another community which could be incorporated into their own familiar categories of social organization (Lockhart 1993: 14). In effect, the omens, myths of return and of weak rulers could be shown to be rhetorical elements from a later historical tradition, rather than empirical evidence of the original response to the arrival of the Spaniards (Lockhart 1993: 17-18). Such a reading of Nahua accounts of conquest has allowed readers to challenge both the triumphant depictions of conquest and also the equally trite

The Task of Translators Past and Present

197

conception of the total destruction of indigenous cultures as manifested most emblematically in the monumental work of the nineteenth century Anglo-American historian, William H. Prescott. As well as sixteenth century indigenous histories and, more recently, the Nahuatl annals of the seventeenth century indigenous historian Chimalpahin (Lockhart 2006), the conception of a “New Philology” (1991) has centred on mundane documents in Nahuatl (wills, land grants, petitions, and the títulos primordiales) as opposed to the more overtly literary Nahuatl texts previously compiled by iconic Mexican scholars in the field, the late Ángel María Garibay Kintana and his student, Miguel León Portilla who had both established the whole concept of Nahuatl Studies. In translating this archive of Nahuatl documents into English, the New Philologists have sought to stress, not only the survival of indigenous socio-cultural and economic patterns and structures in the life of the colony, but to reinvent the so-called vencidos as indispensable agents in the postconquest colony by “let[ting] the Nahuas speak” (Lockhart 1993: 1) in their own (written) language: The marvelous and many-dimensional new world of Nahuatl sources, then, is showing us that indigenous structures and patterns survived the conquest on a much more massive scale and for a longer period of time than had seemed the case when we had to judge by the reports of the Spanish alone […] Increasing degrees of contact with the numerically growing and territorially expanding Hispanic population caused successive general waves of indigenous structural adjustment. The Spaniards represented, however, more the fuel than the motor of development. They did not by themselves, either individually or en masse, determine the nature of change: change was a transaction between two groups and two cultures. Indian numbers were as important as Spanish numbers. (Lockhart 1991: 20-21)

Needless to say, the creation of New Philology for such documentation has involved a considerable engagement with traditional historical linguistics. For, having studied Nahuatl documentation of the colonial period and beyond, Lockhart reached a series of conclusions with regard to the evolution of written Nahuatl in the context of its relationship to Castilian. According to his findings, the language might be conceived of as developing in linear fashion through three definitive stages of transformation, determined principally by the gradually increasing contact between Hispanic and Nahua cultures.17 Each stage of linguistic evolution reflects the

198

Companion to Empire

corresponding socio-cultural and economic transformation of the postconquest population, and, more importantly, allows the historian to measure the degree to which pre-Hispanic cultural patterns survived and contributed to the cultural transfers characterizing life in the colony: “Linguistic phenomena prove to be the most sensitive indicator the historical record contains of the extent, nature and trajectory of contact between the two populations” (Lockhart 1992: 261). If Lockhart’s philological work is certainly not unprecedented, and his theories of translation and language change somewhat outmoded, as we shall go on to discuss in greater detail, there is no doubt that his emphasis on cultural adaptation and indigenous survival represents a definitive rupture with previous conceptions of the conquest in terms of essentialized polarities: the so-called victors and the vanquished.18 More importantly, the New Philology presents a demystified understanding of the early period of inter-cultural contact, which, most significantly, subsumes, as we have noted, a demystification of the adoption of alphabetic writing by indigenous writers. The reproduction of sixteenth century texts in indigenous languages also presents the post-colonial critic with the opportunity to further demystify that same alphabetic writing system, and, in the process, to underscore the decolonizing gesture inherent to the reading of such texts. To illustrate that same gesture more concretely, I have chosen to present the following reading of the earliest conquest history written from the Nahua (Tlatelolca) perspective, the Anales de Tlatelolco (1545), and a comparative allusion to Book 12 of the Florentine Codex (1578-80).19 Visual Thinking in Nahuatl Histories While the oldest known (alphabetic) Nahuatl account of the Spanish Conquest, the Anales de Tlatelolco are dedicated specifically to the period of the Spanish Conquest of the Valley of Mexico, they are in fact extracted from a wider history known as the Anales Históricas de la Nación Mexicana which, in a fashion typical to the annals genre, incorporates the conquest period into a historical continuum dating back to the mythical migration of the Mexica from Aztlan. Amongst post-conquest historical genres, pictorial and alphabetic annals were most closely identified with the Mexica. This was primarily because

The Task of Translators Past and Present

199

the use of linear time (rather than place, protagonist or event) as an organizational principle, and presented as a monotonous sequence of year counts, might best symbolize the unbroken line of an ‘imperial’ rule and the continuity of pre-Hispanic culture as a whole beyond (and, needless to say, despite) the period of the Spanish invasion (Hill Boone 1994: 67). Nevertheless, the annals are still essentially local histories. 20 They are local in the sense that they represent the interpretation and recoding of historical events with the bias of a specific altepetl (Hill Boone 2000: 236): av in ixqch cavitl yn ticalivaque aocan monexiti yn tenochcatl yn izq otli y nica y yacacolco yn atizcapa y covatla y nonovalco y xoxoviltitla y tepeyacac ça novia toneiscavil mochiuh y titlatilolca çano yvi yn acalotli moch toneiscavil mochiuh. [And during all this time, while we were being attacked, the Tenochca appeared nowhere on all the roads here in Yacacolco, Atizaapan, Coatlan, Nonoalco, Xoxohuiltitlan, and Tepeyacac. They became the responsibility of the Tlatelolca alone, and likewise the canals all became our exclusive responsibility.] (Lockhart 1993: 262 - 263)

The Anales de Tlatelolco, like Book 12 of the Florentine Codex, are narrated from the specific perspective of the Tlatelolca rather than the Tenochca, (the two altepetls coexisting in Tenochtitlán, but under Tenochca hegemony), and, on several occasions, as in the case of the short extract above, reveal the antipathy and rivalry between the two groups as a factor of apparently much more significance than any bewilderment before the radical alterity of the European invaders during the battle for Tenochtitlan. Traditionally, because of an addendum to the later of the two extant manuscripts of the Anales, the text had been thought to have been composed as early as 1528.21 However, philological analysis of the language used in the history has enabled historians to propose a date of no earlier than 1545 for the older of the two manuscripts (Lockhart 1993: 39).22 Furthermore, it has been hypothesized that a third manuscript, now lost, and quite possibly, a combination of both pictorial and alphabetic representations of accounts preserved in oral tradition, served as a model for the transcriber of the solely alphabetic version of 1545 (Lockhart 1993: 38; Hill Boone 2000: 199). And it is this resonance of oral tradition and visuality as manifested in the earliest Nahuatl transcription that is of interest here. For if, on the one hand, there is no doubt that pictorial modes of representation were

200

Companion to Empire

eventually superseded by the advent of alphabetic textuality, readers can still discern the residue of orality and non-alphabetic sign systems in alphabetic histories composed during the first century after the conquest. In this regard, Hill Boone (2000) has argued that: “Pictographic writing continued after the conquest because visual thinking did” (245).23 While Hill Boone is referring specifically to both the ‘hybrid’ post-conquest codices, which combined pictographic and alphabetic elements, and purely pictorial histories of the same period, I am more interested in how ‘visual thinking’ manifests itself in purely alphabetic texts. The earliest manuscript version of the Anales de Tlatelolco, needless to say, is one such text: Matlactlomey tochtli xiuitl yquitoqz spañoles atla no yquac miquito mexica tloapa . Ce acatl xiuitl ypa quiçato spañoles y tecpatlayacac . nima ye yc vitz yn capita. [In the year of Thirteen Rabbit the Spaniards were seen on the water. It was also when [some] Mexica went to the ocean and died. In the year of One Reed the Spaniards appeared at Tecpantlayacac. Thereupon the Captain came.](Lockhart 1993: 256-7).

The beginning of the Anales is striking for the lack of grammatical complexity, which transmits, quite laconically, the alphabetic transcription of a series of glyphs indicating Nahua year count symbols, and the events which took place during those same years. The fact that the description is indeed so laconic and so close to a ‘skeletal’ rendition of the original pictorial account, without embellishments, would of course support the New Philologists’ rejection of the notion that the arrival of the European invaders produced a sense of bewilderment of earth-shaking proportions amongst the inhabitants of the Valley of Mexico or that their reaction to the violence of the conquest was at all moralizing in tone. On the contrary, the simple style would suggest a certain calm acceptance before yet another historical event in Nahua history. Consequently, just as the transcription attests to the pictorial origins of the text, it also reproduces the mexicanization of the Christians found in earlier images. On the other hand, it is precisely this narrative simplicity in the alphabetic version, which perhaps belies a more nuanced reaction to the events in the (absent) oral narrative that would presumably have accompanied such glyphs. In other words, the direct transcription of painted year count glyphs which were obviously designed to comply

The Task of Translators Past and Present

201

with the requirements of the annals genre (the registering of battles, conquests, natural disasters, the accession to office of rulers, the death of rulers, the founding of cities, the migration of peoples, etc.) is perhaps not the best source for reaching definitive conclusions about indigenous reactions to the invasion. Instead, one would need access to the oral discourse which would have accompanied and expanded upon the guide provided by the year count glyphs. The transcription, therefore, even while it freezes a sequence of pictorial images in the alphabet, it still invokes, albeit by default, the need for the absent oral accompaniment, and thereby, also invokes a secondary orality. In effect, these opening lines from the Anales, as well as the greater part of the text, resemble an aide de memoire between oral realizations. By defying the pretensions of traditional realism in written composition, the text can therefore be understood more as a mnemonic code than as a mimetic reproduction of past events as is the case in realist historiography. The hypothesis that those Nahua accounts of the Conquest which focus primarily on the infamous massacre at the Templo Mayor during the festival of Toxcatl, and the subsequent events, are more accurate representations of Nahua oral traditions and pictorial renditions contemporaneous to the Conquest, appears to be supported by texts like the Anales.24 This of course represents a striking contrast to the best-known accounts, such as the one contained in Book 12 of the Florentine Codex, which embellishes the history by providing detailed descriptions of the sighting of omens and other supernatural occurrences prior to the arrival of the Christians at Tenochtitlán. The Anales text, meanwhile, provides no such mention of any supernatural omens signaling imminent doom, and, after a brief preamble, as we have seen, noting the arrival of the Spaniards, the subsequent and much more significant event for the transcriber is the massacre at the Templo Mayor after Cortés had absented himself from the city to face the threat posed by Pánfilo de Narváez: y cuicoanoua ça pepetlauhtinenca çan isquich yncuechi yxixiuh. ytempilol ycozqui. ymaztaxel ychochol. Y ueuetzonaya ueuentzitzi ymihiyeteco ymayacach yehoa achto quipeualtiqz vnca quimatlatlazqz quitentlatlazque nima ye yc micoa yn isquchti Cuicoanoaya muchinti tlatlataque vnca mique. [While dancing they went bare [of weapons], with only their net cloaks, their turquoise [ornaments], their lip plugs, their necklaces, their forked heron-feather ornaments, their deer’s hooves. The old men who beat the cylindrical drums had their tobacco pots and their rattles. It was them they first attacked; they struck off

202

Companion to Empire their hands and lips. Then all who were dancing, and all who were looking on, died there.] (Lockhart 1993: 256 - 259)

That one of the predominant features of the Mexica scriptural tradition was the attention paid to the description of costume and symbolic possessions which might identify a specific figure, (usually a noble or a divinity) is evident in this description of the massacre.25 The laconic allusion to such elements in the above description corresponds once again to the direct transcription of a series of glyphs. Similarly, when conveying the carnage, which followed, the transcriber alludes bluntly to the body parts (hands, lips), which, presumably, served as metonyms for violent death and could easily be represented pictorially. In effect, the alphabetic transcription here parallels the previous pictorial representation in such a skeletal fashion that the absence of a more elaborate oral narrative accompaniment is again noticeable by its absence. Although Book 12 of the Florentine Codex was obviously a later text (1578-80) and clearly produced by much more overt intervention on the part of Sahagún, the account of the conquest still provides another evocative instance of ‘visual thinking’: Auh un izquican antica tetlatlaçaltiaia in Españoles in teucuitlatl quitemoa amo tle ipan quitta, in chalchivitl, in que-tzalli yoan in xivitl: novian nemia in inxil-la in incuetitlan, in cioatzitzinti. Auh in toquichtin novian nemi in imaxtlatitlan, yoan in incamac. yoan quimanaia, quinpepenaia in Cioa in chipavaque, in Cuztic innacaio in cuztique. Auh in cequintin cioa inic motetlaçaltiaia, miçoquivique, yoan tatapatli in quimocuetiq tzotzomatli in quimovipiltique, çan moch tzotzomatli in intech quitlalique. Auh no cequintin pepenaloque in toquichtin iehoantin in chicaoaque in iniolloco oquichtin yoa in quin telpupuchtotonti in quinti-tlanizque, in intitlanvan iezque, in moteneoa intlamacazcaoan: cequintin nima quincamatlatiq cequintin quincamaicuiloque: cequintin quintenicuiloque. [And along every stretch [of road] the Spaniards took things from people by

The Task of Translators Past and Present

203

force. They were looking for gold; they cared nothing for green-stone, precious feathers or turquoise. They looked everywhere with the women, on their abdomens, under their skirts. And they looked everywhere with the men, under their loincloths and in their mouths. And [the Spaniards] took, picked out the beautiful women, with yellow bodies. And how some women got loose was that they covered their faces with mud and put on ragged blouses and skirts, clothing themselves all in rags. And some men were picked out, those who were strong and in the prime of life, and those who were barely youths, to run errands for them and to be their errand boys, called their tlamacazque [priests, acolytes]. Then they burned some of them on the mouth [branded them]; some they branded on the cheeks, some on the mouth.] (Lockhart 1993: 248)

Even if the preceding quotation is much more of a narrative description of the terror which followed the surrender of the city, and hence, most probably derives from memorized oral tradition, the striking visual imagery of the piece would not rule out the possibility that what we are also witnessing here consists, at least in part, of another concise and yet, at the same time, evocative, description of a series of glyphs indicating the body parts (abdomens, mouths, genitalia) violated in the feverish quest for gold. That this was in fact the case is underscored by the final allusion to burning of mouths and cheeks. No attempt is made to offer any elaboration on this image; there is no explanation for the burning except the one implicit to the English translation of ‘branding’. In short, this last line cannot but strike us as a blunt alphabetic rendition of a harrowing painted image of a face burnt with branding irons: the brutal ‘writing’ of slavery which requires few skills of decipherment to be understood as such. While historians might insist that Nahua histories of the conquest (precisely like those found here in the Florentine Codex and in the Anales de Tlatelolco) are characterized by the lack of a moralizing perspective on atrocities and acts of cruelty, and hence, instead, by an unwavering acceptance of violent events (Lockhart 1993: 15), the reader will still wonder why such evocative scenes of the violence of

204

Companion to Empire

conquest were retained at all in oral and pictorial traditions? Indeed, once again, the reader will also surely wonder whether the wider oral tradition from which histories like this were extracted to be fixed by the alphabet, would have included details, which were indeed moralizing. In general, then, we might suggest that once alphabetic transcriptions decontextualize indigenous modes of expression from their original sociocultural milieu and transpose them into a code associated with distinct social conditions, the result is obviously a text, which “lose[s] substance” (Gruzinski 1988: 53). However, as we have seen in the case of the Anales and the Florentine Codex, this loss of semantic substance, rather than being viewed as a metaphorical, not to mention stereotypical, eclipse of orality by literacy, might instead be viewed as invoking a secondary orality to make the histories complete. Alphabetic writing is thus reduced to a series of black signifiers, which document, but do not transmit the whole story as conceived and perceived by indigenous modes of expression. In effect, this reading of alphabetized Nahuatl histories as receptacles for a conflation of writing and oral traditions serves, like the New Philologists’ insistence on the comfortable adaptation of alphabetic writing by the Nahua, to avoid any privileging of the alphabetic word and ultimately to reveal the constructed nature of the literacy/orality binary. On the other hand, we might consider the fact that texts like the Anales encourage us to focus on the process of transcription rather than on the communication of the meaning of an original version as we might when adhering to a mimetic conception of language. What I intend here is the fact that the transcription and hence, the intersemiotic translation or transmutation (after Jackobsen) of indigenous modes of expression, rather than championing the purity of an original (oral and pictorial accounts) over an inferior copy (the alphabetic rendition), instead emphasizes the extent to which the act of translation affords continuity for that same original in the form of a cultural after-life. However much the alphabetic version might then represent a transformation of indigenous cultural consciousness and, thus, in the traditional understanding of translation, might represent a ‘betrayal’ of a pre-Hispanic original, it still, nevertheless, serves as a vehicle for both invoking the survival of an oral narrative beyond the

The Task of Translators Past and Present

205

text and also for transmitting a residue of ancient traditions, however much substance may appear to have been lost. Alphabetization and Cultural After-Lives Bearing this premise in mind, and notwithstanding the fact that Walter Benjamin’s work can be criticized for the lack of attention he appears to pay to the role played by European imperialism in the emergence of his principal concern, European modernity (Kraniauskas 2000 [1994]), his meditations on language and non-mimetic translation offer a number of possible strategies for reading transcribed nonwestern texts like the Anales (Benjamin 1985a). For in the first place, Benjamin does not view translation in terms of fidelity and betrayal, of an original being imitated by a copy, or even as a means for communicating meaning. Benjamin’s purpose is far wider and far more abstract: he is not simply presenting a meditation on a technical linguistic activity, but on translation as a process or “mode” with universal implications (Benjamin 1985a: 70). Indeed, critics have often read the essay as a continuation of Benjamin’s earlier language essays and hence, a theological (Kabbalistic) meditation on both the divine process of naming with individual words, and on the kinship between all the languages formed after the destruction of Babel.26 For postcolonial critics like Niranjana (1992), however, Benjamin’s contention that the purpose of all translation is ultimately to reveal the existence of a pure language, which simultaneously proves the complementarity of all individual languages, functions as a metaphor for historical redemption, for a messianic end to history, and, by extension, also for revolution.27 In fact, despite the irrefutably theological nature of the essay, Niranjana proposes that Benjamin’s early concerns with (sacred) language in fact pre-figure and function as tropes for his later, more overt engagement with a radical theory for the writing of (secular) materialist history.28 If we accept the argument that Benjamin uses theological tropes to prefigure his theory for the writing of history, we should, nevertheless, not necessarily dismiss his early preoccupation with language and translation simply as a rhetorical strategy. For, equally characteristic of Benjamin’s thought is a clear parallel between any challenge to naïve language theories (mimetic realism) and the challenge to positivist historiography. In other words, any radical rejection of

206

Companion to Empire

traditional theories for the writing of history would require an equally radical rejection of the notion that language might re-present reality quite transparently. This would mean the rejection of the analogous notion that the translator can simply re-present the original language in a new form. In this regard, a parallel might also be drawn between Benjamin’s subversion of a naïve realist view of language and Derrida’s debunking the metaphysics of presence. In both cases, the notion of an originary meaning or unique and pure presence that might simply be captured through re-presentation is replaced by différance or the realization that all origins are fissured and all presence marked by traces of alterity. Benjamin’s metaphor of the fragmented vessel to describe the relationship between translating and translated language suggests that the original language should itself be seen as fragmented given that its perceived uniqueness in fact depends on its affinity to all language and languages rather than any intrinsic qualities it may possess. Similarly, in the case of Derrida’s deconstruction, the signified is always caught up in a syntagmatic relationship within an infinite chain of signifiers, which renders any claims to a unique presence untenable.29 In effect, we might suggest that if Benjamin’s radical conception of translation does indeed correspond directly to a more general rejection of representation and the writing of totalizing history, it can therefore also be interpreted as a more global critique of the authority of logocentrism, which pre-empts that of Derrida. Finally, as far as Benjamin’s celebrated notion of the ‘after-life’ (Überleben) of a work in translation is concerned, we are presented with a perfect example of how religious imagery might be employed to prefigure concerns that are more secular. Benjamin’s intention, then, is not theological in the sense of a post-mortem life to follow the death of an original. Instead, Benjamin argues that the translation allows the original to survive, to continue living and to evolve into a new form: no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. For in its afterlife - which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living - the original undergoes a change. Even words with a fixed meaning can undergo a maturing process. (Benjamin 1985a: 73)

With this conception of an ‘after-life’, Benjamin stresses the evolution of the original language, rather than viewing translation in terms of an

The Task of Translators Past and Present

207

imitation or copy of an original. By extension, we might entertain the possibility that the notion of the continued life or ‘survival’ (Fortleben) of the original in the translation suggests an analogy to Benjamin’s conception of Jetztzeit or ‘now-time’: that is, the notion that the past might be brought into a dialectic confrontation with the present outside the realm of the historical continuum, and with revolutionary consequences.30 In other words, rather than conceiving of the past (the original) as somehow detached from the present and thus, recoverable (imitated) as such by the historian, Benjamin underscores the ‘survival’ or continued presence of the past in the present. And if the theory of translation shatters the possibility of naïve realism and the facile relationship between original and copy (in its turn, mirroring the relationship between reality and representation), Benjamin’s materialist historian would also shatter totalizing notions of historical progress and linearity. The usefulness of Benjamin’s critique of traditional language theories and analogous conceptions of history to the reading of colonial texts is clear if we view that same critique as a questioning of the logocentrism associated with the cultural ethos underlying early modern European expansion. In particular, Benjamin thereby helps us to challenge the apparent universality and authority of the culturally specific philosophy implicit to the discourses accompanying that same early modern imperialism. Such discourses disseminated the essentializing conceptions of identity by which non-Europeans might be inscribed as imperial subjects and the totalizing histories into which those same subjects might be incorporated. Thus, rather than using naïve conceptions of translation simply as a means by which we might access (quite unproblematically) an authentic ‘indigenous mentality’, we could instead take advantage of the potentially decolonizing gesture proffered by Benjamin’s theory of translation to further consider the relationship between the recording of colonial history and the process of colonization itself. The transcription of the Anales, as I have noted, does not communicate more than the most basic blocks of meaning or represent (i.e., ‘imitate’ an original faithfully) in accordance with a mimetic theory of language, and instead, most immediately, draws attention to the process of transcription/translation itself. The logical consequence of focusing on the act or process of transcription/translation in the colonial context is of course the suspicion that

208

Companion to Empire

alphabetization itself is inherent to a wider colonial process whereby indigenous traditions are obviously transformed by being extracted from their original socio-cultural context and potentially contaminated by Euro-Christian modes of thought (Klor De Alva 1988, 1989; Mignolo 1992, 1994; Florescano 1994). Such an understanding of inter-semiotic translation urges us to acknowledge the culturally specific rather than universal nature of alphabetic (mimetic) historiography and to reject the notion that such texts might quite transparently transmit a legible indigenous mentality. On the other hand, in response to this kind of questioning of the apparent authenticity of alphabetic texts in indigenous languages, León Portilla (1996: 67-71), like Lockhart, appeals to a mimetic theory of translation to argue that such alphabetic texts do indeed transmit, and hence, preserve indigenous traditions quite transparently. Benjamin’s radical theory of translation enables us to question both León Portilla’s conviction that alphabetization thereby constitutes preservation plain and simple, and that of those critics, who, in contrast, regard alphabetization simply as colonization, and hence, tantamount to the erasure of ‘authentic’ indigenous traditions. Indeed, in my reading of the Anales, we have seen how alphabetic histories might both present laconic depictions of glyphs and simultaneously, function as an indicator of the existence of nonwritten traditions beyond the text. The fact that such traditions remained beyond the confines of the written page would, by extension, suggest the continued existence of alternative knowledges and, indeed, alternative epistemologies which had not been transformed or made transparently legible by the mimetic conventions associated with alphabetic writing. The ‘after-life’ or ‘survival’ of indigenous semiotic traditions is thus both expressed within the alphabetic text and also, invoked by the laconic form of that same text. If, by extension, the mimetic theory of language posits a representation of a pure meaning (essence), and totalizing histories point, in the same way, to a recovery of a pure past (origin) to be scrutinized in the present, Benjamin’s theory of translation offers nothing less than an alternative understanding of the writing of history. In the specific case of alphabetized texts like the Anales, this would imply the following: the acknowledgement of the survival of visual thinking in the alphabetic text and of oral traditions beyond the textual rendition serves as an analogue to the notion that the past (non-

The Task of Translators Past and Present

209

alphabetic modes of expression) continues to haunt the present (writing), thus challenging an antiquarian historiography that would posit a definitive rupture between past and present. Finally, if we recall the image with which I began this chapter – that of the quotations inscribed in a wall overlooking the ruins of the Templo Mayor – we might further elaborate on this metaphorical haunting of the present by the past. For a certain analogy might be drawn between a text like the Anales de Tlatelolco and the juxtaposition of ruins and triumphal writings in stone at the site of the Templo Mayor. If oral and pictorial traditions permeate the Anales de Tlatelolco to signal the survival of alternative methods for registering history, then could we not also view the ruins of the Templo Mayor as an equally ‘alternative’ mode of inscription? And, hence, one which actually disturbs the mythic depiction of conquest enshrined in the stone alphabetic engravings? Moreover, just as the terse evocations of violence in the Anales de Tlatelolco encourage us to speculate further on the tone of the (absent) oral narrative which accompanied the first painted depictions of conquest, do the remains of the destroyed temple not also perform the function of a metaphorical inscription which, again, after Walter Benjamin, grimly conceives of progressive history as the accumulation of ruins and debris? 31 For the fact is that both the Anales and the ruins of the temple implicitly evoke the destruction of conquest in the face of the grandiose and idealized conception of a mythical cultural encounter in the three engraved quotations and in standard conquest histories. In contrast to monuments celebrating the transcendental nature of the modern nation and its mythical foundation, Mexico’s ruins might be viewed, like the non-alphabetic sources of the Anales, as telling another story between the lines of any official script. Ultimately, detecting the oral and pictorial residue in alphabetic Nahua histories also encourages us to seek out alternative depictions of foundational (originary)(national) events, which differ in form and content - from those sanctioned solely by the scriptural archive or the sculptured stone monument. Transcending History Benjamin’s more critical understanding of translation is, of course, antithetical to the mimetic theory of language implicit to the New Philology (Lockhart 1993: 4). Ironic as it may seem now, but this

210

Companion to Empire

adherence to naïve realism is actually congruous with the linguistic principles underlying sixteenth century missionary-grammarians’ humanistic philology. We might recall Sahagún’s frequent interventions and commentaries on the writing of the Florentine Codex and especially his comparing his work to a “red barredera” which might not only “sacar a luz todos los vocablos de esta lengua con sus propias y metaphóricas significaciones”, but also allow the Christian reader to penetrate the quilate of the Nahua (or the ‘inner consciousness’ of the people) which might parallel the secretos hidden within their language (Sahagún 1997: Libro 1. Prólogo).32 The sentiment expressed here is reminiscent of the New Philologists’ conviction that documents written in Nahuatl give immediate access to the ‘mentality’ of the sixteenth century Nahua. It is more than tempting, therefore, to discern a certain parallel between the New Philology of alphabetic documentation in Nahuatl and the New Philology in medieval studies of the 1990’s to which I alluded in the introduction. For, in the promotion of alphabetic Nahuatl documentation, the New Philologists re-affirm the sacrosanct importance of ‘original’ documents in historical studies and thereby, obviously overlook the decolonizing gesture proposed by post-philology.33 The traditionalism that imbues this conception of language as a transparent medium to meaning is also apparent in the understanding of the linguistic history of Nahuatl. While historical linguists today would reject an understanding of language changes in terms of neatlypackaged and well-demarcated chronological stages (as in the case of the ‘four stage’ evolution of colonial Nahuatl) and would instead propose a more complex geo-historical scenario involving the coexistence of multiple variations of a given linguistic phenomenon amongst speakers at any given time (Penny 2000), the New Philology’s reliance on written documentation allows them to make general conclusions to support the thesis about mutual cultural adaptation within the colonial contact zone.34 Similarly, the emphasis on language change as an indicator of increasing degrees of cultural contact, collaboration and subsequent adaptation, as manifested in the gradual transformation of Nahuatl during the colonial period, tends to completely obfuscate the analysis of such linguistic phenomena as indices of cultural conflict and instability, not to mention linguistic imperialism. Indeed, in his own study of colonial language contact, especially in terms of its effect on the emergence of certain strands of

The Task of Translators Past and Present

211

Latin American literature, Leinhard (1992) signals the linguistic instability arising from colonial difference as a symptom of a sociocultural hybridity “no resuelto” to thus day, rather than as a symbol of harmonious cultural fusion (Leinhard 1992: 101). On the other hand, there is still no doubt that the New Philology’s revisionist approach to historiography dealing with the Conquest represents significant progress beyond the now trite notion of indigenous ‘passivity’ before the unfolding of ‘bewildering’ events and has certainly set in motion a renewed and ongoing academic preoccupation with Nahuatl textuality as a primary source for colonial historical studies. Paradoxically, however, while the reproduction of alphabetic texts in indigenous languages underscores the ancient cultural and territorial presence of contemporary descendents of Mesoamerica’s aboriginal populations, its execution still pivots upon the empiricist notion that the past can be recovered - ‘as it was’ - as a body of knowledge, quite separate from the present of the historian and hence, uncontaminated by epistemological concerns of its own scene of writing.35 In striking contrast, we might recall Mignolo’s call for a colonial historiography which does not deal with the past as past, but with how the past is made and how that past continues to be made in the present as a reflection of a dominant historical discourse (Mignolo 2005).36 In other words, the past is never cleanly ruptured from an identifiable, unique, originary distant moment which might be recuperated simply by deciphering a single, singular document. If, then, ‘mythical’ histories of the conquest can be “transcended” (Wood 2003) by stressing adaptation and collaboration over military conflict, and thereby, demystified, one wonders why historiography and, in particular, empiricist historiography in any language, however wellintentioned, cannot itself also be transcended. Writing Histories of Violence Finally, if Sánchez-Prado (2005) has described León-Portilla’s work on Nahuatl textuality as presenting a series of “productive paradoxes”, principally because the academic championing of aboriginal languages and literature invariably leads to their subalternization within the larger cultural whole, we might also take note of how the New Philologists deal with the question of the violence of colonial conquest. For, in their attempts to establish a rupture with Prescott’s

212

Companion to Empire

presentation of the conquest simply in terms of military conflict between two homogeneous, but radically-opposed cultures (Lockhart 1992: 2), and in their desire to avoid Gibson’s apparent sympathy for the Leyenda negra (Lockhart 1991: 174), there has been a tendency to obfuscate the discursive and extra-discursive violence that the colonization of the Americas wrought on indigenous populations, not to mention the miserable legacy of colonialism for future generations.37 In contrast, we might recall that the sections of the Anales de Tlatelolco and the Florentine Codex, to which I have alluded to in this chapter, actually demonstrate the extent to which the violence of military conquest remained a pivotal and evocative concept in the collective indigenous memory of events, however absent any moralizing tone might appear to be from such accounts. We might also momentarily shift from writings in Nahuatl to writings in Maya in the Yucatán Peninsula to underscore the extent to which an exaggerated emphasis on cultural adaptation might also obfuscate the examples of a violent response to colonialism on the part of post-conquest indigenous communities. For one cannot overlook the fact that that alphabetized indigenous languages could, in some cases, serve as the catalyst for such responses. What I am thinking of in particular is the prophetic Libro de Chilam Balam de Chumayel, which, as Alicia Barabas (1989) explains, was widely circulated throughout the colonial period in Yucatán, was widely read, and served as inspirational material in all the Mayan rebellions against colonial rule during the same period. Texts like these are especially striking because of the triumphant, millenarian and messianic tone, which counteracts that of the early Spanish histories. With a ‘calibanesque’ sleight of hand, alphabetic writing is driven against ‘the empire’ from a cultural and epistemological site, which can neither be wholly identified with the invading culture, nor understood as purely pre-colonial. The result, however, is similar to the early years of conquest: the written word is a blueprint for transmitting an ideology which might permit action in the material world, and hence, for the subsequent unleashing of a violence which is obviously far from being restricted to the discursive plain. Yucatán would also prove to be the inspiration for another canonical colonial work in which the undeniable violence of conquest and, more importantly, the inextricability of writing and violence, are most strikingly made manifest. In 1566, the Franciscan Diego de

The Task of Translators Past and Present

213

Landa, that most notorious of mendicant book-burners of the early colonial period would write his Relación de las cosas de Yucatán in the aftermath of his savage response to the clandestine continuation of idolatrous practices at Mani in 1562.38 This account is of course best known for its relatively detailed (albeit erroneous) explanation of Mayan glyphic signs, and the proto-ethnographic knowledge which would facilitate the extirpation of idolatry and the administration of the desired Christian-Indian communities.39 While de Landa’s desire to describe pre-colonial cultural practices may seem paradoxical given his previous zeal in the destruction of Mayan books, we might regard the account as another example of how indigenous cultures might be inscribed within the parameters of Christian epistemology, and, in the process, relegated symbolically to a pre-Christian, satanic past. Whether the account reveals a certain fascination and even admiration for Mayan sign-systems: Con estos retruécanos y embarazosa cuenta, es cosa de ver la liberalidad con que los que saben, cuentan y se entienden, y mucho de notar es que salga siempre la letra que es dominical en el primer día de su año, sin errar ni faltar, ni venir a salir allí otra de las 20. (de Landa 1994: 146-7)

- It is still clear that non-alphabetic sign-systems were to be deciphered to prevent their potential use in other idolatrous practices and to harness them for garnering knowledge about pre-Hispanic beliefs. If much scholarly attention has focused on de Landa’s attempts to record such information about Mayan glyphs, less has been paid to a whole series of ‘metaphorical writings’ or cultural signifiers which are interwoven throughout de Landa’s proto-ethnographic narrative. The inscriptions I have in mind initially are the bodily mutations, public torture and executions employed by the conquistadores on indigenous captives so as to spread terror throughout the region: “que los españoles se disculpaban con decir que siendo pocos no podían sujetar tanta gente sin meterles miedo con castigos terribles” (de Landa 1994: 107). While the inclusion of such observations served de Landa in his attempts to deflect accusations of Franciscan brutality and to contrast it with the far more brutal behavior of lay Spaniards, his allusions to a similar use of bodily mutation on the part of Mayan rebels would appear to support the implicit argument that the satanic ways of the Maya had made them deserving of punishment by their ecclesiastic overlords: “y luego enviaron algunos brazos y pies por toda la tierra

214

Companion to Empire

en señal de lo que habían hecho, para que (los otros pueblos) se alzasen” (108). De Landa then complements this symbolic mutation with an allusion to the standard practice for ‘marking’ and humiliating criminals in Mayan communities: y si eran señores o gente principal, juntabase el pueblo y [prendido [el delincuente] le labraban el rostro desde la barba hasta la frente, por los dos lados, en castigo que tenían por grande infamia. (131)

Beyond this more overt notion of violent ‘writing’, on several occasions de Landa attests to his fascination with bodily markings for purely aesthetic purposes: this might, on the one hand, be in the form of carvings in the skin as a sign of courage: “Labrábanse los cuerpos, y cuanto más, [por] tanto más valientes y bravos se tenían, porque el labrarse era gran tormento” (116); or, on the other hand, in the form of the cosmetic sharpening of teeth: “Tenían por costumbre aserrarse los dientes dejándolos como dientes de sierra y esto tenían por galantería y hacían este oficio unas viejas limándolos con ciertas piedras y agua” (132). In the same regard, de Landa observes with curiosity the methods by which Mayans might flatten their foreheads and encourage their children to be cross-eyed, both of which were considered to be aesthetically pleasing (114). The reporting of such physical symbolism might simply be regarded as typical of a colonial gaze bent on objectifying non-Christian cultures as exotic (dehumanized) curiosities. Yet, if we take into account the torture, executions and suicides resulting from de Landa’s handling of the Mani incident, such metaphorical ‘writings’ assume the form of an even more insidious symbolic violence. For, while de Landa is generally understood to be repressing the events of 1562, or, at best, offering “a tacit response” to them (Clendinnen 1987: 119) since the account offers no direct reference to, nor, by the same token, any defense of his actions, perhaps a symptomatic reading of the metaphorical writings in the text reveal more of that same “tacit response”. Those same writings are indeed figurative, but they are also manifest symptoms of the latent fact of the corporal punishments previously meted out at Mani. In other words, de Landa’s descriptions, even of apparently harmless bodily decoration amongst nonChristians, reveal a fascination with a whole series of scriptural practices, both material and figurative: The material sign-systems must be deciphered so that they might produce the knowledge

The Task of Translators Past and Present

215

required for facilitating the evangelization effort. The more figurative ‘scripts’, which might be identified with non-Christian social and physical behaviors, must be replaced by a Christian inscription of the soul. Or, if deemed particularly abominable, such behaviors must be disciplined with the violent writing of the law on the non-Christian body through torture and execution. In short, while acknowledging that our understanding of the conquest of Mexico cannot forgo the question of cultural survival, adaptation, and collaboration between Mesoamericans and Europeans, and, in particular, cannot forgo the role that the imported writing system played in such a conception of post-conquest history, we might, nevertheless, suggest that the Book of Chilam Balam de Chumayel and the Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, like the Anales de Tlatelolco and Book 12 of the Florentine Codex, also remind us not to overlook an equally important feature of early modern colonization: the role that alphabetic writing, as well as a whole series of figurative inscriptions, played (for both Mesoamericans and Europeans), in narrating, legitimating and even effectuating inter-cultural violence. We thus arrive at the conception of a symbolic fusion between writing and colonial power, rather than of a mere alliance (‘companionship’).

216

Companion to Empire

Notes 1

Maya text and English translation appear in Edmonson’s edition (1986). The Latin text reproduced here is taken from Lupton’s edition (1895: 218–219). 3 On the extremes to which the Renaissance concern with the material forms of graphemes could reach, the French master printer, Geofroy Tory provides a suitable point of departure in his Champ Fleury (1529). Not only does Tory comment on More’s Utopian alphabet in his work, but in typically Renaissance fashion, he used a theory of proportion drawn from classical conceptions of human anatomy to arrive at each design for his own letter forms (Drucker 1995: 164-5). 4 On the conventions of the colonial bureaucracy and knowledge production by the conquistadores, I will have more to say in the following chapter when dealing with the ‘second’ conquest by the Crown’s letrados. 5 This Pre-Hispanic account of Moctezuma’s tributaries, is thought to be the model for parts one and two of the post-conquest Codex Mendoza (1541). See Mohar Betancourt (1990). 6 The list of treasures sent by Cortés from Veracruz to the Castilian court in 1519 appears at the end of Cortés’ First Letter. The letter and the items included in the list were received in Spain in 1520 (Delgado Gómez 1993: 150n. 236). 7 Drucker (1995) and Eco (1995) present accounts of how humanists in the hermetic tradition of the time were captivated by ‘exotic’ foreign writing systems like Egyptian hieroglyphics and Hebrew letters. By the end of the sixteenth century, these studies of Hebrew letters and Egyptian hieroglyphics were complemented by Europe’s recent acquaintance with the pictographic writing of Mesoamerica and Chinese ideographic script. In allusion to the works of Jesuits like the German Egyptologist, Athanasius Kircher (1602–80), Eco and Roberto Pellerey (1992) describe how the Jesuits sought to establish a hierarchy of writing systems at the zenith of which hieroglyphics were to be found. Chinese characters, though undoubtedly superior to Amerindian writing because they transmitted concepts rather than things, were to be regarded as limited since, unlike hieroglyphs, each character was bound to the concept it represented. For a general study of the resurgence of interest in Egyptian hieroglyphics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, particularly as a result of the recovery, circulation and impact of Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica, the maximum authority on the subject, see also Dieckmann (1957). 8 On the humanists’ tendency to confuse ‘enigmatic’ or symbolic hieroglyphics with the earliest known forms of Egyptian inscription, see Dieckmann (1957). 9 “Assi que las letras representan las bozes, y las bozes significan como dize aristoteles los pensamientos que tenemos enel anima” (Nebrija 1992: Libro 1. 3). “Las letras se inventaron para referir y significar inmediatamente las palabras que pronunciamos, así como las mismas palabras y vocablos, según el filósofo, son señales inmediatamente de los conceptos y pensamientos de los hombres” (Acosta 1962: Libro 6. 4). 10 My comments here are in large part a response to critics of Mignolo’s ‘tyranny of the alphabet’ thesis of the 80’s and 90’s. I am thinking in particular of those who questioned Mignolo’s assertions that Renaissance men of letters privileged alphabetic writing while disparaging all other forms of writing as inferior, and complained that 2

The Task of Translators Past and Present

217

he had given insufficient attention to the fascination with hieroglyphics and other nonEuropean writing systems (Grafton 1997; Cañizares Esguerra 2001). 11 “Esta tierra de Anáhuac, o Nueva España, llamada [así] primeros por el Emperador nuestro señor; según los libros antiguos que estos naturales tenían de caracteres y figuras, que ésta era su escritura, a causa de no tener letras, sino caracteres, y la memoria de los hombres ser débil y flaca […] Había entres estos naturales cinco libros, como dije de figuras y caracteres. El primero habla de los años y tiempos. El Segundo de los días y fiestas que tenían todo el año. El tercero de los sueños, embaimientos y vanidades u agüeros en que creian. El cuarto era el del bautismo y nombres que daban a los niños. El quinto de los ritos y ceremonias y agüeros que tenían en los matrimonios” (Motolinía 2001: 56-7). 12 Diego Durán, the Dominican friar who undertook a similarly monumental history of Nahua culture in his own heavily illustrated Historia de las Indias de Nueva España (1560-65), expressed an identical faith in a wide range of non-alphabetic sources: “Tenían ayos maestros prelados que les enseñabana y ejercitaban en todo género de artes militares, eclesiásticas y mecánicas y de astrología por el conocimiento de las estrellas, de todo lo cual tenían grandes y hermosos libros de pinturas y caracteres de todas estas artes por donde las enseñaban. También tenían libros de su ley y doctrina a su modo, por donde los enseñaban, de donde hasta que doctos y hábiles no los dejasen salir sino ya hombres” (Durán 1965: 2. 229). 13 It is also worth mentioning the work of Gruzinski (1988, 1992) on the hybrid nature of colonial systems of representation. Gruzinski underscores the continued survival of oral traditions and pictographic writing alongside the introduced alphabetic medium in post-conquest codices, maps and in the títulos primordiales of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is thus able to argue that alphabetic literacy did not simply eclipse pre-Hispanic modes of expression as drastically as we might believe. 14 While Acosta refuses to designate American writing systems as actual ‘writing’ and places both Mexican pictographs and the Peruvian quipu behind the scripts of the Far East in a contrived hierarchy of such systems, he still manages to stress the fact that the mechanical ability of the Amerindian allows them to absorb Christian technologies, like the alphabet, and hence to surpass the apparent cultural superiority of the Chinese. Like Las Casas before him, then, Acosta affirmed the relative ‘barbarity’ of indigenous modes of expression when compared to alphabetic culture, but, again, like his Dominican predecessor, he was also determined to demonstrate the conversion potential of Amerindian cultures. See Chapters 4-9 of Book 6 (Acosta 1962 [1940]: 284-292) on these points. For an exhaustive analysis of the same book, see Pagden (1982). 15 If works by missionaries like de Acosta and Sahagún emerge as frequent points of reference in Mignolo’s work of the 1980’s and 1990’s, they also appear in the counter-arguments raised by his critics, particularly with regard to the question of the perceived reliability and/or denigration of indigenous sources (Cañizares Esguerra 2001: 64–70). Cañizares Esguerra contends that even when non-alphabetic writing was denigrated and relegated to a lower rung of a hierarchy of writing systems, it was still considered worthy as a primary source for authenticating alphabetic histories. What he then detects is a rupture between a sixteenth century (Renaissance) belief in the reliability of indigenous scripts and a late colonial (Enlightenment) tendency to reverse this trend by dismissing the historical value of those same indigenous writing

218

Companion to Empire

systems. As far as the Renaissance is concerned, however, Cañizares Esguerra appears to be oblivious to the possibility that the alphabetization of Amerindian languages and the translation of their traditions might also be a form of colonial violence: “Spanish antiquarians thought of their work as a ‘translation’ of indigenous testimonies stored in quipus, songs, and other record-keeping devices” (2001: 80). 16 A major influence in this regard was the previous archival work of historians like Gibson (1964), which had underscored the continued indispensability of the altepetl to indigenous communal identity (Lockhart 1991: 169) and the conditions of possibility for the colonial encomienda during the post-conquest period. By the same token, therefore, Lockhart dismissed Robert Ricard’s iconic thesis (Ricard 1933) on the complete ‘displacement’ of such indigenous structures through evangelization (Lockhart 1991: 171; 1992: 2). 17 Stage one covers the period of initial contact between 1519 and 1540-50 when few texts were produced, and the language in them attests simply to the incorporation of a small number of Spanish lexical items (primarily names); stage two, between 1540-50 and 1640-50, involved broader textual production and more copious lexical borrowing from Spanish, but with little grammatical transformation; stage three, from 1640-50 to the end of the colonial period and beyond when Nahuatl texts provide evidence of Castilian-influenced innovations in grammar, phonetics and lexis and thus, attest to widespread bilingualism amongst speakers. Lockhart would later add a fourth stage to account for texts produced in Spanish by Nahuatl speakers to demonstrate that, by the late colonial period, more texts were written in Spanish by these speakers, and that, in its turn, the Spanish which had evolved was a variety affected by Nahuatl interference (1992: 323). 18 Amongst other previous translations of Nahuatl histories, Lockhart cites Anderson and Dibble’s celebrated (thirteen volume) English translation of The Florentine Codex as a fundamental influence on his own work (Lockhart 1993: xiii). 19 Both of these are texts reproduced with understandable priority in Lockhart (1993). All my direct quotations from the works are taken from Lockhart’s Nahuatl transcriptions and translations into English. 20 On the relationship between Nahua history and altepetl loyalties, see also Leibsohn (1994). 21 León Portilla appears to maintain faith in the earlier date for the composition of the text (1996: 58). 22 On previous transcriptions and/or translations of the Annals of Tlatelolco, for example, in Mengin (1939; 1945), Toscano (1948), Garibay (1956), León Portilla (1959), see Lockhart (1993: 38 n. 92). 23 In the same respect, we might note that scholars of post-conquest pictorial representation, and particularly, of pictorial histories, like Hill Boone (2000), that, unlike in the case of mundane records directed to the Spanish bureaucracy, pictorial histories continued to be produced, albeit at times in combination with alphabetic texts, and maintained their prestige amongst the indigenous elite for years to come (Hill Boone 2000: 245–249). 24 In other words, as a means for re-stating his revisionist approach to the work of previous Nahuatl scholars (León-Portilla’s Visión de los vencidos from 1959 in particular), Lockhart views the chronicling of supernatural events prior to the Templo Mayor massacre as part of a mid-sixteenth century re-invention of events so as to reinscribe their mythical aura (Lockhart 1993: 17).

The Task of Translators Past and Present 25

219

It is worth noting that in is clearly illustrated in the parallel version of the Templo Mayor massacre in Book 12 of the Florentine Codex, an extensive description of the preparations of the regalia to decorate an effigy of Huitzilopochtli, prior to the ritualized festivities during which the massacre would take place, almost threatens to eclipse the actual massacre in importance so great is the need to present a meticulous analysis of the god’s appearance (Lockhart 1993: 10). While such an extensive description is absent in the Anales version of the massacre, the transcribers, nevertheless, reveal the importance of identifying traits, objects and costumes in pictorial renditions of such events. 26 In this respect, we might note that Derrida (1985) prefaces his own reading of the essay with a meditation on the paradox of the proper name as manifested in God’s injunction against the translation of his own name and, simultaneously, his creation of the need for translation of the post-Babelian plurality of tongues. What is also most striking in this same regard, is Benjamin’s tendency, much like a nineteenth century philologist, or, more probably, like a pre-modern Jewish scholar, to use a combination of genealogical, geneticist and filial metaphors to structure his meditation on the growth and transformation of languages through translation. The supposed ‘kinship’ among languages, however, is obviously meant to shed light on a more abstract affinity than any conceived of by traditional historical linguistics. For, rather than communicating content or sense (as in the notion of a mimetic relationship between reality and language), Benjamin’s translating languages communicate only their own communicability rather than imitating an ‘original’: “Yet, any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information – hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations” (Benjamin 1985a: 69). More important, then, than transmitting any meaning in the act of translating between two languages is the fact that that same act reveals or evokes the existence of a pure language beyond the plurality of languages. This pure language is nothing to do with a metalanguage, universal grammar, or any universal linguistic structure shared by all languages, but according to Derrida, for example, the divine language of truth, which dissolves the mediating intervention of the letter, and allows immediate access to (sacred) meaning. 27 In comparing Benjamin’s theory of translation to Gramsci’s, Ives (2004) concurs with Derrida rather than Niranjana on this point. He argues that in the case of Benjamin, the diversity of tongues allows for a theory of translation as revelation, whereas in the case of Gramsci, it allows for a theory of translation as revolution (Ives 2004: 105). 28 In this respect, Niranjana’s post-colonial reading of the Translator essay differs significantly from that of both De Man and Derrida, its most celebrated commentators. 29 “In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel. For this very reason translation must in large measure refrain from wanting to communicate something, from rendering the sense, and in this the original is important to it only insofar as it has already relieved the translator and his translation of the effort of assembling and expressing what is to be conveyed” (Benjamin 1985a: 78).

220 30

Companion to Empire

In this same regard, Niranjana proposes that we view Benjamin’s notion of the translator’s task as prefiguring his contention in the second of the Theses on the Philosophy of History that the past has a ‘claim’ on future generations (Benjamin 1985b: 254). In the case of the translator, the task is to reveal the affinity between all languages and thus, of the pure language, whereas the materialist historian is subject to the claim of past generations that their age be ‘blasted out’ of the continuum of linear history (Niranjana 1991: 114). 31 Even more tantalizing is the fact that Benjamin compared the ‘remains’ and ‘debris’ of history to a series of allegorical images, which appear in the form of a ‘script’ or ‘writing’. I am thinking here particularly of his early study of allegorical images in German Baroque tragedy (Trauerspiel) which would inform his later meditations on history in the Theses. One of the most celebrated quotations from The Origin of German Tragic Drama in this respect is the following: “When, as is the case of the Trauerspiel, history becomes part of the setting, it does so as a script. The word ‘history’ stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience. The allegorical physiognomy of the nature-history, which is put on stage in the Trauerspiel, is present in reality in the form of the ruin. In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. Moreover, in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. Allegory thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things” (Benjamin 1998: 177-78). 32 The full text is as follows: “Es esta obra como una red barredera para sacar a luz todos los vocablos de esta lengua con sus propias y metaphóricas significaciones, y todas sus maneras de hablar, y las más de sus antiguallas buenas y malas; es para redimir mil canas porque con harto menos trabajo de lo que aquí me cuesta, podrán los que quisieren saber en poco tiempo muchas de sus antiguallas y todo el lenguaje de esta gente mexicana. Aprovecherá mucho toda esta obra para conocer el quilate de esta gente mexicana” (Sahagún 1997: Libro 1. Prólogo). In a similar vein, Sahagún goes on to say that: “porque por mi industria se han escripto doze libros de lenguaje propio y natural de esta lengua mexicana, donde allende de ser muy gustosa y provechosa escriptura, hallarse han también en ella todas las maneras de hablar y todos los vocablos que esta lengua usa […] si se acabase, sería un tesoro para saber muchas cosas dignas de ser sabidas, y para con facilidad saber esta lengua con todos sus secretos y sería cosa de mucha estima en la Nueva y Vieja España” (Sahagún 1997: Libro 1. Al sincero lector). 33 See my discussion of Michelle Warren’s notion of Post-Philology in the introduction. 34 In his study of the evolution of modern Spanish from its Latin roots, Penny reaffirms his conviction that language change is characterized by discontinuity: “[Provided we bear in mind that] language history is not a matter of smooth linear development, by which a single variety undergoes a series of changes and emerges transformed, but is a process full of detours, hiccups, backtrackings and blind alleys” (2000: 55). 35 On the other hand, a New Philologist like Wood (2003) does express a preoccupation with contemporary challenges to antiquarianism, and strives to lay much more emphasis on the relationship between the legacy of conquest for today’s indigenous communities in Mexico than on analyzing the past as rupture (2003: 1213).

The Task of Translators Past and Present 36

221

A point which many of Mignolo’s critics appear to overlook is that his work from the 1980's and 1990's was certainly not solely concerned with a sixteenth century tyranny of the alphabet, but with combating the fetishization of alphabetic knowledge in contemporary cultures of scholarship. Mignolo has been quite unashamedly interested in the power relations invested in contemporary scholarship as much as in the power invested in alphabetic writing in the sixteenth century at the expense of indigenous modes of expression and knowledges. This was a sentiment which Mignolo stated unequivocally in a blunt response to the previously mentioned critiques and, particularly, those contained in Cañizares Esguerra’s How To Write a History of the New World (2001): “There is no room for pragmatic instructions on “how to write the history” of the New World; since the “how” is always related to a political project in the present and not, of course, to what really happened; and since the “how” is also linked to basic assumptions on what “history” is. My argument has been built on the premise that the past “is not” but is always “made” according to political needs and projects and that “history” is a disciplinary form of control in the manner the past is invented” (Mignolo 2005: 455-6). Mignolo made it clear, then, that one of his main aims was precisely to link the history of the Americas to the history of capitalism and, in its turn, to link that history to a history of scholarship wedded to a conception of knowledge production which could not be disassociated from the privileging of a writing system which served to disseminate that same zero-point ideology in the present. In short, Mignolo sought to challenge the privileged place of scholarly writing emanating from the metropolitan centers where a self-designated zero point universalism is still in play and empirical approaches to history remain the privileged methodological norm. 37 Indeed, in her introduction, Wood herself reveals a certain uneasiness with the emphasis on cultural ‘adaptation’ as the hermeneutic grid through which to comprehend the conquest and its aftermath: “One hesitates to speak of adaptation for fear of justifying or rationalizing imperialism. Some well-meaning and sympathetic interpretations, however, reduce the indigenous person to a pathetic pawn” (Wood 2003: 18). 38 Restall and Chuchiak (2002) have challenged the notion that the account was a single manuscript work produced by de Landa himself, but given that the authenticity of the document as a product of sixteenth century colonial discourse, such concerns with the question of authorship do not directly affect my argument here that the text reflects the writing of violence and the violence of writing of the same period. 39 On de Landa’s flawed and yet highly-influential appraisal of Mayan writing in the work of future scholars, Restall observes the following: “Landa’s relevance to epigraphic history is of course his inclusion of an apparent rosetta stone to Maya writing, what he called an ‘‘A, B, C’’ of glyphic signs with phonetic values. This Maya ‘‘alphabet’’ had been created by Landa, or one of his colleagues, by asking a Maya informant how to write in glyphs each Spanish ‘‘letter,’’ which of course the informant heard as a syllable, according to Castilian pronunciation. The false alphabet produced as a result was just about right and wrong enough to confuse generations of would-be epigraphers—whose task was made all the tougher by the woeful quality of published reproductions of the glyphs, a problem not clearly outlined until fairly recently (Stuart 1988). But it also contained the phonetic clues that enabled epigraphers […] to decipher the glyphs” (Restall and Chuchiak 2002: 659).

Chapter 6 The Violence of the letrados los dichos señores presidente y oidores [la] tomaron [la cédula] en sus manos y la besaron y pusieron sobre sus cabezas como a carta y mandado de su rey y señor natural […] y en cuanto al cumplimiento de ella […] mandaron que el dicho Nuño de Guzmán sea suelto luego de la prisión y cárcel donde está, y que […] se parta y vaya del puerto de San Juan de Ulúa, de esta Nueva España, en cualesquier navíos que del dicho Puerto salieren para los reinos de Castilla y llegado que sea a la ciudad de Sevilla se presente preso, como Su Majestad por su real cédula lo manda, ante los oficiales de la Casa de Contratación de la ciudad de Sevilla, para que de allí Su Majestad provea e mande lo que sea servido, so pena de perdimiento de todos sus bienes y la persona a merced de Su Majestad y de las penas en que caen los caballeros fijosdalgos, como el dicho Nuño de Guzmán, que no cumplen los mandamientos de sus reyes y señores naturales.1 Auto de soltura a Nuño de Guzmán (1538)

In the previous two chapters, I have stressed the extent to which the compañera del imperio was not necessarily vernacular writing, but simply the alphabetic form of that same writing system. And, while I have underscored the fact that alphabetization also provided the semiotic wherewithal for indigenous writers to negotiate postconquest subjectivities, we might once again recall the irony of the fact that the spoken vernacular was never successfully imposed as a lingua franca during the entire colonial period. Nevertheless, just as we might remain aware of the impact of alphabetization and the failure to replace Amerindian languages with spoken Castilian, we cannot overlook the fundamental and critical role of written Castilian

224

Companion to Empire

as the hegemonic language of colonial law and administration. For, as in the case of the repopulation of conquered territories under Alfonso X in the thirteenth century, the written legislation governing early modern colonialism obviously guaranteed the expansion of vernacular writing in tandem with the gradual extension of the colonial bureaucratic machinery throughout the Americas. In that sense, Ángel Rama’s well-known metaphor of the ciudad letrada to describe the corps of letrados (‘lawyers’ or ‘literate functionaries’) who oversaw colonial administration and all transatlantic communications remains a useful methodological point of departure for an analysis of the role of vernacular writing to consolidate transatlantic expansion. The limitations of Rama’s original thesis have of course been welldocumented, particularly with regard to his apparently transhistorical conception of the letrado after Independence, and his having paid scant attention to the potential use of the written word as a tool of counter-hegemonic discourses (Moraña 1997). Yet, the notion of a scriptural bureaucracy, which, in its reproducibility, mirrored the rational order embodied in the construction of colonial cities, still resonates as a powerful evocation of the authority bestowed upon the written vernacular during the colonial period. If, then, the presence of the picota (pillory) in the central square of all colonial towns and cities served to symbolize the presence of the force of law for both literate and illiterate vassals of the Crown, it was on the understanding that the transmission and effectuation of colonial law was dependent on the written word. We can hence better appreciate why scholars have traditionally argued that the Crown’s lawyers (letrados) carried out a second conquest after the military action of the conquistadores had ended (Malagón Barceló 1961; González Echevarría 1990). Of course, this conception of two conquests was intended to reflect the standard notion that the early violence of colonization was eventually replaced by the rational and peaceful establishment of the colonial polity (Friederici 1973; Subirats 1994). Bearing this premise in mind, in this final chapter I instead engage with current debates over the complicity between the (written) law and violence, and particularly as a point of departure for considering the complex relationship between conquest, law-making and the expansion of vernacular writing in the early years of the bureaucratic conquest of New Spain. My examination of the legalistic discourse identified with the president of the First Audiencia of New

The Violence of the letrados

225

Spain, Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, and, in particular, the documents pertaining to his torture and illegal execution of Tzintzincha Tangaxoan (or simply ‘Don Francisco’ as he was known after baptism), the last Cazonci, or ‘ruler’, of the ancient Purhépecha/Tarascan kingdom of Michoacán in 1530, serves to challenge the notion that the bureaucratization of colonialism is somehow separate from the violence of military conquest. I have chosen this particular event in the early colonial history of New Spain not only because it remains a truly mythic illustration of the originary violence on which the colonial polity might be founded, but also because the event took place at the outset of the so-called bureaucratic conquest after the initial military conquest of the Valley of Mexico had been consummated. Ultimately, I argue that since Guzmán might quite justifiably be regarded as the quintessential functionary of the Crown, his execution of the Cazonci and his subsequent conquest of New Galicia represent emblematic instances of an interpenetration of colonial law-making (writing) and colonial violence. In effect, imperio and lengua become fused in a brutal image of scriptural conquest. Literacy and the Laws of Conquest Before embarking upon an analysis which is clearly predicated upon the notion that notarial literacy (in the modern sense) was indispensable to early modern military conquest, I would first like to offer a response to the argument that the question of literacy amounts to nothing more than a red-herring in studies of the early colonial period: Despite the myth that literacy gave Spaniards an advantage over Native Americans, members of conquistador companies could probably read and write no better than the most literate native societies, such as the Mayas. Most Europeans and Mayas were semi-literate, with minorities being fully literate and fully illiterate. The correlation between social status and literacy among conquistadors was not as close as might be expected. The colonial chronicler Juan Rodríguez Freyle, a Bogotá native, claimed that some city council members of the New Granada settlements used branding irons to sign documents. Most famously, the chief early conquistador of Peru, Francisco Pizarro, remained illiterate all of his life. (Restall 2003: 37)

While Restall is primarily responding here to Todorov’s (1982) ‘semiotic’ interpretation of the conquest, and his controversial con-

226

Companion to Empire

tention that the possession of writing and a more sophisticated reading of ‘signs’ gave the Christians the upper-hand in the conquest of the Americas, the implication that literacy did not really matter much since only a minority in either culture was ever completely literate (in the modern sense) requires some qualification, particularly with regard to the use of writing by the invading culture. In the first place, I would make a more general observation: perhaps underscoring the illiteracy of the conquistadores serves, ironically, to bolster the privileging of alphabetic textuality. For, whenever we appeal to the ‘uncultured’ or uneducated nature of the first conquerors, we are also close to appealing to the misguided notion that the conquest would have somehow been more ‘humane’, had it been carried out exclusively by ‘cultured’ and educated colonizers or solely by letrados schooled in law and skilled in the notarial arts. The implication would then be that colonialism really could be a benign operation marking a clear boundary between barbarism and civilization, and, by extension, that colonial violence could somehow be opposed to a humanist ethos dependent on the exegesis and production of alphabetic texts. Secondly, we might also note that the stress on illiterate conquistadores recalls the tradition of a diachronic linguistics, which once explained the differences between American and European varieties of Spanish in terms of social class distinction. In other words, some linguists of the early twentieth century tended to view American varieties of Spanish as corrupt forms of a Peninsular standard, apparently because the continent had been colonized by (‘low-class’) Spaniards speaking a degenerate variant of that same standard (Moreno de Alba 1988). Of course, nowadays this perspective no longer holds currency and has ceded to less ideologically charged reasons for explaining the specificity of American varieties of Spanish (Penny 2000). The most obvious amongst these reasons being the fact that the conquest and colonization of the Americas was undertaken by Europeans representing all social classes and all levels of education, rather than being the exclusive reserve of the ‘lowest’ classes. More important, however, for my purposes here, is the fact that the colonizers of the Americas, whether literate, semi-literate or completely illiterate, might also still appreciate or even revere the written word as a convention specific to their culture and believe in the discourse connecting writing to cultural advancement. What is beyond any doubt is that the early conquistadores, whether literate or

The Violence of the letrados

227

not, and whether affected by the residual medievalism which equated Hispanic nobility with arms rather than letters, understood the fundamental importance of legislation underwriting every act of colonization and made sure that their feats were recorded in writing according to strict official protocol. We might recall that even those undertaking acts of rebellion against the Crown abided by the scriptural protocol established by the Crown’s letrados to effectuate those same acts of rebellion. I am thinking here of perhaps the most infamous instance of one such rebellion, which, although not technically identified with New Spain, and hence, with the general geo-historical limits of my overall analysis, represents a seminal illustration of one conquistador’s awareness of the powerful role of the letrado in colonial affairs: Lope de Aguirre and the letter he addressed to Philip II in 1560 to announce his rebellion against the colonial administration, precisely because it was being governed by corrupt bureaucrats. Those familiar with Francisco Vázquez’s Jornada de Omagua y Dorado: Crónica de Lope de Aguirre (1560) will remember how Vázquez’s ferocious indictment of Aguirre implies a complementary association between gentlemanly conduct, loyalty to the Crown, decency, sanity and being able to read and write. The fact that Aguirre was, according to Vázquez, “de agudo y vivo ingenio, para ser hombre sin letras” (Vázquez 1986: 148), and hence, illiterate (although it seems more likely that Aguirre, while far from being a letrado, did have some knowledge of reading and writing in the vernacular as his stress on the production of his own documentation attests) makes his sharp intelligence difficult for Vázquez to explain. Aguirre’s intelligence is especially troubling in Vázquez’s account given that the ideological aim of the chronicle is to reduce Aguirre and his actions to the level of demoniac madness and to underscore that he could only ever be regarded as a friend of gente baja (the much-repeated motif of the account), in sharp contrast to the gentlemanly and, presumably, letrado, Pedro de Orsúa. If Aguirre was depicted in official reports as being uneducated or as feeling only disdain for the Crown’s colonial letrados, and hence, by extension, as complying with the stereotype of the illiterate colonial adventurer, there is no doubt that even he understood that his demands would have to be directed to the Crown using the official channels of communication. In this respect, we might note that

228

Companion to Empire

Aguirre’s irreverence towards Philip II (“teneis (vosotros los reyes) sed y hambre y ambición de hartaros de sangre humana […] y vuestro gobierno es aire” [Vázquez 1986: 118]) in his letter, and his having a statement of denaturalización drawn up for his followers to swear by and to sign as proof of their loyalty to the rebellion (Vázquez 1986: 50-1), both serve as evidence that, while Aguirre mocked and parodied the ritualistic use of the written word to demonstrate services rendered to the Crown, he was also acknowledging the indispensability of written documentation to the machinery of imperial expansion. In fact, Aguirre’s making his treason ‘official’ through the rhetoric (albeit parodied) of notarized documentation demonstrates that the written word was not only a means by which empire might be legitimated and extended, but also a means by which it might be challenged when the tropes of standard ritualized documentation between conquistadores and the Crown were inverted. Consequently, as a semi-literate conquistador, but certainly not a letrado, the use of written communication by a renegade like Lope de Aguirre allows us to problematize the notion that ‘letterless’ soldiers, like ‘letterless Indians’, were to be identified with a pre-literate state of nature where only a savage violence could possibly co-exist with the lack of writing, laws and orthodox Christianity. On the contrary, Lope de Aguirre successfully inserts himself within the written discourses associated with the early modern law-making, bureaucratic state. The crucial point here, therefore, is the fact that whether the conquistadores complied with the stereotype of the illiterate soldier of fortune, or, alternatively, as sometimes occurred, were conquistadores-letrados who had some training in law and notarial rhetoric, as in the case of Cortés, the central role of the law to regulate every act of conquest and colonization cannot be overstated.2 Indeed, scholars have often remarked that the salient feature of Iberian Renaissance imperialism was its preoccupation with the Law and with the more abstract notion of jurisprudence, particularly in respect to the fundamental question of the legality of Spain’s presence in the Americas, which fuelled debates between jurists and theologians during the sixteenth century.3 The obsessive colonial law-making in the first two centuries of colonial rule culminated in 1680 with the Recopilación de leyes de los reinos de las Indias which attested to the fact that literally thousands of laws had been drawn up to oversee every aspect of military action and colonial administration (Morales

The Violence of the letrados

229

Padrón 1979). Moreover, if the drawing up of the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe in 1492 had meant the inscription of the Americas as a legal entity before European colonizers had even dropped anchor there, and hence, symbolized the a priori legislative character of transatlantic expansion, it also reminds us that legal battles between conquerors and the Crown’s lawyers – in this case particular case, over the rights and privileges of the Columbus family, - were a common feature of the earliest colonial expansion (Malagón Barceló 1961). All those individuals involved in some official capacity in military conquest and colonial expansion had, since 1492, been obliged to comply with the dictates of royal contracts (capitulaciones) and instructions with regard to their activities in the Americas and, subsequently, to provide detailed reports (relaciones) of those same activities when their explorations or conquests had been completed.4 These bureaucratic obligations gave rise to a multiplicity of scriptural dialogues between the metropolitan center and the Crown’s representatives in the colonies, which reflected the intense competition for powerful positions and the concomitant interpersonal enmity between individual conquerors and functionaries: El conquistador o el administrador colonial se movían en un campo politico de grandes riesgos, peligros y veleidades, en que debían explicar, justificar, negociar, ensalzar aliados, denigrar enemigos, obtener reconocimiento de la burocracia estatal y del rey, promover nuevas alianzas, desahuciar antiguos convenios. De allí que aparecieran con tal vigor en el período estudiado las cartas de relación, las crónicas, los tratados, testimonios de experiencias y aventuras de la Conquista. Estos escritos, en que se interpelaba a la autoridad estatal y real, fueron formas de la praxis social de los diversos sectores españoles en lucha. A través de estos textos, individuos representativos de intereses más generales meditaban sobre su situación social y política, buscaban una inserción apropiada en el orden institucional y politico de la época para influir decisiones superiores, intentaban identificarse a sí mismos a los grupos representados y aliados ante la estructura de poder, a la vez que en la polémica virtual o expresa contenida en los textos se diferenciaban de sus contrincantes y buscaban neutralizarlos. (Vidal 1985: 31)

This description of the vicious contests between individual interests which fomented the production of early colonial textual genres can, as we have noted, be traced right back to the legal battles during the earliest days of the European presence in the Caribbean. It was, however, after the initial conquest of the Mexican mainland that the Crown stepped up its legal control over developments in the colonies dramatically. In the two decades following the fall of Tenochtitlán,

230

Companion to Empire

and the beginnings of further expansion to western and northwestern Mexico as well as to Florida, the Crown, (and the metropolitan legalistic and bureaucratic machinery it represented), gained greater leverage over the administrative affairs of the newly-acquired territories and over those soon to be annexed (in what is today Central and South America). In the specific case of New Spain this assertion of metropolitan control at the expense of emblematic private individuals like Cortés would of course be articulated through two different colonial institutions: initially through the establishment of an Audiencia (court) in Mexico City and subsequently, in the form of the first Viceroyalty under Antonio de Mendoza in 1535.5 This period, then, would witness the increased implementation of legislative measures to regulate the behaviour of the original conquistadores and also of those Crown functionaries arriving in the colonies after the initial phase of conquest had been completed, especially with regard to the government of the large native populations of Mexico (Morales Padrón 1979). It is no coincidence, then, that it was during this same period that the trial by residencia (formal investigation) was introduced by the Crown to prevent an inappropriate amount of political power being concentrated in the hands of single individuals. Such measures clearly demonstrated that: los engranajes de la administración ya están funcionando, en particular todo un dispositivo dirigido a “marginalizar” a los funcionarios en sus respectivas circunscripciones y hacer de ellos verdaderos “parias de la sociabilidad” (actividades privadas y sociabilidad reducidas al mínimo), con mecanismos de vigilancia (la residencia entre otros) perfectamente a punto. (Blázquez y Calvo, 1992: 132)

Not only conquistadores came under suspicion in this regard and were obliged to undergo trials by residencia, but also officially-appointed functionaries like the president of the first Audiencia, Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, (as we shall go on to discuss in greater detail below), and even Viceroy Mendoza himself. The first conquistadores and colonial officials certainly understood, therefore, the critical importance of efficient written documentation for their own self-preservation before the metropolitan legal system.6 And, it is worth adding, not because they necessarily attributed any magical qualities to the written word or wished to denounce the lack of an alphabet among Amerindian cultures, but simply because they regarded it as an imperial

The Violence of the letrados

231

convention which was indispensable for demonstrating their conformity with the Crown’s control over the production of knowledge in and about the colonies. The Two Conquests In his social and cultural history of death and death imagery in Mexico, Lomnitz Adler (2005) describes the distinction between this conquest by the Crown’s letrados and the earliest years of military conquest in the following terms: the initial period of unbridled violence and genocidal destruction of indigenous life and culture perpetrated by the conquistadores represented quite simply, the power to destroy life. The subsequent period of ‘lawful’ colonization, and the Church’s concomitant introduction of Christian ritual, meant powers over the administration of both life and death of indigenous peoples through the performance of the sacraments (2005: 81). Implicitly, then, Lomnitz Adler takes advantage of Agamben’s (recuperation of the Aristotelian) distinction between zoe or ‘bare life’ and bios or ‘good life’ to account for the relationship between sovereignty and bio-political power in the contemporary period. Zoe would of course indicate the simple fact of life common to all living beings, and hence, life identified with a state of nature where an absence or exclusion from the rights and legal protection afforded by the law-making state would be the norm.7 Bios, meanwhile, indicates the life of a political being governed by the laws determining subjectivity in the modern state (Agamben 1998). Lomnitz Adler then proposes that the initial period of conquest reduced both colonizers and indigenous peoples to a subhuman bestial condition or of ‘bare life’ unprotected by law, but it also constituted an instance of the foundational violence required for the emergence of a political colonial state and bios or the ‘good life’. To underscore the lawless destruction of ‘bare life’ during the first few years of conquest, Lomnitz Adler borrows the language of essentialized polarities associated most famously with Las Casas’ pastoral metaphors of the wolves and the sheep: Spanish colonial statecraft was developed largely as an effort to rein in the destruction of the Indies, as an effort to move beyond the moment of animalistic depredation to the sphere of political life. The colonial state was built on the devastation that had been unleashed in the Indies. (97)

232

Companion to Empire Indeed, no new regime was conceivable without a good measure of violence, without reducing people to their animality […] On the other hand, no new law could willingly prolong the state of animality that had been introduced by the conquistadores, for a political life requires reining in the wolves and administering their lives as well as those of the sheep. (99)

The principal means for assuring this passage from uncontrolled destruction of bare life, which located the colonizers outside the law, to political administration which inscribed both conquistadores and Amerindians as legal subjects, was of course the intervention of the Church and the letrados who oversaw the colonial legal bureaucracy. We are thus left with a scenario in which the violence of conquest is conceived of as antithetical to the law, and in which the laws of the Crown guarantee the establishment of political order over the previously unacceptable behaviour of the individual representatives of colonial power. Dominion, then, in such a scenario, cedes to hegemony. The most obvious objection to such an opposition between violent conquest and legal colonization is simply, as we have noted, that exploration, possession, military engagement and colonization were all regulated by legislation even prior to the events of 1492, thus suggesting that, at least technically, the line between the ‘first’ conquest and the ‘second’ (legal conquest of the letrados) was somewhat less distinguishable than we might imagine. One need only recall the infamous institution of the Requerimiento as an emblematic example of how early colonial legislation might reveal rather than conceal the intimacy of law and violence. Indeed, if we return to Lomnitz Adler’s thesis, we might note that he also admits as much by alluding to the blurriness of the line between the violence of conquest and colonial law: “There is in this violence a constant play between civilization and animality, between political life and predatory behavior, between legality and a subhuman state” (70). The fact that the formation of a colonial state was predicated on dismissing any such ‘blurriness’ and on retaining the ideological distinction between colonial law and unrestrained violence is revealed most strikingly in the shifting nomenclature employed to conceptualize colonial conquest. The term conquista, for instance, possessed its own semantic nuances in the early modern period, albeit of a much more limited range than the previously discussed imperio. A conquista had been primarily identified with the noble and heroic

The Violence of the letrados

233

notion of a crusade or guerra santa against Moslems and hence, a just war (guerra justa) of ‘reconquest’ against an invading infidel army. Since this ‘providential’ understanding of conquest was employed by the early conquerors in the Americas and also by the historians who mythologized their feats, critics wasted no time in dismissing their use of the term as a travesty: Mientras que duraron (como dicho es) lo que ellos llaman conquistas, siendo invasiones violentas de crueles tiranos, condenadas no solo por la ley de Dios, pero por todas las leyes humanas, como lo son y muy peores que las que hace el turco para destruir la Iglesia cristiana. (Las Casas 1993: 105)

This critique of the mythologizing of violence and the illegality of conquest is of course a central theme throughout Las Casas’ Brevísima relación (1552). In this short propagandistic pamphlet, Las Casas sowed the seeds for the future Black Legend by inverting the significance of a whole series of terms identified primarily with legal territorial expansion and occupation: in the lascasian lexicon, for example, conquistador was replaced by verdugo or tirano; poblar and descobrir by despoblar, desolar; and conquista itself becomes estrago, matanza, masacre, invasión violenta, tiranía. While this sardonic inversion of terms was intended to reveal the rhetorical veneer disguising acts of lawless violence, it also served to demonstrate that the trope of the Golden Age could only continue to be applicable to America if Church and Crown brought the law to bear on the criminal tiranos who were creating an infernal desert where the possibility of a Christianized ‘Elysian Fields’ had once existed. In later years, as if to further emphasize this transition to a ‘new’ period of colonization and evangelization overseen more closely by the bureaucratic state, the Crown would actually prohibit all uses of the term conquista in official documentation of activities in the colonies (Subirats 1994: 58). The preferred term from 1573 on would be that of pacificación, a term which had been previously employed in colonial documentation of conquest to describe the evangelical spirit of laws governing conquest and hence, to promote the oxymoronic notion of a just or peaceful conquest.8 In effect, the terminological emphasis on the theological ethos underlying Iberian colonialism would serve to underscore the alleged transition from lawlessness to law, and from violent subjection to Christian subjectification (Subirats 1994: 63). We might obviously wonder at the extent to which this

234

Companion to Empire

supposed transition actually signified a transformation of the manifestations of colonial violence.9 Nuño de Guzmán’s Execution of the Cazonci My principal focus in this chapter, the execution of the Cazonci of Michoacán by the president of the First Audiencia of New Spain, Nuño de Guzmán, occurred at the outset of the period of so–called ‘bureaucratic’ colonization and thus serves to illustrate this scenario in which acts of ‘conquest’ deemed morally dubious were to be policed more vigilantly and the Crown’s administrative infrastructure in the colonies was to make its presence felt more comprehensively. Sixteenth century Spanish sources tended to interpret the event which took place in 1530, (some eight years after Francisco Montaño, and then Cristóbal de Olid, under orders from Cortés, had led the first expeditions into Tarascan territories), as a Christian allegory which depicted the baptized Cazonci (often cited as el buen Cazonci) as a martyr brutally murdered by Guzmán, the archetypal conquistador of the Leyenda negra and hence, personification of cruelty, avarice and obsessive self-interest (Warren 1985; Marín Tamayo 1992; KrippnerMartínez 2001; Stone 2004). Bearing in mind Lomnitz Adler’s notion of a foundational violence characterized by ‘subhuman animality’, both Guzmán and the Cazonci were invariably subjected to constructions identifying them with ‘the wolf’ and ‘the sheep’ respectively. Contemporary historians, meanwhile, are now more likely to interpret the years leading up to the execution as an illustration of how Tarascans and Spaniards had distinct, culturally-specific understandings of the notion of submission to colonial rule (Warren 1985). Indeed, stress is now more often laid on the often violent resistance to the advent of colonialism and in particular to the imposition of the encomienda system which characterized these first years of contact. In other words, while sixteenth century historians bent on condemning the early violence of conquest, (and, thus, promoting the ‘second’ conquest led by the Church and the letrados), depicted the Cazonci as an innocent victim of conquest, it is more likely that the Tarascan ruler had in fact been successful in hindering the occupation of his lands (Altman 2007). Similarly, while scholarly attempts to redeem Guzmán and to attenuate the exceptionalism of his violence and personal greed are few and far between, others have at

The Violence of the letrados

235

least striven to stress how the execution was not simply the act of a deviant individual driven by self-interest, but how it had a symbolic and practical impact on the region (Krippner-Martínez 2001: 43). Other scholars like Stone (2004), who have focused on the representation of the execution and its aftermath as narrated by the Cazonci’s half-brother Cuiníarángari (‘Don Pedro’) in the Relación de Michoacán (1541), have pointed to the complex nature of native collaboration with colonial authorities in negotiating their place in the new colonial order which emerged after 1530. For Guzmán’s actions, albeit inadvertently, had created a more receptive space among the local indigenous population for an alliance with the representatives of the early colonial Church, which might serve as a buffer to the abuses, associated with the encomienda system. This would also go some way to explaining why sixteenth century sources would represent the Cazonci as a model Christian and the Tarascans as spiritually superior to the depraved and violent conquistadores. My primary concern here, however, is not to further unravel the multiplicity of vested interests preceding and resulting from the execution of the Cazonci. Nor do I wish to either redeem Nuño de Guzmán from his traditional place in history, or, on the other hand, to further vilify him as a historical figure, and hence, simply perpetuate a facile Leyenda negra. As Krippener-Martínez points out, continuing to argue for Guzmán's exceptional violence only obscures “the essential violence inherent in founding a colonial order” (2001: 38). And, if we simply wish to be reminded of the fact that Guzmán has traditionally been vilified as one of the cruelest conquistadores of the sixteenth century, we need only recall the gruesome account of the campaign to conquer New Galicia written by his former interpreter, García del Pilar, or more famously, the gory litany of atrocities attributed to Guzmán throughout his political career in the province of Pánuco, New Spain and New Galicia as presented by Las Casas.10 The myth that the Cazonci had been tortured by fire and burning oil is of course presented as a Christian allegory most iconically in visual form in De Bry’s late sixteenth-century version of Las Casas’ account. Yet, if, rather than revisiting Guzmán’s extra-discursive acts of violence outside the law, we wish instead to examine the more abstract notion of a complicity between violence and the law, and more specifically, between territorial conquest and the writing of colonial law, we would be better advised to focus on Guzmán’s role as judge, law-maker and

236

Companion to Empire

administrator, and hence, as a Crown functionary entitled to use colonial law to legitimate any military action or show of force. Any vilification of Guzmán simply as an individual of exceptional cruelty of course serves only to re-assert the opposition between depraved illegal violence and legitimate colonization, and hence, by extension, the opposition between the ‘first’ and ‘second’ conquests. In effect, what I underscore here is the interpenetration of violence and written law, by conceiving of writing in the abstract form of bodily inscriptions (torture and execution) and its dependence on a significantly less abstract second form of writing - legal documentation – to legitimate colonial power over conquered peoples and territories. This second inscription was absolutely crucial if Guzmán was to justify the execution and present it as an act of lawenforcement quite compatible with any notion of just conquest. Of special interest in this regard is the symbolic relationship between the inscription of the Cazonci’s tortured and eventually executed body and the legal transference of power over the territorial body he had represented as supreme ruler over Tarascan lands. Before embarking upon the reading, however, let us first briefly consider some background information with regard to Nuño de Guzmán’s career and the political factionalism existing in New Spain at the time of the First Audiencia. Nuño de Guzmán (c. 1490–1558) had been born into an established noble family and, although he never received a degree in law, and, thus, was not technically a letrado, he had some early experience with the law and notarial rhetoric (Chipman 1967; Marín Tamayo 1992). As a former member or contino of the royal bodyguard, he was eventually appointed governor of the semi-autonomous province of Pánuco on the Gulf of Mexico in 1525, but did not actually take up the post until 1527. Although Guzmán’s governorship was controversial to say the least, was greeted with strong opposition from the proCortés faction in New Spain and inaugurated his bitter enmity with powerful ecclesiastical figures like Zumárraga and Las Casas, the Crown continued to support their choice of governor.11 In fact, this royal support remained constant as long as Nuño de Guzmán could fulfill his role as a political counter to Cortés who, in 1528, would be ordered to return to Spain and submit himself to a trial by residencia (judicial investigation) into his conduct in the colonies. In that sense, Nuño de Guzmán represented, at least initially, the Crown’s desire to

The Violence of the letrados

237

control the administration of the colonies through the appointment of judges of their own choosing at the expense of powerful private individuals like Cortés. In spite of the fact, then, that Nuño de Guzmán’s term as governor of Pánuco almost led to a civil war between that same province and the citizens of New Spain, the Crown proceeded to also make their governor the president of the First Audiencia of New Spain in 1529 (Adorno and Pautz 1999: 334). In retrospect, given the subsequent unfolding of events, we cannot but be bemused by the fact that this appointment was intended to signal “el fin del duro y violento estado de la conquista y el principio del establecimiento de un orden civil, regular y común” (Ramírez quoted in Marín Tamayo 1992: 53). As the political winds changed rapidly, Nuño de Guzmán would only remain in the post until April 1530 when his opponents in New Spain gained the upper-hand in the propagandistic war to have him ousted and Cortés returned from his residencia trial boasting the recently bestowed title of Marqués del Valle. Sixteenth century sources invariably assert that Guzmán had previously taken the bold step in late 1529 of leading an army into Michoacán, and on into modern-day Jalisco (territories which had previously been explored and partially conquered by Cortés and his followers) to initiate his campaign in ‘New Galicia’, precisely because he sensed that he was about to be removed from the presidency.12 Contemporary historians like Marín Tamayo, meanwhile, claim that Guzmán could not yet have possibly had any idea of his downfall, and attributes Guzmán’s decision to undertake the entrada simply to his ambition of conquering the northwestern territories from the Teules-Chichimecas against whom he had already engaged in battle on the outer frontiers of Pánuco (1992: 114). Whatever his reasons for embarking on the conquest, Guzmán wasted no time in indicating the tactics he intended to employ to achieve his aims throughout the campaign: before entering Jalisco, he executed Tzintzincha Tangaxoan, the most powerful indigenous leader in central Mexico after Moctezuma. Despite the devastating impact of Guzmán’s subsequent military action in the west for future colonial relations with indigenous communities of the region, his entrada was at least initially, acknowledged and accepted by the Crown (Altman 2007). For, while disapproving of the execution of an indigenous ally like the Cazonci, and, having replaced the First Audiencia with a second ruling body,

238

Companion to Empire

the Crown still maintained enough faith in Guzmán’s political abilities to have him appointed governor of the territories now comprising New Galicia in 1531.13 Nevertheless, the uproar surrounding the execution of the Cazonci, the previous claims that Guzmán had exceeded his authority in Pánuco, and the fierce opposition to the western expedition (as exemplified in Zumárraga’s documented condemnation of the war as unjust in 1531), would all appear amongst the list of charges which eventually led to Guzmán’s arrest in 1537.14 The inauguration of his own trial by residencia was soon followed by his expulsion from the colonies. The Cazonci’s Two Bodies In the years following his removal from the presidency, Guzmán would put pen to paper in his own defense, and, apart from his public works and his promotion of the evangelization effort, what he underscored was this role as law-maker, claiming in his Memoria from 1538/9, that his conquest of North-Western Mexico entailed “poniendo justicia y ley en la tierra que no la había ni habido” (Blázquez y Calvo 1992: 64).15 In the same way, when the Empress expressed her disapproval and apparent doubt about the legality of the execution of the Cazonci, by demanding that Guzmán provide her with a notarized transcription of the trial, Guzmán, writing two years after the execution in 1532, not only reminded her majesty that he had sent a copy of such a transcription to the Audience in Mexico City in 1530, some months after the actual trial, but remained adamant that, in executing the Cazonci, justice had been served and that “cierto ninguna se ha hecho más justa en toda la Nueva España; y si yo alguna pena podia merecer es porque dudé algunos días de hacerla” (Blázquez y Calvo 1992: 249).16 If, then, Guzmán sought to emphasize his conviction that justice had been done in the case, we should not forget that his intention in executing the Cazonci had also been to create the maximum symbolic effect so as to re-assert his authority, not only over the potentiallyrebellious peoples of Michoacán, but also against his political enemies in New Spain. That this was a symbolic act is especially evident in Guzmán’s Memoria where he reveals that the Cazonci’s execution was synchronous with his also ordering the foundations of a chapel to be laid and for three huge crosses to be erected on the westernmost

The Violence of the letrados

239

frontier of Michoacán so that a formal ceremony of possession could be performed before hostilities in the west began. It is worth quoting the Memoria at length to clarify this point: Me partí de México y fuí a la provincia de Mechoacan por me reacer allí mejor y porque tuve información quel Caçonçi hacía gente para poner en ciertos lugares por donde yo había de pasar, aunque yo le llevaba conmigo a la hora; y llegado allí, estando ordenando mi partida, pusieron acusación criminal al Caçonçi ciertos vecinos de México que allí tenían indios, y por esta causa le prendí; y tomada la información e pasado a tierra de Guerra de la parte de un río donde fundé una iglesia de piedra en honor de Nuestra Señora y puse tres cruces que agora está hecha e permanece, procedí contra el Caçonçi: e probado e confesado que había muerto en veces e en muchas partes más de ochenta criptianos y desollado cuatro para hacer areito con los cueros dellos en sus borracheces privadas, que yo invié al Audiencia, y que toda la tierra tenía tiranizada e usurpada y no servía a xriptiano ninguno y otros graves delitos, se hizo justiçia dél, y luego toda la tierra sirvió y parescieron los señores della y los frailes comenzaron a hacer monasterios por toda ella y libremente andan a convertir indios, y luego se descubrieron muchas minas de plata y oro; y puedo decir, y así lo saben todos, que yo gané la provincia de Mechoacan e la dí a su majestad, por la justiçia que se hizo del Caçonçi, la cual está hoy tan asentada y llana que México no está tal, y acabose de sentar con la conquista e poblazón que yo hice de la Nueva Galicia hasta la mar, de donde decía el Caçonçi que entraban los indios en lo quell sojuzgaba a matar los xriptianos y sus indios y que por esta causa no servía.17

This passage, then, underscores the conception of the Cazonci as an obstacle to the successful colonization of the region, as a threat to the encomienda system and the process of evangelization, and as the catalyst for armed rebellion against Spanish colonial authority. This depiction of a criminal, idolatrous, murderous and treacherous Cazonci, of course, contrasts with traditional accounts of native passivity before Spanish invincibility (Warren 1985; KrippnerMartínez 2001; Stone 2004), as it also equates the legal ‘removal’ of the Cazonci’s body with the establishment of colonial control over a territorial body hitherto resistant to that same control. Guzmán was hence able to claim that his conquest and subsequent campaign of repopulation were predicated on the use of legal force to eradicate the illegal violence embodied by the continued authority of the Cazonci in the region. The public seizure of indigenous rulers as hostages and their subsequent execution was an unremarkable and well-established feature of Spanish military conquest (Lockhart 1993; KrippnerMartínez 2001; Restall 2003), (not to mention an extremely common

240

Companion to Empire

feature of Guzmán’s own military strategy in the later conquest of New Galicia), and, in this respect, we might recall seminal figures like Moctezuma and Cuauhtémoc in Mexico and, in the case of the conquest of Peru, the death of Ata Hualpa. If this hostage-taking was an example of what Restall refers to as “a theatrical form of display violence” (2003: 25) designed to terrorize the ruler’s subjects into submission, it was also clearly a means for underscoring the analogy between dominion over the royal (indigenous) body and dominion over a wider territorial body. In the case of Guzmán’s arrest, torture and execution of the Cazonci, however, the mobilization of this synecdochical relationship between king and kingdom differs from other examples in the sense that the Cazonci of Michoacán had already entered into alliance (albeit precarious) with Cortés during the early stages of the conquest of his territories. In that sense, Guzmán’s destruction of the Cazonci’s physical body symbolized the establishment of a new colonial legal order, which would presumably eclipse that previously established by Cortés’ conquests. Yet, given the fact that, as far as Guzmán’s political enemies were concerned, Michoacán had previously been divided up into a system of encomiendas under the auspices of an alliance with the region’s supreme indigenous leader, the execution of that same ruler was received by contemporaries and later historians as a travesty of colonial justice and one of the most infamous events of the conquest of Mexico (Warren 1985; Cabrero Fernández 1989; Adorno and Pautz 1999; Krippner-Martínez 2001).18 While this implies that the execution of the Cazonci was a unique phenomenon, we should remember the similarities to the execution of Cuauhtémoc by Cortés some years earlier (1525) during his expedition to Honduras: in both cases, the most serious charge against the leaders included that of conspiracy to lead an armed attack against Spanish forces and their allies, in both cases confessions were exacted and, in both cases a formal trial apparently preceded sentencing and execution.19 Of course, distinctions remain between the two as national and regional historical symbols: Cuauhtémoc’s martyrdom would guarantee his longevity as a seminal symbol of courage and stoicism in the modern Mexican imaginary; the death of Tzintzincha Tangaxoan, meanwhile, was often portrayed by nationalistic historians of the post-Independence period as the death of a weak and effeminate coward.20 On the other hand, the death of the Cazonci remains an

The Violence of the letrados

241

event of greater significance for those historians seeking to underscore the intimacy between material conquest and writing itself as a ‘conquering’ practice. For the simple fact remains that no transcription of any trial, if such a trial actually took place, is extant in the case of Cuauhtémoc, whereas in the case of the Cazonci, two edited copies of the trial transcription have been made available to scholars since 1952 when Scholes and Adams first discovered a manuscript copy.21 And it is this document that allows us to examine the synecdoche between king’s body and territorial body in relation to its production in legalistic writing. A reading of the transcription of the Cazonci’s trial encourages us to better understand that Guzmán did not simply seek to terrorize the local population by executing their ruler. He sought to document the transfer of power over the region as a legal act and, by extension, to re-assert his personal authority as Crown functionary and legislator. In proposing a reading of the transcription which underscores the intimate connection between territorial conquest (violence) and lawmaking (writing laws) and between the death penalty and the reaffirmation of the authority of the (colonial) legal institution, I am indebted to Walter Benjamin’s conception of (state-sanctioned) violence as isomorphic with both law-making and also the preservation of the law (Benjamin 1986).22 Benjamin abides by the contention that state-sanctioned violence is always justified as a necessary means to just ends so that that same violence is no longer to be regarded simply as violence but as a legitimate (ethical) use of legal force.23 Moreover, he proposes that it is in the implementation of the death penalty that the interrelation between state-sanctioned violence (legal force) and the law (in the sense of law-preservation or law-making) might be found in its most primordial, archetypal and crudest form. For if violence is the origin of the law, in the sense that the primordial foundation of any social taboo cannot be divorced from an inaugurating act of force (since it obviously depends on the threat of force for its authority), it stands to reason that “where the highest violence, that over life and death, occurs in the legal system, the origins of law jut manifestly and fearsomely into existence” (Benjamin 1986: 286). Thus, rather than serving to simply punish an infringement of the law, the death penalty, as the most extreme form of legal violence against an individual life, serves to “establish new law” since each implementation of the death penalty enables the law

242

Companion to Empire

to “reaffirm itself” as a transcendental institution (ibid.). By way of a complement to Benjamin’s assertions, it is also worth recalling Foucault’s view that the early modern public execution served as a means for “reactivating (an ineluctable) power” by functioning as a manifestation of the “awesome force of the sovereign deployed” on the body of the condemned man (Foucault 1979: 49-50). In other words, in the public execution an isomorphic relationship between the power of the sovereign and the authority of the law is ‘legible’ in the dismembered body of the criminal. In this same respect, we might take note of the following observation from Lomnitz Adler (2005) so as to better appreciate the relevance of Foucault’s thesis to the specifically colonial context: In sixteenth-century Mexico, the public dismemberment, execution or disfigurement of bodies was a recurrent form of displaying and enacting power, and the steady trickle of decrees by Crown and clergy that sought to give dignity to dead Indians, or at the very least to dead Christian Indians, were feeble protestations in the face of actual practice. (2005: 86)

Corporeal Inscriptions If we bear this theoretical premise in mind, and also remind ourselves of Guzmán’s fierce enmity with Cortés, it is more than tempting to draw an analogy between the transcription of the trial and Cortés’ Second Letter from 1522. More specifically, what I intend here is that the transcription might be read as comparable to Cortés’ previous manipulation of an indigenous leader (Moctezuma) to legitimate conquest as a legal transference of power. In the same way, for instance, that Cortés’ letter documents the ‘lawful’ establishment of New Spain through the invention of Moctezuma’s speeches, Guzmán’s transcription of the trial involves the inscription of a captured indigenous body and voice which, ultimately, was intended to cement Guzmán’s authority as lawmaker and conqueror. Military conquest is therefore presented as founding a new legal order: but not simply because conquest is documented as law (and, hence, the justifiable means) before the sovereign, but also because an indigenous voice is appropriated as a means for legitimating the inauguration of that very order. In this same regard, readers of Cortés’ letter have remarked over the years upon the synecdoche mobilized with respect to Moctezuma’s body and the territories under Nahua

The Violence of the letrados

243

control (Checa 1996). The textual capture of Moctezuma amounted to a symbolic decapitation of the symbolic body of the Nahua confederation and simultaneously, its surgical reconstruction as part of the Holy Roman Empire under the title of New Spain (Pagden 1971). In the same way, Guzmán’s transcription of the trial, torture and eventual confession of the (physical) Cazonci is written up so as to permit the legal transfer of the Cazonci’s symbolic body to Guzmán, and, by extension, to the Crown. Once the whole drama has been transferred to writing, Guzmán has in his possession documental proof of the Cazonci’s apparent threat to Spanish colonial rule in the region, proof of the legal re-assertion of that same rule through the execution of the abuser of Crown authority and, in the process, the symbolic transference of complete sovereignty over conquered lands back to the Crown through Guzmán’s intercession. Guzmán’s dream of founding his own fanciful vision of a Mayor España – or the integration of the provinces of Pánuco in the east and New Galicia in the west – which, presumably, would diminish the territorial importance of New Spain and of Cortés, its ‘founder’, could quite easily be inferred from the drawing up of this document. While critics have argued that Guzmán’s own eventual downfall was in large part to be attributed to his inability to infuse his writings with rhetorical eloquence (“La pluma, a menudo poco segura y torpe de Nuño no daba la talla”) and hence, his inability to challenge his opponents, “algunos de los mejores escritores de su tiempo” (Blázquez y Calvo 1992: 37), we should be left in doubt at Guzmán’s relative competence in taking advantage of the legalistic discourse inherent to documents like the trial transcription to attempt to further his aims.24 In that sense, and bearing in mind that for years it was believed that Guzmán had not even bothered to document the trial formally and had summarily executed the Cazonci, we should be left in even less doubt that the production of a legitimating transcription would have been indispensable to his re-asserting his authority before the Crown and would hardly have been overlooked, especially given the controversial nature of the event. It is therefore worth reiterating that what we are dealing with in a transcription like this is the second of two types of inscription aimed at two different audiences. For, if, following Foucault (1979), we agree that torture constitutes the exercising of power through bodily inscription, or, the application of a metaphorical ‘writing’, and that, in

244

Companion to Empire

a similar vein, spectacular public executions of the early modern period constituted a manifestation of the sovereign’s power on the body of the victim, then it is evident that these corporal ‘writings’ were meant to be seen (and, presumably, to terrorize). In the case of the (alphabetic) transcription of the trial, torture and execution, meanwhile, a different audience was obviously intended. The spetacular bodily inscription inherent to early-modern torture and execution could be perfectly understood by an alphabetically-illiterate audience, while documented accounts of trials, torture and executions were directed at those authorities who would read and acknowledge them as standard procedures authorized by law. By extension, if the execution of the Cazonci might be equated symbolically with territorial conquest, then we might suggest that conquest (material violence) becomes affirmed as law (use of force for legal ends), not when the initial physical destruction (execution in this case) of bodies takes place, but when those bodies and their voices are inscribed (through discursive violence) as legitimating articles of written law and hence, as signals of the truth of an institutional power. In other words, the legality of Guzmán’s actions and the possibility of his reasserting his waning political power in 1530 was dependent on the official documentation of those same actions being read and acknowledged by the Crown. Confession as the Signature to Truth In this particular case, the actual transcription or ‘second inscription’ consists of three principal parts: the first is the summary of a suit brought against the Cazonci and his half-brother, Cuiníerángari, (Don Pedro), by one of the encomenderos who had benefited from the initial partition of Michoacan in 1524, a certain Francisco de Villegas. Amongst the charges brought by Villegas against the Cazonci are his apparent interference in the Spanish administration of the encomiendas by maintaining his traditional authority amongst the native elite of the territories, his having ordered the deaths of a number of Spanish settlers and his having indulged in “sodomy” (Scholes and Adams 1952: 12). The transcription then includes the testimony of three Spanish witnesses summoned to support Villegas’ suit and the charges being presented. What follows is the summons for the Cazonci to be brought before the court, “prender el cuerpo del dicho

The Violence of the letrados

245

Caçonçi” (19), so that the discursive transformation of the indigenous ruler’s physical body into Guzmán’s authority over the territorial body might be legally initiated. The series of charges against the Cazonci as well as several questions accusing him of withholding the gold and silver supplies of the region are then put to him in the form of a meticulously transcribed interrogation undertaken by Guzmán himself (20-22). Most noteworthy here, however, is the fact that the precise transcription of the Cazonci’s replies (and, needless to say, denials of the charges) to all the questions allows the inscribed indigenous voice to appear momentarily empowered and dissenting within a text already progressing inexorably towards a predictable conclusion. For instance, when questioned about his having ordered the deaths of six Spaniards in the town of Uruapan, the Cazonci replies with an ironic, ridiculing tone: “dijo que (no) por qué los había él de mandar matar, que lo digan los de Uruapan” (22). The inscription of this defiance on the part of the Cazonci is, however, quickly superseded by the testimony of a further nine Spanish witnesses in support of Villegas’ suit (25-36). The second section of the transcription consists of a previous suit (from 1529) brought against Cuiníerángeri and two indigenous intepreters (identified as Gonzalo Xuárez and Francisco) by another Spanish encomendero, Bernaldino de Albornoz, with a series of charges that lend greater weight to those presented in Villegas’ suit, particularly with regard to indigenous resistance to the implementation of the encomienda system and the Cazonci’s encouragement of that resistance (36-44). The third and final section of the transcription is dedicated to Nuño de Guzmán’s own case against the Cazonci and hence, his own contribution to the accumulated charges already facing the Tarascan leader: Guzmán’s (subsequently unfounded) conviction that the Cazonci was preparing an army to ambush his own troops as they embarked upon their conquest of modern-day Jalisco and a further charge of idolatry which had involved the murdering of several Spaniards and the ritualistic donning of the hides from their skinned corpses by the Cazonci and his companions (44-48). Following the confirmation of these charges by the apparently willing testimony of a native witness identified as Cuaraque, the Cazonci and other natives accused in the case are sentenced to undergo torture so that the charges might be proven beyond doubt:

246

Companion to Empire Hallo que para major saber la verdad debo de condenar y condeno al dicho don Francisco, llamado Caçonçi, a cuestión de tormento y tormentos, los cuales mando que sean dados en la forma y manera acostumbrada hasta que el dicho Caçonçi diga y declare la verdad conforme a derecho, y por esta mi sentencia juzgada así lo pronuncio y mando en estos escritos y por ellos. Nuño de Guzmán. (1952: 48)

Guzmán’s formulaic declaration here primarily demonstrates how the writing up of the decision to apply torture is in itself sufficient to legitimate that same decision. The declaration also underscores that all charges against the defendant have basically been accepted as proven but that they still require the ‘signature’ of the accused in the form of an oral confession, which must be transcribed to establish the truth of the charges as articles of written law. In this respect the transcription of the trial, torture and anticipated confession of the Cazonci according to strict codified ritual immediately bring to mind Foucault’s contention that early modern judicial torture “was certainly cruel, but it was not savage. It was a regulated practice obeying a well-defined procedure […] carefully codified” (Foucault 1979: 40). In that sense, it is worth remembering, once again, that Guzmán’s actions were hardly exceptional for the epoch and that spectacular corporal punishment was common throughout the colonial period. The importance attached to the application of torture as a criterion for condemning Guzmán’s cruelty over the years is more of a symptom of his political defeat during the period in question rather than that the actions he had taken were significantly more morally dubious than those of his contemporaries (Krippner-Martínez 2001: 38). It is surprising, therefore, that in their brief introduction to the transcription of the trial, Scholes and Adams warn the reader that the description of the Cazonci’s torments “puede llenar al lector de terror” (1952: 9). Rather than being appalled by the fact that torture was used, it is more important for my purposes here to focus on the strategic implications of recording such torture (‘violent writing’) rather than the torture itself. The description of the Cazonci’s torture that follows certainly suggests a regulated practice, which was correspondingly documented according to equally strict protocol with every single application of torment being described meticulously: Y luego fue traída una escalera para le dar el dicho tormento […] Y luego fue sentado en la escalera, y comenzádole a liar los brazos, su señoría le tornó a decir el dicho apercibimiento que diga la verdad […] Y luego le fueron liados los

The Violence of the letrados

247

brazos con cordeles […] Y luego fue tendido en el dicho tormento […] Y luego mandó su señoría ligar las piernas y apercebido que diga la verdad […]Y luego le fué dado el primer garrote al brazo derecho […]. (48 -9)

What is most noteworthy about the description of the torture, however, is its brevity compared to that of the other defendants, especially with respect to the fact that no mention is made of the fire torture applied to several of the defendants. As I noted earlier, sixteenth century sources like the Relación de Michoacán and Las Casas’ Brevísima relación asserted that the Cazonci was indeed tortured by fire as Cuauhtémoc had been. Consequently, his torment became an indelible image of the suffering endured by the Cazonci and of Guzmán’s legendary sadism. Whether other forms of torture were actually applied to the Cazonci mattered little, however, given that a confession was apparently produced. All previous and sub-sequent uses of torture against the accused were thus theoretically justified before the Crown and Guzmán’s opponents. In this respect, we might recall once again the relevance of Foucault’s meditation on the central importance of the confession to early modern trials in the French classical tradition: Within the crime reconstituted by writing, the criminal who confessed came to play the role of living truth. The confession, an act of the criminal, responsible and speaking subject, was the complement to the written investigation […] the confession had priority over any other kind of evidence. To a certain extent, it transcended all other evidence; an element in the calculation of the truth, it was also the act by which the accused accepted the charge and recognized its truth; it transformed an investigation carried out without him into a voluntary affirmation. Through the confession, the accused himself took part in the ritual of producing penal truth. (1979: 38-9)

While Foucault thereby also underscores the oral/written opposition presented by the appearance of a confession in a trial dependant on its regulated documentation for its legitimation, he stops short of actually affirming that only by being documented in writing could that same oral confession become accepted as a ‘signature’ to the production of truth. That this obviously had to be the case is made clear in the Cazonci’s trial since, having apparently confessed to the most serious charges against him (the preparing of an ambush, the murder of Spanish settlers, the continuation of idolatrous practices)(Scholes and Adams 1952: 50), the Cazonci is also obliged to listen to the confession being read back to him (in translation) and to once again

248

Companion to Empire

confirm the veracity of his original, oral confession, now documented in writing: después de estar quitado y desligado del tormento y leído y hecho entender su confesión por el dicho Juan Pascual, lengua, el cual dijo que aquello es la verdad y que otra vez lo torna a decir como en su confesión se contiene. Nuño de Guzmán. (50)

On the other hand, it is worth pointing out that, as far as Foucault is concerned, there is a certain parallel between the conceptions of the oral confession as a signature to the production of truth through torture and the spectacular signature to the truth of the crime as manifested in the public exhibition of tortured and executed bodies: The function of the public torture was to reveal the truth; and in this respect it continued, in the public eye, the work of the judicial torture conducted in private. It added to the conviction the signature of the convicted man. A successful public execution justified justice, in that it published the truth of the crime in the very body of the man to be executed. (Foucault 1979: 44)

The mutilated and executed body of the condemned man thus functioned as another means whereby the accused himself participated in the ritualized production of truth, ‘confessed’ to his crime before the public and legitimated his sentence as just. Yet, having said that, in the transcription of colonial trials and executions like this one, relatively few lines are devoted to the writing up of the actual exhibition of the accused’s tortured body and his public execution: Y luego el dicho alguacil mayor en cumplimiento de lo susodicho, trajo una estera de la tierra hecha a manera de serón (petaca), y en ella fué metido, e atados los pies a la cola de un caballo, y por voz de Pedro Martín, pregonero de este ejército diciendo “¡Esta es la justicia que manda hazer el emperador y reina, nuestros señores y el muy magnífico señor Nuño de Guzmán, presidente de la Nueva España y capitán general de este ejército en su nombre, a este hombre por traidor, idolatrico, y porque ha muerto muchos españoles por su mandado, mándanlo arrastrar e quemar por ello; quien tal hace que tal pague. Y luego fue traído al derredor del real e llevado al dicho paso, y dado un garrote y ahogado y quemado. (Scholes and Adams 1952: 67-8)

Here in the written transcription, unlike the real life execution where maximum spectacular effect in public was the aim, the execution now functions more as a formality, a short epilogue to a textual body, which has been formed and molded so as to produce and confirm the

The Violence of the letrados

249

desired truth (in the form of a confession). In contrast, virtually the whole transcription, as we have noted, had consisted of detailed descriptions of the interrogation of defendant and witnesses according to the strict legal procedure of the period, on the carefully-codified application of torture and then, most importantly, on the transcription of the confession(s) which authenticate the whole process. In other words, in the transcription, it is the transformation of the prisoner’s words into a signed confession which functions as the culmination of the whole process rather than the actual death of the prisoner. Torture as Territorial Expansion Although Elaine Scarry’s (1985) analysis of torture in modern regimes focuses principally on torture as a form of bodily inscription rather than on the documentation of that same torture as a means for bolstering a regime’s power, we might also make use of her conclusions to further analyze the importance of the transcription to Guzmán’s attempt to bolster his own authority. What is particularly striking, and, needless to say, relevant about Scarry’s analysis is her use of metaphors of imperial expansion to describe the aim of the torturer’s infliction of pain on the victim’s body, her conception of torture as a technique which translates pain into power, and which, ultimately, results in the appropriation of the victim’s voice. Torture understood as a metonym of imperialism, for example, reiterates most immediately the conception of (power over) the tortured body as a metaphor for (power over) a conquered territorial body as we previously noted. Moreover, by conceiving of torture in linguistic terms as a process of translation, Scarry invites us to view torture as a practice and a form of inscription which functions metonymically – both as an integral part and as a trope – for a whole process of colonization aimed at re-writing radical alterity within familiar categories of knowledge. Similarly, with respect to the appropriation of the victim’s voice by the torturer, the transcription of the trial, torture and execution of an indigenous leader like the Cazonci lends itself to a comparison with a template for a ‘conquering’ writing practice, productive of colonial subjectivities and designed to inscribe indigenous subjects within the parameters of Christian epistemology. Interestingly enough, Scarry begins her analysis by arguing that modern regimes resorting to the act of torture do so when the power

250

Companion to Empire

base of the regime does not enjoy a solid foundation, but is in fact demonstrably unstable and precariously close to being toppled: “It is, of course, precisely because the reality of (that) power is so highly contestable, the regime so unstable, that torture is being used” (Scarry 1985: 27).25 The process of torture, by denying the very real pain and suffering of the victim, functions as a mechanism that transforms the very incontestable reality of pain of the prisoner into an equally incontestable reality of dominance by the regime, thus denying any uncertainty about the regime’s legitimacy and strength. Even though Scarry is referring specifically to twentieth century dictatorial regimes, there is a certain appropriateness in applying her observation to the case of Nuño de Guzmán given that, as we have previously noted, his arrest, torture and execution of the Cazonci can be viewed as an attempt to re-assert his authority as representative of the Crown, as legislator and military strategist from a position of political weakness. More importantly, however, Scarry proceeds to describe how torture is a process which, on the one hand, results in the shrinking of the prisoner’s consciousness to encompass only the physical self and a reality limited to suffering physical pain, while, on the other hand, the torturer’s sense of self – which is not restricted to the physical limitations of the human body - expands in proportion to the gradual diminishment of the prisoner’s in a way analogous to territorial expansion: The torturer’s questions – asked, shouted, insisted upon, pleaded for – objectify the fact that he has a world, announce in their feigned urgency the critical importance of that world, a world whose asserted magnitude is confirmed by the cruelty it is able to motivate and justify. Part of what makes his world so huge is its continued juxtaposition with the small and shredded world objectified in the prisoner’s answers, answers that articulate and comment on the disintegration of all objects to which he might have been bonded in loyalty or love or good sense or long familiarity. It is only the prisoner’s steadily shrinking ground that wins for the torturer his swelling sense of territory. The question and answer are a prolonged comparative display, an unfurling of world maps. (Scarry 1985: 36)[My emphasis]

In the case of the Cazonci’s trial, we witness a process whereby the king’s ‘two bodies’ (the physical and the institutional) undergo a dramatic transformation: while the Cazonci’s institutional body symbolizing his continued authority and power over his territories - is appropriated by his torturer, Guzmán’s own sense of territory swells

The Violence of the letrados

251

up as he legitimates his replacement of the Tarascan ruler. As the Cazonci is gradually bereft of his institutional power in this way, his own world, like that of Scarry’s torture victim, becomes reduced to the space inhabited by a tortured physical body, which, needless to say, will eventually also disappear when burnt at the stake. In this respect, one cannot help but also be reminded of Foucault’s recommendation that the early-modern criminal’s body - “the least body of the condemned man” - be imagined as the opposite pole of the King’s “double body” (physical and institutional) (Foucault 1979: 29). That the trial of the Cazonci despoils him of his institutional power, reduces him to the mere presence of a physical body and to the status of a common heretic to be disposed of, is illustrated by the assertion in the transcription that the Cazonci had bitterly complained about being relegated to the level of a macegual (Nahuatl) or ‘commoner’ by the colonial regime: “preguntado si es señor de toda esta provincia, dijo que señor solía ser de ella pero que ahora es como macegual” (Scholes and Adams 1952: 20). Another key factor, according to Scarry, in the expansion of the torturer’s world and the translation of physical pain into the manifestation of the regime’s ubiquitous power, is the torturer’s control of language: the transition from pain to power requires the loss of the prisoner’s use of language as s/he becomes overwhelmed by the unbearable presence of his/her physical body. Indeed, the prisoner’s confession is simply proof that the destruction of the self, smothered by the “colossal” body in pain, has been completed by the appropriation of the last vestige of that self - the voice: The question and answer also objectify the fact that while the prisoner has almost no voice – his confession is a halfway point in the disintegration of language, an audible objectification of the proximity of silence – the torturer and the regime have doubled their voice since the prisoner is now speaking their words. (Scarry 1985: 36)

Scarry then alludes to the next stage of the process, which would involve the tape-recording, or transcription of the confession so that the regime’s appropriation of the prisoner’s voice might be left beyond doubt. Such inscription of the voice is tantamount to making it the property of the regime and hence further proof of the regime’s total dominance over the prisoner and of the regime’s inexorable expansion.26 As for this question of how the torturer obliges the victim

252

Companion to Empire

of torture to speak “the regime’s words” and how he, in effect, makes all the victim’s sounds and words the “property” of the regime could not be more obviously manifested than in the transcription of the Cazonci’s eventual confession. Yet, in the case of a colonial text like this where an indigenous voice is not only translated into a foreign language and culturally-specific writing system, but also inserted into an alien legalistic discourse according to the conventions governing an equally alien bureaucratic system, we should perhaps conceive not simply of an appropriation of a voice, but the construction of an indigenous speaking subject who serves to bolster the colonial regime’s power. ‘Disappearing’ the Body What is perhaps most striking about the textual construction and colonization of alterity in legal documents like this one is the fact that, not only is the inscribed voice of the accused eventually silenced (once the confession has been received) and superseded by the monologic discourse of a transcendental juridical institution, but the fact that the text also records how the physical body of the Cazonci, hitherto so symbolically useful, was to be reduced to ash after the execution and completely obliterated without a trace: y porque de los naturales de la dicha provincia se presume que tomarán sus polvos que de su cuerpo […] y los llevarán por con ellos idolatrar, de que Dios nuestro Señor será deservido, mando que de los polvos que de su cuerpo y de su carne se hicieren sean echados en este dicho río en manera que no puedan ser habidos. (67)

In other words, once the authority and power symbolized by the institutional body of the Cazonci has been transferred to his torturer and executioner, the dead physical body is completely ‘disappeared’ (literally and textually) so as to prevent his followers from creating their own potentially inflammatory symbols around the figure of the Cazonci. In that sense, it is tempting to view this disappearance as an attempted textual exorcism reminiscent of other legal texts describing the execution of perceived threats to colonial power.27 That this attempted disappearance obviously failed to have the desired effect is amply demonstrated by the fact that the Cazonci’s death would subsequently be interpreted by Spanish historians as a Christian allegory of saintly martyrdom before the lawless violence of a

The Violence of the letrados

253

conquistador, and hence, an act of sacrifice which inaugurated the successful evangelization of the region. More important, however, is the fact that, according to Don Pedro’s account of the execution as it appears in the Relación de Michoacán, the order to prevent the Tarascans from retrieving the Cazonci’s ashes was only partially fulfilled: Y diéronle garrote y ahogáronle, y ansí murió y pusieron en rededor dél mucha leña y quemáronle. Y sus criados andaban cogiendo por allí las cenizas y hízolas echar Guzmán en el río. Y echo huir la gente por su muerte de miedo. Todavía algunos criados suyos trujeron de aquellas cenizas y las enterraron en dos partes: en Pátzcuaro y en otra parte, y con las que enterraron en Pátzcuaro pusieron una rodela de oro y bezotes y orejeras, según su costumbre, y todas las uñas y cabellos que se había cortado desde chiquito, y cotaras y camisetas que había tenido cuando pequeño porque esta costumbre era entrellos, y en otra parte dicen también que enterraron de aquellas cenizas, y que mataron una mujer no se sabe dónde. (1989: 295-6)

If the Cazonci’s execution might be equated with martyrdom in the Christian tradition, the fact that his ashes were collected and then buried according to pre-Hispanic funerary traditions indicates that the death could actually also be used to symbolize indigenous cultural survival under colonial rule. In the Tarascan pantheon, the supreme deity had of course been Curicaueri, the god of fire, and, given the fact that each Cazonci was regarded as the incarnation of Curicaueri on earth, great stress was placed on consummating the deceased Cazonci’s death by fire (Cabrero Fernández 1989: 15-16). In effect, Guzmán’s burning of the Cazonci at the stake could be interpreted as being congruent with an indigenous funerary rite symbolizing the continuation of ancient non-Christian beliefs. The Cazonci’s death might, therefore, signify the inception of a new era in which Christianity would co-exist with indigenous cultural traditions and thus herald the potential for a period of inter-cultural conciliation. Indeed, Stone’s (2004) analysis of the paintings which accompany the Relación de Michoacán as vehicles for transmitting indigenous conceptual categories, and her recuperation of Don Pedro as cultural mediator rather than as colonial opportunist, bring compelling evidence to suggest that this was in fact the case. Ultimately, the compilers of the Relación de Michoacán thereby re-affirm the ‘two stage’ conception of conquest with the violence personified by

254

Companion to Empire

Guzmán superseded by a period of lawful settlement and evangelization. The most important point, however, is that neither the execution nor the writing up of the trial and torture could save Guzmán from his own arrest and trial by residencia. The value of a document like the transcription of Guzmán’s supposedly ‘lawful’ action against the Cazonci, then, is the fact that it demonstrates that as long as Guzmán was afforded institutional power by virtue of his office, he could attempt to transform the violence of military conquest into the acceptable use of force for legal ends. We might recall that some years went by before Guzmán was actually stripped of his governorship of New Galicia and that in effect, he was allowed to consolidate his conquests of north-western Mexico, despite his execution of the Cazonci and despite the previous charges against him as president of the First Audiencia and as governor of Pánuco. However, once his services as a conqueror had been rendered, his privileges as colonial official – that is, in the sense of law-maker were withdrawn and the colonial legislative machinery in the metropolis finally decided that he should instead be viewed as an outlaw who threatened the very preservation of colonial law. Henceforth, stress would be laid exclusively on Guzmán’s actions beyond the pale, his savage atrocities and inhumanity, and, in short, his violence, so that the traditional antithetical relationship between colonial law and (unacceptable) colonial violence might be reestablished. Indeed, while Guzmán’s fate is obviously to be understood within the specific context of sixteenth century Castilian law, it is, nevertheless, worth extrapolating from this particular case a more general observation about the relationship between the law and violence. What I am thinking of here is another of Walter Benjamin’s philosophical insights on the relationship between violence and the modern law-making state to which we alluded earlier; and, especially with respect to the relationship between state-sanctioned violence and that wielded by an individual: all the natural ends of individuals must collide with legal ends if pursued with a greater or lesser degree of violence. From this maxim it follows that law sees violence in the hands of individuals as a danger undermining the legal system […] the law’s interest in a monopoly of violence vis à vis individuals is not explained by the intention of preserving legal ends but, rather, by that of preserving the law

The Violence of the letrados

255

itself; that violence, when not in the hands of the law, threatens it not by the ends that it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law. (Benjamin 1986: 2801) 28

In other words, like other functionaries of this period, Guzmán was viewed as a threat to the Crown’s monopoly over the use of violence for legal ends. Those individuals, who had earlier been the representatives of sovereign colonial law using a legally acceptable force, now became outlawed as perpetrators of an unlawful violence and fell victims to the wider legal bureaucracy to which they had apparently been so loyal. Consequently, instead of regarding Guzmán’s punishment as symptomatic of a transitional period between lawless violence and legal administration, we might simply view it as evidence of a more general complicity between the law and violence, despite the advent of the so-called ‘conquest’ by the letrados.

256

Companion to Empire

Notes 1

Mandamientos del virrey don Antonio de Mendoza, quoted in Marín Tamayo (1992: 248 -9). 2 Even though historians like Elliott (1986 [1971]) and Pagden (1986) have discarded the notion that Cortés might be considered a letrado in the sense of being well-versed in Latin and classical humanism, neither would deny that his training in law and notarial rhetoric would allow us to conceive of him as a letrado in the sense of a legal bureaucrat. It was, after all, Cortés’ manipulation of legal rhetoric, which guaranteed his ‘after-life’ as the archetypal figure of Spanish imperial history. 3 “The symbol of the Spanish Empire lies, more than in the ships of discovery and the swords of the conquerors, in the toga of the oidor and the courtroom of the audiencia” (Alcalá Zamora quoted in Malagón Barceló 1961: 17). 4 What I intend here are conquest narratives in the standard form of relaciones or official reports, (witnessed and authenticated by notaries, and, hence, validated as legal documents), which were intended to confirm the correspondence between the interests and actions of individual conquistadores and an imperial ideology predicated on the universalism of a militant Catholic Church (Vidal 1985: 35). We cannot overstate the extent to which the relaciones functioned as legal documents and also actually reflected the colonial legislation being implemented at any given time by that same Crown bureaucracy. In effect, laws were constantly modifying the production and organization of knowledge which might rationalize the imperial enterprise and, as a result, those conquistadores keeping written records of their expeditions and writing accounts of their services rendered to the Crown did so using the “epistemic grid” provided by such colonial legislation (Rabasa 2000: 101). 5 During his term as viceroy between 1535 and 1550, Antonio de Mendoza took important steps which reflected this official preoccupation with making systematic studies of pre-Hispanic cultures and their socio-political infrastructures (Liss 1975; Calderón 1988): for instance, the printing press was introduced into New Spain for the first time and the Tlatelolco school was founded for the training of indigenous translators and for the production of ethnographic texts under the Franciscans’ tutelage. Moreover, the Viceroy commissioned the production of texts like the Codex Mendoza (1541) to gain insight into Mexica history, systems of tribute and imperial administration. He also commissioned the drawing up of the Relación de Michoacán (1541) to provide information about the history, traditions and customs of the prosperous Tarascan kingdom of Michoacán, to the north of Mexico City. I will have say more to say about this latter work and its depiction of the execution of the last ruler of the Tarascans as the chapter progresses. 6 The central importance of the writings controlled by the organs of colonial legislative administration – the Council of the Indies in Spain and the respective audiencias and chancelleries in the colonies – meant that other kinds of writing were unavoidably imbued by the all-pervading legality of the bureaucratic state. Moreover, if, as González Echevarría (1990) has argued: “Law and history are the two predominant modes of discourse in the colonial period” (55), then it is in the sense that the law regulated the form and content of official historiography: “In the sixteenth century writing was subservient to the law. One of the most significant changes in Spain, as the Peninsula was unified and became the center of an Empire, was the legal system, which redefined the relationship between the individual and the

The Violence of the letrados

257

body politic and held a tight rein on writing. Narrative, both fictional and historical, thus issued from the forms and constraints of legal writing. Legal writing was the predominant form of discourse in the Spanish Golden Age. It permeated the writing of history, sustained the idea of Empire, and was instrumental in the creation of the Picaresque” (González Echevarría 1990: 45). Early modern legal discourse, therefore, even gave rise to literary genres like the picaresque novel, which parodied the selflegitimating first person narrative of colonial cartas de relación and reflected the codified relationship between individual and bureaucratic authority (56-59). Both the writer of the relación and the pícaro-narrator of the novel, sought validation and integration into the body politic through the regulated norms of writing (46). 7 I am aware of the ambivalence intended by Agamben in using the term ‘bare life’ in specific relation to the dehumanized state of the modern concentration camp prisoner. While zoe implies ‘life’ in the sense of all that is left of the impoverished, unprotected and hence, unvalued humanity of the prisoner, it also indicates the last shred of humanity that is worth retaining under such circumstances. My interpretation of Lomnitz–Adler’s thesis is predicated on the former rather than the latter understanding of the term. For an insightful critique of Agamben’s rhetorical ambivalence and “hermeneutic controversion”, see Brennan (2006: 194). 8 For a discussion of how the evangelical spirit of laws governing conquest manifested itself in early colonial documents, see Rabasa’s (2000) reading of Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios. Cabeza de Vaca’s notion of a just conquest coincides with the dictates of the Ordenanzas sobre el buen tratamiento de los Indios of 1526, which, paradoxically, allow for the waging of war and enslavement despite their apparent pastoral concern with the welfare of the indigenous population. In other words, Cabeza de Vaca’s theory of conquest demonstrates the extent to which colonial law might provide methods for both “regulating violence as well as providing mechanisms to control information” (Rabasa 2000: 41). 9 Subirats describes this transition from subjection to the making of Christian subjects in terms of a distinction between kinds of colonial violence rather than in terms of a progression from lawlessness to lawfulness: “Principio de vasallaje o sujeción por medio de la violencia y la guerra, de la persecución, la tortura y el castigo; principio de subjetivación, inmediatemente después, por medio del bautismo compulsorio y masivo, mediante el nuevo nombre y la nueva ley que el bautismo significan: principio de indoctrinación y propaganda, de enseñanza y vigilancia persuasivas, o sea de educación formativa, como momento supremo que confiere valores, significados, contenidos nuevos a un proceso al mismo tiempo destructivo y abstracto, brutal y sublime de sujeción y subjetivación, de destrucción y aculturación: tales son los momentos del discurso teológico de la colonización americana” (1994: 63). 10 García de Pilar’s account, Relación de la entrada de Nuño de Guzmán, que dió García del Pilar, su intérprete (c.1532) appears in Icazbalceta (1971: 248–261); for Las Casas’ portrait of Guzmán, see the Brevísima relación (1993 [1552]: 121-125). On the subsequent consolidation of Nuño de Guzmán’s reputation as a cruel sadist and the construction of the Cazonci as either ‘innocent’ or as a ‘coward’, see Krippner-Martínez’s summary (2001: 39-42) 11 On the historical context in which the Cazonci was executed and Nuño de Guzmán eventually stripped of all his privileges and arrested, see the studies by Chipman (1967), Warren (1985), Bláquez y Calvo (1992), Marín Tamayo (1992), Adorno and Pautz (1999) and Krippner-Martínez (2001).

258 12

Companion to Empire

On this point, see for example: López de Gómara (2000: 413) and Las Casas (1993: 122). 13 On Guzmán’s conquest of Michoacán and Nueva Galicia, see the works by Warren (1985), Marín Tamayo (1992) and, more recently, Altman’s essay (2007). 14 Zumárraga’s severe critique of Nuño de Guzmán’s performance as governor in Pánuco and President of the First Audience appears in his infamous letter to Carlos V in 1529. See Icazblaceta (1947: Vol 2, 169-245). Evidence of is opposition to the war in New Galicia appears in a short document entitled Contra Nuño de Guzmán 1531 in the same collection (281-3). 15 The references to Nuño de Guzmán’s Memoria (1538/9) and Carta a la emperatriz (1532) are those reproduced in their entirety by Blázquez y Calvo (1992). 16 It appears that Guzmán did in fact have a copy of the transcription sent to Mexico City in July 1530, five months after the actual trial, a fact that appears to have been doubted by historians until 1952 when Scholes and Adams published their manuscript edition. On the history of the different copies of the transcription of the trial, see Scholes and Adams’ brief introduction to their (1952) edition, and for further information, see Warren (1985) Adorno and Pautz (1999) and Krippner-Martínez (2001). 17 Memoria de los servicios que había hecho Nuño de Guzmán desde que fue nombrado gobernador de Panuco en 1525 (1538-9) (reproduced in Blázquez y Calvo 1992: 63). 18 In this regard, we might remember Parry’s assessment of Guzmán as “a natural gangster” (1948: 19) and his perpetuation of a nineteenth century historiographic tradition, which vilified Guzmán while, rather problematically, exalting Cortés as a military genius. For an illustration of how contemporary historians continue to condemn Guzmán as exceptionally cruel, see Yáñez Rosales (2001), who, while citing sixteenth century sources, underscores the brutality of the tactics employed in the conquest of modern-day Jalisco and asserts that it is therefore impossible to remain neutral with regard to Guzmán’s place in history (2001: 58). 19 According to Gómara, after the confessions had been exacted from Cuauhtémoc’s companions that he was in fact conspiring to revolt against the Spanish, Cuauhtémoc and the other ring-leaders were hanged (justly) after being tried: “les hizo proceso, y al cabo de poco tiempo se ahorcó por justicia a Cuauhtimoccín, Tlacatlec, y Tetepanquetzatl” (Gómara 2000: 377). 20 For a relatively recent treatment of Cuauhtémoc’s role as national hero, see Johnson (2004), and for a summary of nineteenth century depictions of the Cazonci, see Stone (2004: 168–9). Contemporary historians like Marín Tamayo abide by the stereotypical image of the Cazonci as weak and indecisive to this day (1992: 121-122). 21 In 1952, Scholes and Adams published an edition of a 1532 copy of the manuscript and made the existence of the transcription known to modern scholars for the first time. In 1997, Escobar Olmedo published a version of another copy of the transcription, which was used primarily as evidence in Guzmán’s trial by residencia (Escobar Olmedo 1997: 20). 22 I am referring here to Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ essay from 1921. Amongst contemporary readings of the essay, those by Derrida (1992), Balibar (2002) and Avelar (2004) have underscored the fact that in the English title of Benjamin’s essay, the translation of the original German Gewalt as ‘violence’ fails to capture the fact that Gewalt also signifies ‘authority’, ‘public force’ and the notion of a state-

The Violence of the letrados

259

sanctioned use of violence, thus ignoring a clear allusion to a case in which violence is legitimated by law. Derrida’s reading of the essay is especially useful for denaturalizing the foundational conception of the Law as a transcendental institution and emphatically prizing the concept of justice free from its automatic identification with the Law. In this respect, Pascal’s well-known aphorism that ‘La justice sans la force est impuissante’, and Montaigne’s contention that ‘Or les loix se maintiennent en crédit, non parce qu’elles sont justes, mais parce qu’elles sont loix’ (Derrida 1992: 12) illustrate Derrida’s understanding of the law as an institution owing its power to its authority and capacity for force rather than any appeal to justice as an ethical ideal. The difference between justice and law is the difference between “justice, infinite, incalculable, rebellious to rule and foreign to symmetry, heterogeneous and heterotropic) and the exercise of justice as law or right, legitimacy or legality, stabilizable and statutory, calculable, a system of regulated and coded prescription” (1992: 22). For Derrida the regulatory, prescriptive, ordered and calculating nature of law, as a codified corpus of prohibitions and rules to be generally enforced, with no respect for the singularity and specificity of the cases in which it is applied, are what makes the inevitability of justice being done in such cases so problematic and what makes the universality of the law so paradoxical. 23 And, although Benjamin’s understanding of this relationship between violence and the law in terms of means and ends might actually suggest an opposition between lawmaking (establishing legal ends) and law-preservation (preserving an existing order), Benjamin reminds his readers that the founding of new laws is invariably predicated on the conservation of a pre-existing legal order 24 It is worth noting here that Parry, in a similar vein, rather bizarrely scoffs at Guzmán for lacking the ‘charm’ possessed by the more successful Cortés (Parry 1948: 19). 25 This point is, of course, debatable, especially given the fact that, as we know, the world’s most powerful nations make systematic use of torture to further their ends when it is considered expedient. We should also bear in mind Avelar’s critique of Scarry’s thesis in this regard: instead of supporting the notion that torture is somehow a ‘barbaric’ practice antithetical to the ‘civilized’ world (and, hence, implicitly the reserve of ‘rogue nations), Avelar argues that torture is inextricably linked to the emergence of ‘civilized’ institutions in the western tradition (Avelar 2004: 32). 26 “The ‘it’ in ‘get it out of him’ refers not just to a piece of information but to the capacity for speech itself. The written or tape-recorded confession that can be carried away on a piece of paper or on a tape is only the most concrete exhibition of the torturer’s attempt to induce sounds so that they can be broken off from the speaker so that they can be taken off and made the property of the regime. The torturer tries to make his own not only the words of the prisoner’s confession but all his words and sounds” (Scarry 1985: 49). 27 More specifically, and as a seminal example of such reports, I am thinking here of the execution of Lope de Aguirre to which I alluded earlier. In Francisco Vázquez’s account of Aguirre’s demise and eventual execution, he laments the fact that the dismemberment of Aguirre’s corpse would not have the desired effect of symbolizing either the triumph of the colonial legal order over acts of rebellion or of exorcising Aguirre’s cruel actions from the collective memory. On the contrary, according to Vázquez, Aguirre himself had predicted quite glibly that, should he be overthrown by forces loyal to the Crown, the public display of his severed head would serve merely

260

Companion to Empire

to preserve his memory in the popular imaginary forever rather than serving as a deterrent to other acts of rebellion (Vázquez 1986: 145 -6). Moreover, Vázquez proceeds to describe how in fact Aguirre’s prediction would not only be fulfilled, but exceeded: after his body had been quartered, his head was indeed severed and placed in an iron cage for public display while each one of his severed hands was sent to respective neighboring towns to complete the spectacular dissection. The problem, he explains, is that each part of Aguirre’s body, which was exhibited in this way, was received “como si fueran reliquias de algún santo” (Vázquez 1986: 146). Rather than demonstrating the foucauldian inscription of the sovereign’s power on the body of a criminal (as a means for re-asserting the universality of the law and of the omnipresence of the sovereign’s own symbolic body), the public spectacle of Aguirre’s body had instead had the effect of cementing Aguirre’s celebrity and incipient mythologization. 28 Echoing both Machiavelli and Hobbes, Benjamin argues that despite the fact that the commonwealth might respect the right of the individual to use violence for natural ends, that same right must, by law, be given up so as to protect the integrity of the commonwealth and to allow a state monopolization of the use of force for legal ends. Hence, any use of violence by individuals is potentially a threat to the foundations of the Law itself rather than the enactment of a natural right for, for example, self –protection. According to Benjamin, any challenge from individuals to the commonwealth’s monopoly of violence for legal ends implies a law-making function on the part of the challengers. For if such a challenge were to be treated with impunity, the commonwealth’s legislators would paradoxically be accepting legalized violence, which reformed their own monopoly over violence and the law. Meanwhile, the subordination of individuals to the state’s monopoly over violence would, on the other hand, constitute an act of law-preservation.

Postscript In his contrastive analysis of the Romance and national philological traditions, Gumbrecht (1986) suggested that, far from being a nationalist or imperialist discipline, Romance Philology might be better understood as the discipline of the outsider, of the exile, entranced “with the fragmentation, the loveliness and merits of the scattering of the long- lost empire” (Menocal 1994: 109). Bearing this in mind, it comes as no surprise that Gumbrecht should also note that the founder of Romance Philology, Friedrich Diez, actually fit the bill of the ‘outsider’ himself: Diez was Prussian, and hence a non-native Romance speaker, and born at a time when Germany did not even yet exist as a nation. Moreover, Diez dwelt on Provençal poetry in Languedoc and therefore on a language not correlated with any national boundaries, and in fact a tongue destined for destruction to allow for the emergence of France as a linguistically unified polity. If later nationalistic philological institutions of individual powerful cultures “bound by a specific and particular language” (Menocal 1994: 109) stood in contrast to Diez’ apparent love of diasporic fragmentation and languages ‘without homes’, then Romance Philology, in its preoccupation with an essentially atemporal Romania “written in all languages and at all times”, presupposed that for all its practitioners – not least of all in the case of Erich Auerbach – the “philological home is the earth: it can no longer be the nation” (110). By revisiting such a conception of Romance Philology, Menocal appears to want to create a certain equivalency between contemporary concerns with crossing frontiers, diasporic migrations, the writing of history from exile, the rejection of cultural nationalism and the practice of the discipline in its broadest sense. While attractive, and apparently oppositional to the ethos of national philologies, there remains the danger, it seems to me, that this conception of a diasporic or even transnational Romance philology, might, in its obsession with

262

Companion to Empire

crossing frontiers at will, unwittingly serve as a metaphor for contemporary economic (neo-liberal) deregulation and hence, reflect the market mentality inherent to new forms of colonialism. Furthermore, and more importantly, however great its obsession with the fragments of empire and languages without “national homes”, there is no escaping an association between Romance Philology and a nostalgia for the restitution of imperial origins, as much as there is no escaping a traditional identification of Hispanic Philology with the restitution of mythic national origins. Finally, and without a doubt, most importantly, what should not be overlooked either, given the inextricable link between early modern colonialism and the evolution of individual nation-states, is the fact that the national philological tradition itself could also – as was made patently clear in this book be inherently nostalgic of empire. In structuring this study as a genealogy of the written word, then, I have been able to question such imperial nostalgia and the mythologization of the eternal nation. For, instead of tracing the trajectory of how Spanish evolved from Latin, and thus, re-affirming the conception of a broader national history emerging inevitably from a single origin, I chose to analyze the varied social functions of writing in Hispanic cultures at distinct historical junctures of the premodern and colonial periods. These were also historical junctures at which the written word assumed increased ideological importance as a means for bolstering different kinds of ‘imperial’ power over peoples and territories. In each case studied, therefore, I focused upon the relationship between the emergence of textual cultures and the ideological consolidation of territorial expansion, or, quite simply, upon the alliance between writing and imperium. By underscoring the shifting significance of both concepts in Hispanic cultures, my aim was also to destabilize the historical continuity associated primarily with an ancient etymological theory of knowledge. In its turn, this destabilization of an antiquated language theory has presupposed its substitution by a history of the shifting values of concepts, by a constellation of historical scenarios in which those same concepts were transformed, and, hence, ultimately, by a challenge to the predictable continuities inherent to national and imperial historiography.

Postscript

263

Having said that, it is worth pondering the following observation with regard to similar attempts to undermine a specifically western preoccupation with origins: No matter how often the critique of the search for origins is made, no matter how sophisticated the person, the origin is the goal (Its promises are as tenacious as they are vague, lost in a melee of yearning energizing the discipline of history itself). (Taussig 1992: 161)

Taussig believes that this is the case because the search for origins functions, not only as an inevitable principle around which to construct history, but as a seductive means for affirming a sense of self which, evidently, proves to be irresistible to the western psyche (1992: 162). As an anthropologist, Taussig identifies this allure of origins to a colonial attraction to the primitive and by extension, the supposed pre-history of ‘the west’, which, in its turn, might assume a more Freudian hue, and be imagined as an originary mother and hence the symbol of “the womb of time itself” (ibid.). While Taussig proceeds to illustrate this premise through allusions to Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos (1953), what immediately comes to mind in the context of my own study is of course the Golden Age trope. We might recall that Martyr D’Anghiera employed this classical figure to imagine the Americas as a primitive state of nature located in Europe’s distant, mythical past. The inhabitants of the terrestrial paradise, meanwhile, were constructed accordingly as child-like innocents and thus, provided the discursive means by which the ‘civilized’ self of the Christian writer might be constituted. If Taussig’s identification of the quest for origins as an exclusively western phenomenon is certainly questionable, there is no doubt that such a quest has traditionally been the methodological principle around which to construct histories of western languages. I therefore took that same principle to its logical extreme as a means for underscoring the ‘unreality’ of mythic, national continuities, which can be traced back to a recoverable origin. In effect, my analysis centered upon a series of foundational figures or ‘fathers’ of textual culture (Isidore of Seville – the saviour of Late Imperial Christian Culture and symbolic commencement of the Hispanic Middle Ages; Alfonso X el Sabio, the ‘father’ of Castilian prose; Nebrija, the ‘father’ of Castilian humanism; Martyr D’Anghiera, the ‘first’ Renaissance historian of the Americas; and, even, albeit to a lesser

264

Companion to Empire

extent, Bernardino de Sahagún, the ‘father’ of anthropology), on a series of foundational or ‘first’ texts (the first history of the Visigoths of Hispania; the first comprehensive codification of modern Spanish law in Castilian; the first Castilian grammar; the first Latinate history of the New World; the first account of the conquest of Mexico written in alphabetic Nahuatl), and, on a series of ‘superlative’ historical figures (Nuño de Guzmán, President of the First Audiencia and hence, first representative of the bureaucratic ‘conquest’ and, simultaneously, the most sadistic and abusive of the conquistadores). The analysis of these primordial figures and texts within the wider discursive field that they inhabit, and in several cases, within the context of their future reception in subsequent historical studies, has of course served me in proposing that these clichés and commonplaces of Hispanic textual cultures can be employed to divert our historical gaze to the constructed nature of their respective originary claims. More crucially, they can also be employed to underscore the intimacy between official ideologies of language and the consolidation of territorial conquest, rather than simply reinforcing the predictable linearity of total histories. By reading these foundational figures and their respective textual cultures in such terms, we are thus able to confirm that the standardization of prestige languages and the creation of an (alphabetic) ‘literate mentality’ arise from the need to consolidate such territorial expansion. In other words, neither prestige written registers nor the ‘literate mentality’ emerge and evolve naturally: they are artificially created. And, just to underline this inextricable relationship between the evolution of written languages and the maintenance of different manifestations of imperium, we might make one further point: If the episodes of Hispanic history analyzed in this study are associated with national or imperial ‘origins’, it is primarily in the sense of an excavation of the foundational violence of conquest and of that most primordial form of inscription: written law (both canon and secular), the archetypal scriptural manifestation of authority, regulation and force. These are not ‘origins’, then, that would simply serve to naturalize the historical trajectory of a mythic self boasting a homogeneous culture and a single national language. Finally, it goes without saying that the Spanish language is of course no longer a language of global empire in today’s world where English has emerged to fulfill that same role. Indeed, even though the

Postscript

265

hegemonic role of Spanish vis à vis Amerindian languages in Latin America, and vis à vis other Ibero-Romance languages in the Peninsula continues to provoke debate, nowadays Spanish is itself often more readily identified as a language which can challenge the official dominance of English in the USA. In this same regard, it is also worth adding that much scholarly discussion has been devoted to the question of plurilingualism in nations with both ‘official’ and ‘national’ languages, or to the changing role of Spanish and English in the contemporary world of transnational economics (Mar-Molinero 1996, 2006a, 2006b; Del Valle 2002, 2006). Not surprisingly, given world events of the last twenty years, there has also been much debate over the exact constitution of the modern-day empire of the Englishspeaking world, and also, curiously enough, over how to define the precise significance of the word itself. What I am thinking of in particular here is the ambivalent use of Empire as a concept in Negri and Hardt’s eponymous work (2000). Among the principal arguments presented by these authors was the notion that the contemporary global economic and political order is no longer governed by a single nation as was the case with the empires of the past, and hence, cannot be equated with old ‘imperialisms’: “Imperialism is over. No nation will be world leader the way modern European nations were” (Negri and Hardt 2000: xiv). Yet, given the universal expansion of contemporary globalization, the authors saw fit to retain the term Empire as if to suggest residual similarities with the universal pretensions of empires of the past. They also told us that since all analyses of empire have always simultaneously comprised an analysis of the decline of empire (370), they had chosen to retain the term Empire to describe the fact that the global system had created the potential for its own dissolution: Empire creates a greater potential for revolution than did the modern regimes of power because it presents us, alongside the machine of command, with an alternative: the set of all the exploited and subjugated, a multitude that is directly opposed to Empire, with no mediation between them. (393)

In other words, Empire implies three distinct meanings: 1) supranational sovereignty over the contemporary global order; 2) the residue of previous imperialisms; 3) the potential for revolution against Empire.

266

Companion to Empire

While critics received the stylized rhetorical ambivalences of Empire with a certain impatience, their harshest comments were reserved, quite understandably, for the authors’ tendency to exculpate individual nation-states for today’s militarism, and for the authors’ confident announcement that imperialism had ended at a time when “imperial adventure[s] almost Roman in [their] excess” had once again become the guiding principle of foreign policy (Brennan 2006: 172-3). Clearly, the battle over the meaning of ‘empire’ goes on even today, just as the phantom of imperial hopes from the past appears to be haunting the progression of current events.

Bibliography Abellán, José Luis. 2003. ‘Isabel and the Idea of America’. In: David Boruchoff (ed.), Isabel la Católica, Queen of Castile: critical essays. New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 79–90. Abu-Lughod, Janet. 1989. ‘On the Re-making of History: How To Re-invent the Past’. In: Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani (eds), Remaking History. Seattle: Bay Press: 111-130. Acevedo, Rebecca. 2000. El español mexicano durante la colonia: El paradigma verbal en el altiplano central. Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara. Acosta, José de. 1962. Historia natural y moral de las Indias (ed. Edmundo O’Gorman).México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. __. 2002. Natural and Moral History of the Indies (ed. Jane E. Mangan)(tr. Frances López-Morillas)(with an Introduction and Commentary by Walter D. Mignolo). Durham and London: Duke University Press. Adorno, Rolena. 1986. Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru. Austin: University of Texas Press. __ . and Patrick Charles Pautz. 1999. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez. 3 Vols. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Alatorre, Antonio. 1979. 1,001 Años de la Lengua Española. México: Tezontle. Alfonso X el Sabio. 1807. Las Siete Partidas. 3 vols. Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia. __ . 1955. Primera Crónica General. 2 vols. (ed. Ramón Menéndez Pidal). Madrid: Gredos. __ . 1985 [1555]. Las Siete partidas glosadas por Gregorio López. 3 vols. Madrid: Boletín Oficial del Estado. __ . 1991. Fuero Real (ed. Azucena Palacios Alcaine). Barcelona: Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias. Altman, Ida. 2007. ‘Conquest, Coercion and Collaboration: Indian Allies and the Campaigns in Nueva Galicia’. In: Laura E. Matthew and Michael R. Oudijk (eds), Indian Conquistadors: indigenous allies in the conquest of Mesoamerica. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press: 145-174. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Ando, Clifford. 1994. ‘Augustine on Language’. In: Revue des Études Augustiniennes 40: 45-78.

268

Companion to Empire

Anónimo. 1973. ‘Tragedia de la muerte de Ata Hualpa. Obra de Lengua Quechua. Traducción del manuscrito Chayanta de 1877 por Jesús Lara’. In: José Cid Pérez and Dolores Martí de Cid (eds), Teatro Indoamericano Colonial. Madrid: Aguilar: 139–204. Anónimo. 1989. Relación de Michoacán (ed. Leoncio Cabrero Fernández). Madrid: Historia 16. Anonymous. 1993. ‘Extract from the Annals of Tlatelolco’. In: James Lockhart (ed. and tr.), We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico. Vol 1. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Press: 256–273. Asensio, Eugenio. 1960. ‘La lengua compañera del imperio: Historia de una idea de Nebrija en España y Portugal’. In: RFE XLIII: 399-413. Attridge, Derek. 1989. ‘Language as history/history as language: Saussure and the romance of etymology’. In: Post-Structuralism and the Question of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 183-211. Augustine, Saint. 1996. Teaching Christianity (tr. Edmund Hill). New York: New City Press. Avelar, Idelbar. 2004. The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics and Politics. London/New York: Palgrave. Balibar, Etienne. 2002. Politics and the Other Scene. New York: Verso. Banniard, Michel. 1992. Viva voce: communication écrite et communication orale du IVe au IXe siècle en Occident latin. Paris: Institut des Études Augustiniennes: Centre national de la recherche scientifique. Barabas, Alicia. 1989. Utopias Indias: movimientos socio-religiosos en México. México: Grijalbo. Barney, Stephen. A. et al. (eds and tr.). 2006. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnwell, Paul, S. 1997. Kings, Courtiers and Imperium: The Barbarian West, 565 – 725. London: Duckworth. Bartra, Roger. 1992. El salvaje en el espejo. México: Era. Bataillon, Marcel. 1950. Erasmo y España: estudios sobre la historia espiritual del siglo xvi (tr. Antonio Alatorre). México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Baudot, Georges. 1995. Utopia and History in Mexico: The First Chroniclers of Mexican Civilization (1520-1569). Niwot: University of Colorado Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1985a. ‘The Task of the Translator’. In: Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations. Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken Books: 69-82. __ . 1985b. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. In: Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations. Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken Books: 253-264. __ . 1986. ‘Critique of Violence’. In: Peter Demetz (ed.), Reflections. Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York: Schocken Books: 277-300. __ . 1998. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London: Verso. Bernáldez, Andrés. 1945. Antología (Selección y prólogo por Octavio de Medeiros). Madrid: Ediciones Fe. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

Bibliography

269

Bierbach, Christine. 1989. ‘“La lengua, compañera del imperio”? ou “la filología, compañera del imperialismo?” – Nebrija (1492) au service de la politique linguistique du Franquisme’. In: Bernard Py and René Jeanneret (eds), Minorisation Linguistique et Interaction: Actes du Symposium Organisé par L’Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée et La Commission Interuniversitaire Suisse de Linguistique Appliquée, Neuchatel, 16-18 Septembre 1987. Genéve: Librairie Droz S.A.: 217-232. Binotti, Lucia. 2000. ‘“La lengua compañera del imperio”. Observaciones sobre el desarrollo de un discurso de colonialismo lingüístico en el renacimiento español’. In: Otto Zwartjes (ed.), Las gramáticas misioneras de tradición hispánica (siglos xvi – xvii). Amsterdam – Atlanta: Rodopi: 259–288. Blázquez, Adrián y Thomas Calvo. 1992. Guadalajara y el nuevo mundo. Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán: semblanza de un conquistador. Guadalajara: Institución Provincial de Cultura “Marqués de Santillana”. Bloch, R. Howard. 1983. Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middles Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Boruchoff, David. 2003. ‘Introduction: Instructions for Sainthood and Other Feminine Wiles in the Historiography of Isabel I’. In: David Boruchoff (ed.), Isabel la Cat ólica, Queen of Castile: critical essays. New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 1-24. Brancaforte, Benito. (ed.). 1984. Alfonso X el Sabio, Prosa histórica. Madrid: Cátedra. Breisemeister, Dietrich. 1997. ‘La estela de Nebrija en el Nuevo Mundo: la gramática y retórica latinas’. In: Karl Kohut y Sonia V. Rose (eds), Pensamiento europeo y cultura colonial. Madrid: Iberoamericana: 52-67. Brennan, Timothy. 2006. Wars of Position. The Cultural Politics of Left and Right. New York: Columbia University Press. Brotherston, Gordon. 1992. Book of the Fourth World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Thomas. 1992. ‘The Transformation of the Roman Mediterranean, 400–900’. In: George Holmes (ed.), The Oxford History of Medieval Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1–58. Burns, Robert, I. S. J. 1990. ‘Stupor Mundi: Alfonso X of Castile, the Learned’. In: Robert I. Burns S. J. (ed.), Emperor of Culture Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania: 1-13. __ . Jerry Craddock and Joseph O’Callaghan. (eds). 2001. Alfonso X el Sabio, Las Siete Partidas. 5 vols. (tr. Samuel Parsons Scott). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Burton Russell, Jeffrey 1992. Dissent and Order in the Middle Ages: the Search for Legitimate Authority. New York: Twayne. Bustamante García, Jesús. 1992. ‘Retórica, traducción y responsabilidad histórica: claves humanísticas en la obra de Bernardino de Sahagún’. In: Humanismo y visión del Otro en la España moderna. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas: 245–378. Calderón, Francisco R. 1988. Historia Económica de la Nueva España en tiempo de los Austrias. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica Camillo, Ottavio di. 1976. El Humanismo Castellano del XV. Valencia: J. Domenech.

270

Companion to Empire

Cañizares Esguerra, Jorge. 2001. How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Carrera de la Red, Avelina. 1988. El “Problema de la lengua” en el humanismo renacentista español. Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid. Carruthers, Mary. 1990. The Book of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cassiodorus, Senator. 1946. Institutiones: An Introduction to Divine and Human Readings (tr. Leslie Webber Jones). New York: Columbia University Press. Castañeda, Carmen. 2004. ‘Importación, producción, censura y circulación de libros en la Nueva España en el siglo xvi’. In: Guadalupe Fernández-López (ed.), Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América, X aniversario. México: Universidad Autonóma Metropolitana: 38–59. Certeau, Michel de. 1975. The Writing of History. New York: Columbia University Press. __ . 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. __ . 1997 [1986]. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Chang-Rodríguez, Raquel. 1994. ‘Cultural Resistance in the Andes and Its Depiction in Atau Wallpaj P’uchukakuyninpa Wankan or Tragedy of Atahualpa’s Death’. In: Francisco Javier Cevallos-Candau. et al. (eds), Coded Encounters: Writing, Gender, and Ethnicity in Colonial Latin America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press: 115-134. Checa, Jorge. 1996. ‘Cortés y el espacio de la Conquista: la Segunda Carta de Relación’. In: MLN 111: 187–217. Chipman, Donald E. 1967. Nuño de Guzmán and the Province of Panuco in New Spain, 1518 -1533. Glendale, California: A.H. Clark. Clanchy, Michael. 1979. From Memory to Written Record. Matthew Arnold: London. Clendinnen, Inga. 1987. Ambivalent Conquests. Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517 – 1570. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Colish, Marcia L. 1969. The Mirror of Knowledge: A Study in the Medieval theory of Knowledge. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Collins, Roger. 1991. Early Medieval Europe 300-1000. New York: St. Martin’s Press. __ . 1992. Law, Culture and Regionalism in Early Medieval Spain. Brookfield Vermont: Variorum. __ . 2000. ‘Visigothic Spain, 409–711’. In: Raymond Carr (ed.), Spain: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 39-62. Colón, Cristóbal. 1997. Textos y documentos completos (ed. Consuelo Varela). Nuevas cartas (ed. Juan Gil). Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Cortés, Hernán. 1993. Cartas de Relación (ed. Ángel Delgado Gómez). Madrid: Castalia. __ . 2001 [1971]. Letters from Mexico (Translated, Edited and with a new introduction by Anthony Pagden). New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Craddock, Jerry. 1981. ‘La cronología de las obras legislativas de Alfonso X el Sabio’. In: AHDE 51: 365-418.

Bibliography

271

Cro, Stelio. 1990. The Noble Savage: Allegory of Freedom. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press. ‘Crónica del Rey Don Alfonso X’. 1953. In: Cayetano Rosell (ed.), Crónicas de los Reyes de Castilla desde Alfonso el Sabio hasta los Católicos Reyes Don Fernando y Doña Isabel. Madrid: BAE 1: 3-66. Cummins, Thomas. 1995. ‘From Lies to Truth: Colonial Ekphrasis and The Act of Crosscultural Translation’. In: Claire Farago (ed.), Re-Framing the Renaissance: visual culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650. New Haven: Yale University Press: 152–174. Curtius, Ernst. 1953. European Literature and The Latin Middle Ages. New York: Pantheon. D’Anghiera, Pietro Martire. 2005. De Orbe Novo Decades, I – VIII (a cura di Rosanna Mazzacane ed Elisa Magioncalda). Tilgher: Genova. De Anglería, Pedro Mártir. 1496. ‘De Barbaria Fugata’. In: In vafre dicta philosopho-rum. Salamanca. __ . 1990. Cartas sobre el Nuevo Mundo. (tr. Julio Bauzano) (Introducción de Ramón Alba). Madrid: Ediciones Polifemo. __ . 2004. De Orbe Novo (ed. Stelio Cro). Alción Editora: Córdoba. Delacampagne, Christian. 2000. Une histoire du racisme: Des origines à nos jours. Paris: Librairie Générale Française. Del Valle, José. 2002. ‘Menéndez Pidal, national regeneration and the linguistic utopia’. In: José del Valle and Luis Gabriel Stheeman (eds), The Battle over Spanish Between 1800 and 2000. London: Routledge: 78-105. __ . 2006. ‘US Latinos, la hispanofonía and the Language Ideologies of High Modernity’. In: Clare Mar-Molinero and Miranda Stewart (eds), Globalization and Language in the Spanish-Speaking World: Macro and Micro Perspectives. New York and London: Palgrave and Macmillan: 27-46. Derrida, Jacques. 1976 [1967]. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. __ . 1985. ‘Des Tours de Babel’. In: Joseph F. Graham (ed.), Difference in Translation. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press: 165–207. __ . 1992. ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority.”’ In: Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. New York: Routledge: 3-67. Díaz y Díaz, Manuel C. 1976. De Isidoro al Siglo XI. Barcelona: Ediciones El Albir. __ . 1994. ‘Lexicografía tardomedieval en Hispania’. In: Carmen Codoñer y Juan Antonio González Iglesias (eds), Antonio de Nebrija: Edad Media y Renacimiento. Salamanca: Editoriales Universidad: 389-398. Dieckmann, Liselotte. 1957. ‘Renaissance Hieroglyphics’. In: Comparative Literature Vol. 9, No. 4 (Autumn): 308–321. Doubleday, Simon R. 2001. ‘Aristocracia y monarquía en los reinos de Castilla y León: el caso de la familia Lara’. In: Hispania, LXI/3, núm. 209: 999-1016. Drucker, Johanna. 1995. The Alphabetic Labyrinth: the letters in history and imagination. London: Thames and Hudson. Durán, Fray Diego. 1965 [1867 – 1880]. Historia de las Indias de Nueva España y islas de Tierra Firme / la publica con un atlas de estampas, notas é iluss. [por] José F. Ramírez. 2 vols. México: Editora nacional.

272

Companion to Empire

Dussel, Enrique. 1998. ‘Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity’. In: Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (eds), The Cultures of Globalization. Durham and London: Duke University Press: 3-31. Eco, Umberto. 1995. The Search for the Perfect Language. London: Blackwell. Edmonson, Munroe S. (ed. and tr.). 1986. Chilam Balam de Chumayel (Manuscript). English and Mayan. Heaven Born Merida and its destiny: The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel. Austin: University of Texas Press. Elliott, John, H. 1986 [1971]. ‘Cortés, Velázquez and Charles V’. In: Hernán Cortés. Letters from Mexico (Translated, Edited and with a new introduction by Anthony Pagden). New Haven and London: Yale University Press: xi-xxxvii. __ . 1990 [1963]. Imperial Spain. 1469-1716. London: Penguin. Esparza Torres, Miguel Angel. 1995. Las ideas lingüísticas de Antonio de Nebrija. Münster: Nodus Publikationen. __ . y Hans-Josef Niederehe. 1999. Bibliografía nebrisense: las obras completas del humanista Antonio de Nebrija desde 1481 hasta nuestros días. Amsterdam: Philadelphia: J. Benjamins. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other. New York: Columbia University Press. __ . 1993. ‘Keep Listening: Ethnography and Reading’. In: Jonathan Boyarin (ed.), The Ethnography of Reading. Berkeley: University of California Press: 80-97. Fernández Santamaría, José Antonio. 1977. The State, War and Peace: Spanish Political Thought in the Renaissance, 1516-1559. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Finnegan, Ruth. 1988. Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication. London: Blackwell. Firmage, Richard A. 1994. The Alphabet Abecedarium: Some Notes on Letters. Boston, Mass.: David R. Godine Publisher. Fletcher, Richard. 1992. Moorish Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Florescano, Enrique. 1994. Memoria mexicana. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Folz, Robert. 1969. The Concept of Empire in Western Europe from the Fifth to the Fourteenth Centuries (tr. Sheila Ann Ogilivie). London: Edward Arnold. Fontaine, Jacques. 1959. Isidore de Séville et la culture classique dans l’Espagne wisigothique. 2 vols. Paris: Études augustiniennes. Foucault, Michel. 1972 [1969]. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language. New York: Pantheon, __ . 1977 [1969]. ‘What is an author?’ In: Donald F. Bouchar (ed.), Language, Counter-memory, Practice. Ithaka, New York: Cornell University Press: 113–138. __ . 1977 [1971]. ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’. In: Donald F. Bouchar (ed.), Language, Counter-memory, Practice. Ithaka, New York: Cornell University Press: 139-164 __ . 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage. Frankl, Victor. 1962. ‘Hernán Cortés y la tradición de las Siete Partidas’. In: Revista de Historia de América 53-54 (Junio – Diciembre): 9-74. Friederici, Georg. 1973. El carácter del descubrimiento y de la conquista de América. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Fuchs, Barbara. 2003. ‘Imperium Studies: Theorizing Early Modern Expansion’. In: Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren (eds). Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern. New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 71-92.

Bibliography

273

__ . 2007. ‘1492 and the Cleaving of Hispanism’. In: Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37: 3 (Fall): 493-510. Fuero Juzgo o Libro de los Jueces cotejado con los más antiguos y precisos por la Real Academia Española. 1980 [1815]. Valladolid: Editorial Lex Nova. Galarza, Joaquín. 1992. In amoxtli, in tlacatl (el libro, el hombre): Códices y vivencias. México: TAVA editorial. Gellrich, Jesse. 1990. The Idea of The Book in The Middle Ages. Ithaka: Cornell University Press. Gibson, Charles. 1964. The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-1810. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gil Fernández, Luis. 1981. Panorama social del humanismo español (1500-1800). Madrid: Alhambra. Gimeno Menéndez, Francisco. 1995. Sociolingüística histórica (Siglos X-XII). Madrid: Visor Libros Universidad de Alicante. Girón Alconchel, José Luis. 2001. ‘Nebrija y las gramáticas del español en el Siglo de Oro’. In: E.F.K. Koerner y Hans Josef Niederehe (eds), Historia de la Lingüística en España. Vol II. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company: 57–78. Gómez Moreno, Angel. 1994. España y la Italia de los humanistas: primeros ecos. Madrid: Gredos. González-Casanovas, Roberto. 1994. ‘Book Culture in Alfonso’s Prologues: The Texts and Contexts of Wisdom’. In: Hispanófila 111 (May): 1-15. __ . 1995. ‘Alfonso X’s Concept of Hispania: Cultural Politics in the Histories’. In: Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages. Leeds: Leeds Texts and Monographs, New Series 14: 155-170. González Cuenca, Joaquín. (ed.). 1983. Las Etimologías de San Isidoro romanceadas. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca. González-Echevarría. 1990. Myth and Archive. A theory of Latin American narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. __ . 1995. ‘Pedro Mártir de Anglería y el segundo descubrimiento de América’. In: La Torre (Universidad de Puerto Rico) año 9, no. 33: 29–52. González-Iglesias, Juan Antonio. 1994. ‘El humanista y los príncipes: Antonio de Nebrija inventor de las empresas heráldicas de los reyes católicos’. In: Carmen Codoñer y Juan Antonio González-Iglesias (eds), Antonio de Nebrija: Edad Media y Renacimiento. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad: 59-75. González Jiménez, Manuel. 1989. ‘Alfonso X y Andalucía’. In: Juan Carlos de Miguel Rodríguez et al. (eds), Alfonso X el Sabio: vida, obra y época. Actas del congreso internacional. Madrid: Sociedad Española de Estudios Medievales: 259271. __ . 2000. Sevilla en tiempos de Alfonso X el Sabio. Sevilla: Biblioteca de Temas Sevillanos. Goodich, Michael. (ed.). 1998. Other Middle Ages: Witnesses at the Margins of Medieval Society. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Goody, Jack and Watt, Ian. 1988 [1963]. ‘The Consequences of Literacy’. In: E. Kintgen, B. Kroll and M. Rose (eds), Perspectives on Literacy. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press: 3-28.

274

Companion to Empire

Grafton, Anthony. 1997. ‘The Rest vs. the West,’ review of The Darker Side of the Renaissance, by Walter D. Mignolo and Re-Framing the Renaissance: visual culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650, by Claire Farago (ed.). In: The New York Review of Books Vol. 44, Number 6: 1-14. __ . 1992. New Worlds, Ancient Texts. The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Gramsci, Antonio. 1991. Selections from Cultural Writings. (eds, David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith)(tr. William Boelhower). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Graziano, Frank. 1999. The Millenial New World. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1991. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Gruzinski, Serge. 1988. The Conquest of Mexico. Cambridge: Polity Press. __ . 1992. Painting the Conquest. Paris: Flammarion. Guerrero Ramos, Gloria. 1995. El léxico en el Diccionario (1492) y en el Vocabulario (¿1495?) de Nebrija. Universidad de Sevilla: Sevilla. Guitarte, Guillermo. 1986. ‘La dimensión imperial del español en la obra de Aldrete: sobre la aparición del español de América en la lingüística hispánica’. In: The History of Linguistics in Spain. Amsterdam: John Benjamins: 129–186. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 1986. ‘“Un soufflé d’Allemagne ayant passé”: Friedrich Diez, Gaston Paris, and the Genesis of National Philologies’. In: Romance Philology 60.1: 1-37. Guzmán Betancourt, Ignacio.1997. ‘La lengua, ¿compañera del imperio? Destino de un “presagio” nebrisense en la Nueva España’. In: Ignacio Guzmán Betancourt y Eréndira Nansen Díaz (eds), Memoria del coloquio “La obra de Antonio de Nebrija y su Recepción en la Nueva España” Quince estudios nebrisenses (1492 1992). México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia: 23-38. Halverson, John. 1992. ‘Goody and The Implosion of The Literacy Thesis’. In: Man 27: 301-317. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Heath, Shirley Brice. 1972. La política del lenguaje en México: de la colonia a la nación. México: Secretaria de Educacieon Pública/Instituto Nacional Indigenista. Herman, Jozsef. 1997. Vulgar Latin (tr. Roger Wright). University Park: Pennsylvania University Press. Hill Boone, Elizabeth and Walter Mignolo (eds). 1994. Writing Without Words. Durham and London: Duke University Press: __ . 2000. Stories in Red and Black. Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hillgarth, Jocelyn Nigel. 1985a [1966]. ‘Coins and Chonicles: Propaganda in SixthCentury Spain and the Byzantine Background’. In: Visigothic Spain, Byzantium and the Irish. London: Variorum Reprints: 483–508. __ . 1985b [1970]. ‘Historiography in Visigothic Spain’. In: Visigothic Spain, Byzantium and the Irish. London: Variorum Reprints: 261–311. Hinojo Andrés, G. 1991. Obras históricas de Nebrija: estudio filológico. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca.

Bibliography

275

__ . 1994. ‘Nebrija y la historiografía renacentista: la fortuna’. In: Carmen Codoñer and Juan Antonio González Iglesias (eds), Antonio de Nebrija: Edad Media y Renacimiento. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad: 29-37. Hobbes, Thomas. 2002. Leviathan (ed. A. P. Martinich). Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press. Hodgen, Margaret. 1971 [1964]. Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Icazbalceta, Joaquín García. 1971 [1866]. Colección de documentos para la historia de México. Vol. 2. Liechtenstein: Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited. __ . 1947. Don Fray Juan de Zumárraga, Primer Obispo y Arzobispo de México. 4 vols. México: Porrúa. Iglesia, Ramón. 1990 [1942]. Cronistas e historiadores de la conquista de México. México: Biblioteca de la Ciudad de México. Inter Caetera, The Bull. 1917 [1493]. In: Frances Gardiner Davenport (ed.), European Treaties bearing on the History of the United States and its Dependencies to 1648. Washington D.C.: The Carnegie Institution: 72-78. Iordan-Orr, Iorgu. 1970. An Introduction to Romance Linguistics: Its Scholars and Schools. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Irvine, Michael. 1994. The Making of Textual Culture: Grammatica and Literary Theory, 350 – 1100. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Isidore of Seville, Saint. 1962 [1911]. Etymologiarum sive Originum Libri XX. 2 vols. (ed. W. M. Lindsay). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ives, Peter. 2004. Gramsci’s Politics of Language. Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Izbicki, Thomas M. and Cary J. Nederman (eds). 2000. Three Tracts on Empire: Engelbert of Admont, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, and Juan de Torquemada. Bristol: Thoemmes Press. Jager, Eric. 2000. The Book of the Heart. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso. Jiménez de Rada, Rodrigo. 1989. Historia de los hechos de España (tr. Juan Fernández Valverde). Madrid: Alianza Universidad. John of Salisbury. 1990. Policraticus (ed. Cary Nederman). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, Lesley. 1995. ‘Etymologies, Genealogies, and Nationalities (Again)’. In: Simon Forde, Lesley Johnson and Alan V. Murray (eds), Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages. Leeds: Leeds Texts and Monographs: 125-136. Johnson, Lyman L. 2004. ‘Digging up Cuauhtémoc’. In: Lyman L. Johnson (ed.), Body Politics: Death, Dismemberment and Memory in Latin America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press: 207–244. Jones, W. R. 1971. ‘The Image of the Barbarian in Medieval Europe’. In: Comparative Studies in Society and History 13: 376-407. Kadir, Djelal. 1992. Columbus and The Ends of the Earth: Europe’s Prophetic Rhetoric as Conquering Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kamen, Henry. 2003. Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763. New York: Perennial. Kantorowicz, Ernst. 1997 [1957]. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton: University of Princeton Press.

276

Companion to Empire

Kendrick, Laura. 1999. Animating the Letter: The Figurative Embodiment of Writing from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Klor de Alva, Jorge. 1988. ‘Sahagun and the Birth of Modern Ethnography: Representing, Confessing, and Inscribing the Native Other’. In: Klor de Alva, Nicholson, and Quiñones Keber (eds), The Work of Bernardino de Sahagún: Pioneer Ethnographer of Sixteenth-Century Aztec Mexico. Albany: Insitute for Mesoamerican Studies: 31-53. __ . 1989. ‘Language, Politics and Translation: Colonial Discourse and Classical Nahuatl in New Spain’. In: Rosanna Warren (ed.), The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field. Boston: Northeastern University Press: 143–162. __ . 1992. ‘Colonialism and Postcolonialism as (Latin) American Mirages’. In: Colonial Latin American Review 1: 3-23. Kohut, Karl. 1997. ‘La implantación del humanismo español en La Nueva España. El caso de Francisco Cervantes de Salazar’. In: Karl Kohut y Sonia V. Rose (eds), Pensamiento europeo y cultura colonial. Madrid: Iberoamericana: 11-51. Kraniauskas, John. 2000. ‘Beware Mexican Ruins! “One Way Street” and the Colonial Unconscious’. In: Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osbourne (eds), Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience. Manchester: Clinamen Press: 137-152. Krippner-Martínez, James. 2001. Re-reading the Conquest: Power, Politics, and the History of Early Colonial Michoacán, Mexico, 1521-1565. University Park: Penn State University Press. Kristeller, Paul Oskar. 1990. Renaissance Thought and the Arts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ladner, Gerhardt B. 1979. ‘Medieval and Modern Understanding of Symbolism: A Comparison’. In: Speculum Vol. 4, no.2 (April): 223-256. Lagos, Cora. 2002. Confrontando imaginarios: oralidad, pintura y escritura en el México colonial. Madrid: Pliegos. Landa, Fray Diego de. 1994. Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (ed. María del Carmen León Cázares). México: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. Lane Fox, Robin. 1994. ‘Literacy and Power in Early Christianity’. In: A. Bowman and G. Woolf (eds), Literacy and Power in the Ancient World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 126-148. Lapesa, Rafael. 1980. Historia de la lengua española. Madrid: Gredos. __ . 1985. ‘La apócope de la vocal en castellano antiguo. Intento de explicación’. In: Estudios de historia lingüística española. Madrid: Paraninfo: 167-198. Las Casas, Bartolomé de. 1993. Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias. Madrid: Cátedra. Lawrence, Jeremy N.H. 1990. ‘Humanism in the Iberian Peninsula’. In: Anthony Goodman and Angus Mackay (eds), The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe. London and New York: Longman: 220–258. Le Goff, Jacques. 1989. ‘Head or Heart? The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Middle Ages’. In: Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (eds), Fragments for a History of the Human Body. Vol. 3. New York: Zone Books: 13– 27.

Bibliography

277

Leibsohn, Dana. 1994. ‘Primers for Memory: Cartographic Histories and Nahua Iden-tity’. In: Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter Mignolo (eds), Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Durham and London: Duke University Press: 161-187. Leinhard, Martin. 1992. La voz y su huella. Lima: Editorial Horizonte. León-Portilla, Miguel. 1959. Visión de los vencidos. México: Ediciones de la UNAM. __ . 1961. Los antiguos mexicanos a través de sus crónicas y cantares. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. __ . 1996. El destino de la palabra: de la oralidad y los glifos mesoamericanos a la escritura alfabética. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. __ . 2003. Códices. Los antiguos libros del Nuevo Mundo. México: Aguilar. Lestringant, Frank. 1997. Cannibals. Berkeley: University of California Press. Levin, Harry. 1969. The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance. Indiana University Press: Bloomington. Linehan, Peter. 1993. History and the Historians of Medieval Spain. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Liss, Peggy K. 1975. Mexico under Spain 1521-1556. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. __ . 2003. ‘Isabel, Myth and History’. In: David A. Boruchoff (ed.), Isabel la Católica, Queen of Castile: critical essays. New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 57– 78. Lledó-Guillem, Vicente. 2008. Literatura o imperio: La construcción de las lenguas castellana y catalana en la España renacentista. Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta Monographs. Lockhart, James. 1991. Nahuas and Spaniards. Postconquest Central Mexican History and Philology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. __ . 1992. The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries. Stanford: Stanford University Press. __ . Susan Schroeder and Doris Namala (eds and trans.). 2006. Annals of His Time: Don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lodares, Juan R. 1995. ‘Alfonso el Sabio y la lengua de Toledo (un motivo politicojurídico en la promoción del castellano medieval)’. In: RFE LXXV: 35-56. __ . 2002. Lengua y patria: sobre el nacionalismo lingüístico en España. Madrid: Taurus. __ . 2007. ‘Languages, Catholicism, and Power in the Hispanic Empire (1500-1700)’. In: Nelsey Echávez-Solano and Kenya C. Dworkin y Méndez (eds), Spanish and Empire. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press: 3–31. Lomax, Derek W. 1971. ‘La lengua oficial de Castilla’ In: Actes du xxe Congrés International de Linguistique et Philologie Romanes (Bucarest): 411- 417. Lomnitz-Adler, Claudio. 2005. Death and the Idea of Mexico. New York: Zone Books. López de Gómara, Francisco. 1954. Historia general de las Indias. 2 Vols. Barcelona: Editorial Iberia. __ . 2000. La Conquista de México (ed. José Luis de Rojas). Madrid: Dastin Historia, 2000.

278

Companion to Empire

López Estrada, Francisco y María Teresa López García-Berdoy. (eds). 1992. Alfonso X el Sabio. Antología: Las Siete Partidas. Madrid: Editorial Castalia. Lot, Ferdinand. 1931. ‘A quelle époque a-t-on cessé de parler latin?’ In: Bulletin du Cange (Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi) 6: 97–159. Lozano Sebastián, F. Javier. 1982. San Isidoro y la filosofía clásica. León: Isidoriana Editorial. Lupton, Joseph Hirst. (ed.). 1865. The Utopia of Sir Thomas More in Latin from the edition of March 1518, and in English from the first edition of Ralph Robynson’s translation of 1551. Oxford: Clarendon Press. MacCormack, Sabine. 1989. ‘Atahualpa and the Book’. In: Dispositio Vol. 14, No. 36-38: 141-168. Maguiña, Santiago López. 1992. ‘Colonial Writing and Indigenous Discourse in Ramón Pané’s Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios’. In: René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini (eds), Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 291–311. Malagón Barceló, Javier. 1961. ‘The Role of the Letrado in the Colonization of America’. In: The Americas 18, no. 1: 1-7. Mandeville, John, Sir. 1983. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (Translated with an introduction by C. W. R. D. Moseley). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marín Tamayo, Fausto. 1992. Nuño de Guzmán. México: Siglo XXI Editores. MarMolinero, Clare and Ángel Smith (eds). 1996. Nationalism and the Nation in the Iberian Peninsula: Competing and Conflicting Identities. Oxford and Washington D.C.: Berg. __ . 2000. The Politics of Language in the Spanish-Speaking World. London: Routledge. __ . 2006a. ‘Forces of Globalization in the Spanish- Speaking World: Linguistic Imperialism or Grassroots Adaptation’. In: Clare Mar-Molinero and Miranda Stewart (eds), Globalization and Language in the Spanish-Speaking World: Macro and Micro Perspectives. New York and London: Palgrave and Macmillan: 8-26. __ . 2006b. ‘The European Linguistic Legacy in the Global Era: Linguistic Imperialism, Spanish and the Instituto Cervantes’. In: Clare Mar-Molinero and Patrick Stevenson (eds), Language Ideologies, Policies and Practices: Language and the Future of Europe. New York & London: Palgrave and Macmillan: 76- 90. Maravall, José Antonio. 1952. ‘El descubrimiento de América en la historia del pensamiento político’. In: Revista de Estudios Políticos 63: 229–248. __ . 1958. ‘Las etapas del pensamiento político de Carlos V’. In: Revista de Estudios Políticos 100: 93–146. __ . 1967a [1953]. ‘Los “hombres de saber” o letrados y la formación de su conciencia estamental’. In: Estudios de Historia del Pensamiento Español. Edad Media: Serie primera. 2 vols. Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica: 345-380. __ . 1967b [1956]. ‘La idea de cuerpo místico en España antes de Erasmo’. In: Estudios de Historia del Pensamiento Español. Edad Media: Serie primera. 2 vols. Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica: 177-200. __ . 1967c [1965]. ‘Del régimen feudal al régimen corporativo en el pensamiento de Alfonso X el Sabio’. In: Estudios de Historia del Pensamiento Español. Edad Media: Serie primera. 2 vols. Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica: 87-140.

Bibliography

279

__ . 1967d [1966]. ‘La concepción del saber en una sociedad tradicional’. In: Estudios de Historia del Pensamiento Español. Edad Media: Serie primera. 2 vols. Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica: 201-260. __ . 1997 [1954]. El concepto de España en la Edad Media. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Constitucionales. Márquez-Villanueva, Francisco. 1990. ‘The Alfonsine Cultural Concept’. In: Francisco Márquez Villanueva and Carlos Alberto Vega (eds), Alfonso X of Castile (1221-1284) An International Symposium: Harvard University 17 November 1984. (Harvard Studies in Romance Languages 43): 76-110. __ . 1994. El concepto cultural alfonsí. Madrid: Editorial Mapfre. Marsá, María. 2001. La imprenta en los Siglos de Oro: 1520-1700. Madrid: Ediciones del Laberinto. Marx, Karl. 1915. Capital. Vol. 1. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr and Company. Mazzocco, Angelo. 1994. ‘Los fundamentos italianos de la Gramática de la lengua Castellana de Nebrija’. In: R.Escavy, M. Hernández Terrés, A. Roldán (eds), Actas del Congreso Internacional de Historiografía Lingüística – Nebrija V Centenario. Vol 1. Murcia: Ingramur: 367-376. Mazzotti, José Antonio. (ed.). 2000. Agencias criollas: la ambigüedad "colonial" en las letras hispanoamericanas. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino. 1890–1906. Antología de poetas líricos castellanos desde la formación del idioma hasta nuestros días. Madrid: Hernando. Menéndez Pidal, Ramón. 1904. Manual elemental de gramática histórica española Madrid: V. Suárez. __ . 1926. Orígenes del español: estado lingüístico de la península ibérica hasta el siglo XI. Madrid: Imprenta de la librería y casa editorial Hernando. __ . 1947. La lengua de Cristóbal Colón. Buenos Aires: Espasa Calpe. __ . 1950. ‘La lengua en tiempo de los Reyes Católicos’. In: Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 5 (enero – febrero): 9-24. Menocal, Rosa María. 1994. Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric. Durham: Duke University Press. __ . 2002. Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Mignolo, Walter. 1986. ‘La lengua, la letra, el territorio (o la crisis de los estudios literarios coloniales)’. In: Dispositio Vol. 11, Nos. 28-29: 137–160. __ . 1989a. ‘Colonial Situations, Geographical Discourses and Territorial Representations: Towards a Diatopical Understanding of Colonial Semiosis’. In: Dispositio Vol. 14, Nos. 36-38: 93-140. __ . 1989b. ‘Literacy and Colonization: The New World Experience’. In: René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini (eds), 1492-1992: Re/Discovering Colonial Writing. Minneapolis: The Prisma Institute: 51-97. __ . 1992. ‘When Speaking Was Not Good Enough: Illiterates, Savages, Barbarians and Cannibals’. In: René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini (eds), Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 312345. __ . 1995. The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

280

Companion to Empire

__ . 2003 [1995]. ‘Second Thoughts on The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Afterword to the Second Edition’ In: The Darker Side of the Renaissance. 2d ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press: 427-463. Milhou, Alain. 1983. Colón y su mentalidad mesiánica en el ambiente franciscanista español. Valladolid: Casa-Museo de Colón y Seminario Americanista de la Universidad. Mohar Betancourt, Luz María. 1990. La escritura en el México Antiguo. 2 Vols. México: Plaza y Valdés Editores. Molina, Fray Alonso de. 1970. Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana (estudio preliminar de Miguel León-Portilla). Mexico: Editorial Porrúa. Montoya Martínez, Jesús. 1994. ‘El prólogo a la Gramática Castellana de Elio Antonio de Nebrija’ In: R. Escavy, M. Hernández Terrés, A. Roldán (eds), Actas del Congreso Internacional de Historiografía Lingüística – Nebrija V Centenario. Vol 1. Murcia: Ingramur: 377-388. Moore, Robert I. 1987. The Formation of a Persecuting Society. Power and Deviance in Western Europe 950 – 1250. Oxford: Blackwell. Morales Padrón, Francisco. 1979. Teoría y Leyes de la Conquista. Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica. __ . (ed.). 1991. Primeras cartas sobre América (1493-1503). Sevilla: Secretariado de Publicaciones, Universidad de Sevilla. Morán Álvarez, Julio Cesar. 1990. El Pensamiento de Vasco de Quiroga: Génesis y Trascendencia. Morelia: Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo. Moraña, Mabel. (ed.). 1997. Ángel Rama y los estudios latinoamericanos. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. Moreno de Alba, José. 1988. El español en América. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. More, Thomas, Sir. 1965. Utopia (ed. and tr. Paul Turner). London: Penguin Books. __ . 2003. Utopia (eds, George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Motolinía, (Fray Toribio de Benavente). 2001. Historia de los indios de la Nueva España (ed. Claudio Esteva Fabregat). Madrid: Dastin Historia. Motsch, Andreas. 2001. Lafitau et l’emergence du discours ethnographique. Paris: Presses de L’Université de Paris-Sorbonne. Muldoon, James. 1999. Empire and Order: The Concept of Empire, 800-1800. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Mundy, Barbara E. 1996. The Mapping of New Spain. Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Navarrete, Ignacio. 1994. Orphans of Petrarch: Poetry and Theory in the Spanish Renaissance. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Nebrija, Antonio de. 1496. In vafre dicta philosophorum. Salamanca. __ . 1507. Apologia earum rerum quae illi obijciuntur. Logroño. Arnao Guillén de Brocar. __ . 1545. Rerum a Ferdinando et Elisabe Hispaniarum felicissimis Regibus gestarum Decades duae. Granada. __ . 1926 [1492]. Gramática de la Lengua Castellana (ed. Ignacio González-Llubera). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bibliography

281

__ . 1973 [1516]. Vocabulario de Romance en Latín. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. __ . 1977 [1517]. Reglas de Ortografía en La Lengua Castellana (Estudio y edición de Antonio Quilis). Instituto Caro y Cuervo: Bogotá. __ . 1979 [1492]. El Diccionario Latino-Español (Salamanca 1492) de Elio Antonio de Nebrija (edición de German Colón y Amadeu J. Soberanas). Barcelona: Puvill Editor. __ . 1987 [1503] De vi ac potestate litterarum (edición, traducción y facsímil de Antonio Quilis y Pilar Usábel). Madrid: Sociedad General Española de Librería, S.A. __ . 1989 [1492]. Arte de Gramática Castellana (ed. Antonio Quilis). Madrid: Centr-o de estudios Ramón Areces. __ . 1992 [1492]. Gramática Castellana (Introducción y notas: Miguel Ángel Esparza y Ramón Sarmiento). Fundación Antonio de Nebrija: Madrid. Nieto Soria, José Manuel. 1988. Fundamentos ideológicos del poder real en Castilla (siglos XIII – XVI). Madrid: EDUEMA. __ . (ed.). 1999. Orígenes de la monarquía hispánica: propaganda y legitimación, ca. 1400-1520. Madrid: Dykinson. __ . 2001. ‘Los fundamentos ideológicos del poder regio’ In: Julio Valdeón Baruque (ed.), Isabel la Católica y la politica. Valladolid: Instituto Universitario de Historia Simancas, Universidad de Valladolid: 181-216. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1989. ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’. In: Untimely Meditations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 59-123. __ . 1994. On the Genealogy of Morality (ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson)(tr. Carol Dithie). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1992. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press. Nirenberg, David. 1996. Communities of Violence. Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press. O’Callaghan, Joseph, F. 1990. ‘Image and Reality: The King Creates His Kingdom’. In: Robert I. Burns S. J. (ed.), Emperor of Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press: 14-32. O’Gorman, Edmundo. 1989. Cuatro historiadores de Indias. Siglo XVI. México: Edi-torial Patria, S.A. de C.V. __ . 2004 [1958]. La invención de América. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Olmedo, Felix G., S. I. 1944. Nebrija (1444-1522): Debelador de la barbarie, comentador eclesiástico, pedágogo, poeta. Madrid: Editora nacional. Olmos, Fray Andrés de. 2002. Arte de la lengua mexicana : concluído en el convento de San Andrés de Ueytlalpan en la provincia de la Totonacapan que es en la Nueva España, el 1. de enero de 1547 (edición, estudio introductorio, transliteración y notas de Ascensión Hernández de León-Portilla y Miguel León- Portilla). México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Ong, Walter. 1982. Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge. . Orlandis, José. 2003. Historia del Reino Visigodo Español. Madrid: Ediciones RIALP, S.A. Ostler, Nicholas. 2005. Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. New York: Harper Perennial. Ovid. (Publius Ovidius Naso). 1921. Metamorphoses. London: Heinemann.

282

Companion to Empire

Oviedo y Valdés, Gonzalo Fernández de. 1945. Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y tierra-firme del mar océano. 14 tomos. Asunción del Paraguay: Editorial Guarania. Pagden, Anthony. 1982. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and The Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. __ . 1995. Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500 – c. 1800. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. __ . 2003. Peoples and Empires. New York: The Modern Library. Pané, Fray Ramón de. 2001 [1974]. Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios (ed. José Juan Arrom). México: Siglo XXI. Parry, John, H. 1948. The Audiencia of New Galicia in the Sixteenth Century: A Study in Spanish Colonial Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pastor, Beatriz. 1988 [1983]. Discursos narrativos de la Conquista de América. Hanover, New Hampshire: Ediciones del Norte. Pellerey, Roberto. 1992. ‘La Cina e Il Nuovo Mondo: il mito dell’ideografia nella lingua delle Indie’. In: Belfagor: rassegna di varia umanitá. Firenze, anno 47, n.5: 507-522. Penny, Ralph. 2000. Variation and Change in Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pérez Bustamante, Rogelio. 1994. Historia del Derecho Español: Las Fuentes del Derecho. Madrid: Dykinson. Phelan, John Leddy. 1956. The Millenial Kingdom of The Franciscans in the New World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pietz, William. 1985. ‘The Problem of the Fetish I’. In: Res (Cambridge, Mass.) No. 9 (Spring): 5-17. __ . 1987. ‘The Problem of the Fetish II’. In: Res (Cambridge, Mass.) No. 13 (Spring): 23-45. Piña Homs, Román. 1995. ‘Alfonso X el Sabio: universalidad frente al localismo’. In: Javier Alvarado Planas (Coordinador), Espacios y Fueros en Castilla-La Mancha (siglos XI-XV), Una perspectiva metodológica. Madrid: Ediciones Polifemo: 471- 486. Plato. 1956. ‘Phaedrus’. In: The Works of Plato (ed. Irwin Edman). New York: The Modern Library: 263-329. Proceso, tormento y muerte del Cazonzi, último Gran Señor de los tarascos por Nuño de Guzmán. 1530. 1997. (Introducción, version paleográfica y notas por Armando M. Escobar Olmedo). Morelia: Frente de Afirmación Hispanista A.C. Quiñones Keber, Eloise. (ed.). 2002. Representing Aztec Ritual: Performance, Text and Image in the Work of Sahagún. Boulder: University of Colorado Press. Rabasa, José. 1993. The Invention of A-m-e-r-i-c-a. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press. __ . 2000. Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest. Durham: Duke University Press. Rafael, Victor. 1993. Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Rama, Ángel. 1979. La ciudad letrada, Hanover: Ediciones del norte.

Bibliography

283

Read, Malcolm K. 1977. ‘The Renaissance Concept of Linguistic Change.’ In: Archivum Linguisticum 8: 60-69. Regoliosi, Mariangela. 1993. Nel Cantiere del Valla: elaborazione e montaggio delle “Elegantiae”. Roma: Bulzoni. Restall, Matthew and John F. Chuchiak IV. 2002. ‘A Reevaluation of the Authenticity of Fray Diego de Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán’. In: Ethnohistory 49, no. 3 (summer): 651-669. __ . 2003. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ricard, Robert. 1982 [1933]. The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press. Riché, Pierre. 1975. Education and culture in the barbarian West, sixth through eighth centuries. (tr. John J. Contreni). Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Rico, Francisco. 1978a. Nebrija frente a los barbaros: el canón de gramáticos nefastos en la polémica del humanismo. Salamanca: Universidad. __ . 1978b. ‘Laudes litterarum: Humanismo y dignidad del hombre en la España del Renacimiento’. In: Antonio Carreira et al. (eds), Homenaje a Julio Caro Baroja. Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas: 895-914. __ . 1981. ‘Un prólogo al Renacimiento español. La dedicatoria de Nebrija a las “Introductiones latinas” (1488)’. In: Pedro M. Piñero Ramírez y Rogelio Reyes Cano (eds), Seis lecciones sobre la España de los Siglos de Oro. Homenaje a Marcel Bataillon. Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla-Université de Bourdeaux III: 59-94. Rodríguez Alonso, Cristóbal. (Estudio, edición crítica y traducción). 1975. Las historias de los Godos, Vándalos, y Suevos de Isidoro de Sevilla. León: Centro de Estudios de Investigación ‘San Isidoro’. Rojinsky, David. 2000. ‘Grammatical Rule for a ‘Scriptural’ Empire: A Reading of the Prologue to Nebrija’s Gramática Castellana’. In: Hispanic Journal Vol. 21, no. 1 (spring): 151-163. __ . 2003. ‘The Rule of Law and the Written Word in Alfonsine Castile: Demystifying a Consecrated Vernacular’. In: BHS Vol. 80, no. 3: 287-305. __ . 2006. ‘Found in Translation: Writing Beyond Hybridity in Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios’. In: Hofstra Hispanic Review Vol. 3. (Fall): 11-25. Root, Deborah. 1988. ‘The Imperial Signifier: Todorov and the Conquest of Mexico’. In: Critical Critique 9 (spring): 197-219. Round, Nicholas G. 1962. ‘Renaissance Culture and Its Opponents in Fifteenth Century Castile’. In: The Modern Language Review 57: 204-215. Rowe, John Howland. 1965. ‘The Renaissance Foundations of Anthropology’. In: American Anthropologist Vol. 67, no.1: 1-20. Rucquoi, Adeline. 1993. ‘El Rey Sabio: cultura y poder en la monarquía medieval castellana’. In: José Luis Hernando Garrido (Coordinador), Repoblación y reconquista. Actas del III Curso de Cultura Medieval. Aguilar de Campóo: Centro de Estudios del Románico: 77-87. Ruíz García, Elisa. 1999. ‘El poder de la escritura y la escritura del poder’. In: José Manuel Nieto Soria (ed.), Orígenes de la Monarquía Hispánica: propaganda y legitimación, ca. 1400-1520. Madrid: Dykinson: 275-314.

284

Companion to Empire

Sahagún, Fray Bernardino de. 1993. ‘Book Twelve of the Florentine Codex’. In: James Lockhart (ed. and tr.), We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico. Vol 1. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Press: 48–255. __ . 1997 [1956]. Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España (ed. Ángel María Garibay K.). México: Porrúa. Sánchez Marcos, Francisco. 1999. ‘La historiografía sobre la Edad Moderna’. In: J. Andrés Gallego (Coordinador), Historia de la historiografía española. Madrid: Encuentro: 117-82. Sánchez Prado, Ignacio M. 2005. ‘The Pre-Columbian Past as a Project: Miguel LeónPortilla and Hispanism’. In: Mabel Moraña (ed.), Ideologies of Hispanism. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press: 40-61. Santillana, Marqués de. 1984. ‘Proemio e Carta’. In: Francisco López Estrada (ed.), Las Poéticas Castellanas de la Edad Media. Madrid: Taurus. Sarmiento, Ramón. 1992. ‘La teoría de la corrupción en Antonio de Nebrija’. In: Bulletin Hispanique T. 94, no. 2: 405-409. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scholem, Gershom. 1996. On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. New York: Schocken. Scholes, France V. and Eleanor B. Adams (eds). 1952. Proceso contra Tzintzincha Tangaxoan el Caltzontzín, formado por Nuño de Guzmán, año de 1530. México: Porrúa y Obregón, S.A. Seed, Patricia. 1991. ‘Failing to Marvel: Atahualpa’s Encounter with The Word’. In: Latin American Research Review 26, no. 1: 7-32. Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de. 1987 [1547]. Democrates Alter. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Salomon, Frank. 2004. The Cord Keepers. Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Solano, Francisco de. (ed.). 1991. Documentos sobre la política lingüística en Hispanoamérica (1492-1800). Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Smalley, Beryl. 1941. The Study of The Bible In The Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon. Spiegel, Gabrielle. 1983. ‘Genealogy: Form and Function in Medieval Historical Narrative’. In: History and Theory 22, no. 1 (Feb): 43-53. Stern, Steve J. 1992. ‘Paradigms of Conquest: History, Historiography, and Politics’. In: Journal of Latin American Studies Vol. 24, Quincentenary Supplement: The Colonial and Post Colonial Experience. Five Centuries of Spanish and Portuguese America: 1-34. Stock, Brian. 1983. The Implications of Literacy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stone, Cynthia. 2004. In Place of Gods and Kings. Authorship and Identity in the Relación de Michoacán. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Street, Brian. 1983. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Suárez Roca, José Luis. 2000. ‘Tradición e innovación en la descripción de la lengua náhuatl’. In: Otto Zwartjes (ed.), Las gramáticas misioneras de tradición hispánica (siglos xvi-xvii). Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi: 73-95. Subirats, Eduardo. 1994. El continente vacío: la conquista del Nuevo Mundo y la conciencia moderna. Madrid: Anaya y Mario Muchnik.

Bibliography

285

__ . 2004. Una última vision del paraíso. Ensayos sobre media, vanguardia y la destrucción de culturas en América Latina. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Tanner, Marie. 1993. The Last Descendant of Aeneas. The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Tate, Robert B. 1970. Ensayos sobre la historiografía peninsular del siglo XV. Madrid: Gredos. __ . 1994. ‘La historiografía del reinado de los Reyes Católicos’. In: Carmen Codoñer y Juan Antonio González Iglesias (eds), Antonio de Nebrija: Edad Media y Renacimiento. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad: 17-28. Taussig, Michael. 1992. The Nervous System. London and New York: Routledge. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1984. The Conquest of America. New York: Harper Perennial. Torre Revello, José. 1940. Orígenes de la imprenta en España y su desarrollo en América española. Buenos Aires: Editado por la Institución Cultural Española con motivo del quinto centenario dela imprenta. Tory, Geofroy. 1927 [1529]. Champ Fleury (tr. George B. Ives). New York: Grolier Club. Ukolova, Victoria. 1989. The Last of the Romans and European Culture. Progress Publishers: Moscow. Ullmann, Walter. 1965. A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages. Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books. Valera, Diego de. 1927. Corónica de los reyes católicos (ed. Juan de M. Carriazo). Madrid: J. Molina impresor. Valverde Castro, María R. 2000. Ideología, simbolismo, y ejercicio del poder real en la monarquía Visigoda: un proceso de cambio. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad. Vance, Eugene. 1986. Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Vázquez, Francisco y Pedrarias de Almesto. 1986. Jornada de Omagua y Dorado. Crónica de Lope de Aguirre. Madrid: Ediciones Miraguano. Vicens Vives, Jaume. 1979. Historia de España y América social y económica II. Barcelona: Editorial Vicens-Vives. Vidal, Hernán. 1985. Socio-historia de la literatura colonial hispanoamericana: tres lecturas orgánicas. Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature. Warren, Benedict. 1985. The Conquest of Michoacan. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Warren, Michelle R. 2003. ‘Post-Philology’. In: Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R Warren (eds), Postcolonial Moves: Medieval Through Modern. New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 19-46. Warwor, Gerhardt. 1997. ‘La vision del Nuevo Mundo: Cristóbal Colón, Guiliano Dati, Pedro Mártir’. In: Karl Kohut y Sonia V. Rose (eds), Pensamiento europeo y cultura colonial. Madrid: Iberoamericana: 297-319. Weckmann, Luis. 1984. La herencia medieval de México. 2 vols. México: El Colegio de México. Weiss, Julian. 1990. The Poet’s Art: Literary Theory in Castile c.1400-60. Oxford: The Society for the Study of Medieval Language and Literature.

286

Companion to Empire

Weissberger, Barbara F. 2004. Isabel rules: constructing queenship, wielding power. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Williams, Raymond. 1989 [1983]. Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society. Glasgow: Fontana Press. Wogan, Peter. 1994. ‘Perceptions of European Literacy in Early Contact Situations’. In: Ethnohistory 41: 407-29. Wolf, Armin. 1989. ‘El movimiento de legislación y codificación en Europa en tiempos de Alfonso el Sabio’. In: Juan Carlos de Miguel Rodríguez et al. (eds), Alfonso X el Sabio, Vida, Obra y Época. Actas del Congreso Internacional. Madrid: Sociedad Española de Estudios Medievales: 31-37. Wolf, Kenneth Baxter. (ed. and tr.). 1990. Conquerors and Chroniclers of Medieval Spain. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1990. Wood, Stephanie. 2003. Transcending Conquest. Nahua Views of Spanish Colonial Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Woolard, Kathryn A. 2002. ‘Bernardo de Aldrete and the Morisco Problem: A Study in Early Modern Spanish Language Ideology’. In: Comparative Studies in Society and History 44: 446-80. Wright, Roger. 1982. Late Latin and early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France. Liverpool: Francis Cairns. __ . 1996. ‘Latin and Romance in the Castilian Chancery (1180-1230)’. In: BHS Vol. 73: 115-128. __ . 1997. ‘Linguistic Standardization in the Middle Ages in the Iberian Peninsula: advantages and disadvantages’. In: Stewart Gregory and D.A. Trotter (eds), De mot en mot. Aspects of medieval linguistics. Essays in Honour of William Rothwel. Cardiff: The University of Wales Press in Conjunction with the Modern Humanities Research Association: 261-275. __ . 1999. ‘Periodization and how to avoid it’. In: Blake, Ranson and Wright (eds), Essays in Hispanic Linguistics Dedicated to Paul M. Lloyd. Delaware: Juan de la cuesta – Hispanic Monographs: 25-42. __ . 2000. El Tratado de Cabreros (1206): Estudio sociofilológico de una reforma ortográfica. London: Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar 19. __ . 2002. A Sociophilological Study of Late Latin. Turnhout: Brepols. Ximenius de Rada, Rodericus. 1968. Opera. Reimpresión facsímil de la edición de 1793 (ed. María Desamparados Cabanes Pecourt). Valencia: Editorial Anubar. Yañez Rosales, Rosa H. 2001. Rostro, palabra y memoria indígenas: El Occidente de México: 1524-1816. México: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores de Antropología Social. Yates, Frances. 1966. The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. __ . 1975. Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Index aboriginal cultures, 173 n.13 Abu-Lughod, Janet, 101, 102 Acosta, José de, Historia natural y moral de las Indias, 193–4 Adams, Eleanor B., 246, 258 n.21 Africa (see North Africa) Agamben, Giorgio, 231 Aguirre, Lope de, 227–8, 259 n.27 Alatorre, Antonio, 89 n.12 Albornoz, Bernaldino de, 245 Alcalá, 114 Aldrete, Bernardo de, Del origen I principio de la lengua castellana o española, 138 Alexander the Great, 51 Alfonso VI, King of León-Castile, 67–8 Alfonso X el Sabio, 15–16, 263; as author-function, 85–6; and Chancery, 70; Estoria de Espanna (Primera Crónica General), 65, 72; and law, 81–2; and territorial expansion, 76; and vernacular writing system, 59–60, 66, 72, 113 allegory, 220 n.31 Almohads, 80 Almoravids, 80 Alonso of Portugal, 122, 125 alphabetization: Amerindian languages, 17, 191–5; and colonial acculturation, 22 alphabet: Hebrew, 19; Mayan, 221 n.39; and kingdoms, origins of, 178; manuals, 178; origins of, 39, 117; pre-Hispanic languages, 138, 139; and travel writing,

authentication of, 182–3; tyranny of, 140; vernacular, 19 altepetls (kingdoms), 196, 199 America, 'discovery' and 'invention' of, 145 Amerindians: compared with Christians 151; 1492, significance for, 102; and history, recording of, 179; idealization of, 156; as legal subjects, 232; 'letterless Indian' trope, 140, 145–6, 150, 188, 191, 172 n.11; Taíno, 152; writing systems, 159–60; and written word, reaction to, 169 (and see indigenous peoples; Maya; Mexica; Taíno; Tupinamba) Anales de Tlatelolco, 16, 179, 198– 201, 203–4, 209, 212, 215 Anales Históricas de la Nación Mexicana, 198–9 anima corpus, metaphor of, 90 n.24 anti-Semitism, 58 n.17 apostasy, 84–5 Arabic, 77, 88 n.6 Aragon: Italian expansion, 102, 128, 130; law codes in, 88 n.8; union with Castile, 106, 113; vernacular in, 77 archaeology, 115 Asensio, Eugenio, 108 Atahualpa, 240, 175 n.21 Audiencia (court), Mexico City, 184, 230, 237 Auerbach, Erich, 261 Augustine, Saint, 36, 37 Augustus Caesar, 43

288

Companion to Empire

Avelar, Idelbar, 259 n.25 Aztecs, 98 Babel, myth of, 32, 118, 137, 205 Barabas, Alicia, 212 barbarism/barbarians, 126–32; Amerindian culture, 159, 179; Amerindian languages, 195; geography of, 132; compared with modern present, 115; origin of term, 126, 127; and ‘lack’ of writing, 162 Bartra, Roger, 155 Basque language, 133 n.2 Benjamin, Walter: 'Critique of Violence', 241, 254-5, 258 n.22, 259 n.23, 260 n.28; and history, 94–5; translation, theory of, 179, 205–7, 208, 209 Bernáldez, Andrés, 134 n.10 Bhabha, Homi, 175 n.20 Bible: Amerindians' attitude to, 175 n.20; and body of Christ, 160; imagery, 125; New Testament, Book of Revelation, 124, 125; Old Testament, 34; Book of Daniel, 124; Polyglot, 116; Roman Empire, 37; writing metaphors in, 174 n.16 Biclaro, Juan de, 41, 42 Bierbach, Christine, 105–6 bilingualism: Nahuatl, 218 n.17; Roman Empire, 171 n.3; texts, 107 bishops, 55, 90 n.21 Black Legend (see Leyenda negra) blasphemers, 83–4 Bloch, R. Howard, 32, 45 body: body politic, 83; of Christ, 160; 'disappeared', 252–5; King's Two Bodies, 240, 241, 251; of law, 82–5; regal, 110; symbolism, 236; territorial, 82, 236; and torture, 251 Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, 177 (quoted), 212 The Book of Formation, 19 Book of Nature, 111

books: burning, 161, 213; and imperial image-making, 96, 109, 111–12; lack of, 148–9; Latin, 114; lead (plomos), 171 n.2; Mesoamerican, 188; Nahua, 190–2; (and see manuscripts) bureaucrats (see letrados) Burgos, Council of, 88 Burgos, Laws of, 151 Byzantine Empire, 44, 52 Byzantine forces, Iberian peninsula, 47 Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez, Naufragios, 174 n.19, 257 n.8 Cajamarca (Peru), 175 n.21 Calepino, Ambrogio, 192 Calvinists, 163 Canary Islands, 102, 111, 128 Cañizares Esguerra, Jorge, 162, 217 n.15, 221 n.36 capitalism, western, 101 Capitulaciones de Santa Fe, 166, 229 Caribbean, conquest of, 144 Carlos III, King of Spain, 138 Carmentis (nymph), 39 Caroline miniscule, 87 n.6 Carolingian reforms, 76, 79 Carolingian renaissance, 54 Carpentier, Alejo, Los pasos perdidos, 263 Carruthers, Mary, 40–1, 30 n.6 Cartagena, 46 cartillas (alphabet manuals), 178 Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América (Mexico City), 178 Cassiodorus Senator, 36, 40, 42, 56 n.7 castellanización, 66–7 castellano drecho, as writing system, 71 Castile: annexation of Canary Islands, 102; as a Christian power, 77; expansion, 76, 98, 125; historiography, 111–12; humanism, 101, 106, 113, 130; imperium, 21, 67– 9, 95; law, 54; literate mentality, 17, 61, 74; literature, 104;

Index patriotism, 77, 128; power, 62; repopulation, 77, 79–81; compared with Roman Empire, 137–8; union with Aragon, 106, 113; union with León, 77; vernacular textuality, 23; war, 128 Castilian: evolution of, 23, 117–18, 119; and the gospel, diffusion of, 157–8; history of, 15, 133 n.2; compared with Latin, 137; as a lingua franca, 138, 139; as an official language, 9, 59–60, 65–7, 71, 72, 77, 78, 79, 85, 86, 104, 112, 223–4; origins of, 63–4, 104; orthographic system, 74; philology, 104; prestige of, 114, 137; and tyranny of the alphabet, 140; as a written language, 106 Catalan, 106, 90 n.20, 133 n.2 Catalonian nationalism, 104 catechisms, 178 Catholic Monarchs: and artistic production, 119, 125; and book culture, 96, 109; and expansion, 99, 128; and imperial nostalgia, 98; and propaganda, 111, 120, 122, 134 n.10 Cazonci of Michoacán, the: confession, 244–5, 248; torture and execution, 225, 234–6, 238– 9, 240, 241, 243, 244, 246–7, 248, 250, 253; two bodies of, 251, 252 Cédula de Aranjuez, 138 Celtiberia, etymology of, 116 Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote, 145 Cervantes de Salazar, Francisco, 186 Chaldeans, 153 Chanceries, Royal, 69–70, 71, 88 n.8 Charlemagne, 57 n.11 (and see Carolingian reforms; Carolingian renaissance) Charles V, emperor, 97–8, 142 Chimalpahin (Nahua annalist), 197 Chinese characters, 216 n.7 Christ, as 'alpha and omega', 160

289 Christian belief, and Greek alphabet, 40 Christianity: and colonization, 156–7; Iberian Peninsula, 77; and imperial ideology, 44; importance of letters to, 160; and orality, 156; pax Christiana, 97–8, 151; Roman Empire, 37 Christians: apostasy, 84–5; mexicanization of, 200 Chuchiak, John F. IV, 221 n.38 Church: and colonization, 231; and cultural production, 78; and language policy, 138, 139; and law, 55 Cisneros, Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de, 116 ciudad letrada, 224 Clanchy, Michael, 17 classical culture, 56 n.7 clergy, Roman Empire, 56 n.7 Codex Mendoza, 216 n.5, 256 n.5 Colish, Marcia L., 40–1 Collins, Roger, 58 n.17 colonial rule, resistance to, 234 colonialism: meaning of term, 21; as a mission to evangelize, 151; mythologization of, 132 colonies: and barbarism/barbarity, 130, 132; language policy, 99; transformation of, 144 colonization: and language policy, 138, 139; and literacy, 226; terminology of, 233–4; and universal Christian empire, 96–7, 98, 99; (and see castellanización) Columbus, Christopher, 144, 147, 164 (quoted), 166; Carta a Santángel, 147 Columbus family, 229 compañera del imperio motto, 101, 104, 105, 108 confessionaries, 178 confessions, 246, 247–8, 249, 252 conquest, and myth, 99 Conquests, The Two, 231-234 conquista, use of term, 232–3 conquistadores: brutality of, 203,

290

Companion to Empire

213–14; and literacy, 225–31; and written word, authority of, 167–8 (and see Cortés, Hernán; Díaz del Castillo, Bernal; Guzmán, Nuño Beltrán de; Narváez, Pánfilo de; Pizarro, Francisco) Constantine, emperor, 44, 51 Constantinople, 44, 51 convivencia, 102 Cordoba, 90 n.21 Cortés, Hernán: First Letter, 216 n.6; and literacy, 184–6, 228; in Mexico City, 177; Second Letter, 184; trial by residencia, 237; Canzonci's alliance with, 240 crime/criminals, 83, 84 Crónica de Alfonso III, 53 Crónica del Rey Don Alfonso décimo, 88 n.9 Crown, Spanish: and colonial administration, 237; and Guzmán, Nuño Beltrán de, 238; and legal control, 230; preoccupations of, 72–3; rebellion against, 227; and vernacular tongue, 81 Cuauhtémoc, 240 Cuba, 146 Cuiníarángari (‘Don Pedro’), 235 cultural adaptation, 221 n.37 cultural reforms, 105 cultural relativism, D'Anghiera and, 150 cultural studies, hegemony in, 17 culture: aboriginal, 173 n.13; classical, 56 n.7; grammatical, 54, 61 culture versus nature, 146 Cummins, Thomas, 184 Curicaueri (Tarascan god), 253 Curtius, Ernst, 18 Dante Alighieri, De Monarchia, 97, 98 de Bry, Theodore, 146, 235 de Certeau, Michel, 9 (quoted), 18, 24, 163 de Landa, Fray Diego, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, 213–15

death penalty, 241–2 del Pilar, García, 235 del Valle, José, 104 ‘denial of coevalness’, 173 n.13 Derrida, Jacques, 18, 206, 56 n.2, 171 n.6, 219 n.26, 259 n.22 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 177, 186 dictionaries, 178; Castilian-Mexican, 157; Latin-Castilian, 107, 131, 194; multi-lingual, 192; Nahuatl, 158; Romance-Latin, 135 n.17 Diez, Friedrich, 261 disease (as metaphor), 83, 84 documents, as evidence, 13 'Don Francisco' (see Cazonci of Michoacán, the) ‘Don Pedro' (see Cuiníarángari) Donatus, Ars grammatica, 40 Drucker, Johanna, 216 n.7 Durán, Fray Diego, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España, 217 n.12 Dussel, Enrique, 101–2 Eco, Umberto, 216 n.7 El Cid, 105 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 136 n.22 Elliott, John H., 256 n.2 Empire (Negri and Hardt), 265–6 empires (and see also imperio (Spanish)) : and Christian mission, 138–9; non-Christian, 98 encomenderos, 244 encomienda system, 234, 235, 239, 240 encyclopedias (see Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, sive Origines) Enrique IV, King, 111 Enzina, Juan del, Égloga cuarta, 93 (quoted) epigraphs, 110, 115 “epistemic grid”, 256 n.4 Erasmians, 97–8 Erasmus, 152 Ervigio, King, 54 Escobar Olmedo, Armando M., 258

Index n.21 España una, grande, libre motto, 105 Esparza Torres, Miguel Angel, 108, 135 n.21 Espéculo (law-code), 66 etymology: and Hebrew, 34; methodology, 32; Nebrija and, 116; Romance words, 10; theory of, 32, 34–6, 41, 75 (and see Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae) etymons, 32, 34 Eusebius of Caesarea, 34 evangelization, colonies, 178, 190, 195, 215, 234, 238, 239, 253, 254 executions, 242 Fabian, Johannes, 173 n.13 Falangists, 135 n.14 Ferdinand the Catholic, King: espacio gráfico, importance of, 109–10; and imperial image-making, 121–4; and laws, 86; and Spanish unity, 106; and textual culture, 111, 112 (and see Catholic Monarchs) Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo, 186 Fernando III 'El Santo', King, 62, 63, 65, 70, 77 fetish/fetishization, 140, 164–70, 221 n.36 Ficino, Marsilio, 188–9 Fiore, Joaquin de, 124–5 fire, symbolism of, 253 First Audience of Mexico, 184 Florentine Codex, 191, 193, 201, 202–3, 210, 212, 215, 218 n.18 Florida, 230 Foucault, Michel, 9 (quoted), 13, 28 n.2, 242, 246, 247, 248, 251 1492, mythologization of, 102 France: linguistic unity, 261; military intervention in Iberian Peninsula, 90 n.21 Franciscans, 214 Franco, General Francisco, 106 (and see Falangists) Francoist ideologies, 105, 106 Fuchs, Barbara, 20, 22, 102

291 fueros (charters): Fuero Juzgo, 54, 55, 65, 66; Fuero Real, 66–7, 86; translation, 76 Galician, 133 n.2 Galindo Romeo, Pascual, 104 García de Santa María, Gonzalo de, 108 Garibay Kintana, Ángel María, 197 gender: and barbarism/barbarity, 131–2; ideology of, 121 genealogy: Bloch and, 32; and writing of history in Foucault, 13–14, 28 n.2; Nietzsche and, 13– 14, 29 n.4; Old Testament, 34; and written word, 17–19 Gibson, Charles, 218 n.16 Gil Fernández, Luis, 94 Girón Alconchel, José Luis, 107–8 globalization, 265 glyphs, 187–8, 200, 201, 213 gold: as a commodity, 166, 169, 203; as a metaphor, 142 Golden Age: of artistic production, 119; Columbus and, 147–8; and linguistic purity, 118; Martyr D'Anghiera and, 145–7, 148–54, 155, 156, 263; in Ovid, 141, 142, 144, 145, 149; and pagan imagery, 151; and pax Christiana, 122–3; as a spatialized concept, 143; and tyranny, 233; in Virgil, 122, 124, 125, 142; and writing, 162 Golden Fleece myth, 142 González Casanovas, Roberto, 78 González Cuenca, Joaquín, Las etimologías de San Isidoro romançeadas, 57 n.16 González Echevarría, Roberto, 140, 256 n.6 González Llubera, Ignacio, 104 Goths, 42, 45, 48–9, 136 n.24 (and see Visigoths) grammar: Castilian (see Nebrija, Antonio de); and divine word, 116; Roman Empire, 36–7; Spanish, 118; speculative, 53;

292

Companion to Empire

vernacular, 107–8, 178 grammarians, 36, 108, 138 grammatica (litteratura), 19; and imperium, 36, 36–7 grammatica Christiana, 37 grammatical culture, 61; Carolingian renaissance, 54 Gramsci, Antonio, 17, 128, 219 n.27 Granada: fall of, 102, 111, 121, 125– 6; Plomos del Sacromonte, 138; war for, 120–1, 128 graphemes, 74, 117, 160, 183 Graziano, Frank, The New Millennial World, 144 (quoted) Greek: culture, 181; language, 39 Greeks: and 'barbarity', 126, 127; elements and letters, association between, 160; writing, antipathy towards, 160 Greenblatt, Stephen, 162, 167–8 Gregory I, Pope, 36 Gregory VII, Pope, 68 Gruzinski, Serge, 217 n.13 Guerrero Ramos, Gloria, 107 (quoted) Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 261 Guzmán, Nuño Beltrán de, 223 (quoted), 264; arrest and trial, 254–5; career, 235–8; and Cazonci, torture and execution of, 225, 234, 235, 239, 240, 241, 245–7, 248, 250, 251, 253; Memoria, 238–9; and political power, 230; Proceso del Cazonci, 16 Hardt, Michael, 265 Hebrew, 34, 39, 78, 216 n.7 heraldry, 110, 111–12 heretics/heresy, 83–4, 156, 58 n.17 Hermenegild (son of Leovigild), 50 Hermes (Greek god) (see Thoth) Herodotus, 150, 180 Hesiod, (Five) Ages of Man, 142 hieroglyphics, Egyptian, 39, 187, 189 Hill Boone, Elizabeth, 200 Hillgarth, Jocelyn N., 42–3, 48 Hispania: imperium in, 45, 48–9, 50–

2; as a monarchy, 51; national history, 62; writing and Roman law, 54 Hispanic Philology, 262 Hispaniola, 146, 151 historians, task of, 13, 24 historical distancing, 115 histories: Latin, 135 n.17; local, 199; Nahuatl, 198–201; of violence, 212–15 historiography: antiquarian, 208; Castilian, 111–12, 122; Christian, 34; de Certeau's definition of, 30 n. 5; decentering of, 101; and historical cohesion, 62–3; New Philologists' approach to, 211 history: conceptions of, 14, 28 n.2, 29 n.4; cyclical nature of, 118; as a discipline, 41; Golden Age myth and, 142–3; and language theory, 34–5; millenarian concepts of, 124; 'original' documents, 210; 'self-fulfilling prophecy' view of, 101, 102, 103, 122, 124, 126; and truth, 94–5, 102–3, 130; and unity, 134 n.10; of writing, 62; writing of, 62, 63–4, 179, 206, 221 n.36; and written records, 148, 192 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, 162 Holy Roman Emperor, Alfonso X el Sabio's candidature, 67; (and see Charles V) Holy Roman Empire, 96, 97, 98 Holy Trinity, 41 hostage-taking, 240 Huejotzingo (Mexico), 184 Huitzilopochtli (god), 219 n.25 human condition, 161, 162 humanism: and barbarism/barbarity, meaning of, 127; Castile, 101, 106, 113; and Christendom, unified, 120; and civilizing process, 161–2; and 'exotic' writing systems, 216 n.7; and historical distancing, 115; and imperium, 97; Italian, 129; and

Index language, 116, 118–19; Latin, 114; Nebrija and, 108–9; impact on royal ideology, 125; and unity, proto-national, 119–20 Ibañez Martínez, José, 104, 105–6, 107 Iberian Peninsula: Byzantine forces in, 47; Christianity in, 77; French military intervention in, 90 n.21; kingdoms, 68; medieval Hispanic conception of, 68 'identity politics', 103 imperial imagery, 45, 120 imperial renovation, 119 imperialism, 265, 266 (and see empire) imperio (Spanish): compañera del imperio, 20–1, 94; and imperium, 95–100; and lengua, 225; meaning of, 95–6; in Nebrija's Gramática castellana, 105 imperium (political power): Castile, 67–9, 89 n.12; Christian, 162; and imperio, 95–100; Imperium Christianum, 44; Imperium Romanum, 98; Isidore of Seville and, 47–50, 51–2; origin of term, 20, 43–6; Roman Empire, 36–7, 43; use of term, 98–9; and the vernacular, 65, 72; Visigoths and, 45–6, 47, 50, 51–2 Imperium Studies, 20, 22 Incas, 98 incunabula, 114 Indies, colonization of, 96–7 indigenous peoples, dehumanization of, 153 inscription, 264; Alfonso X el Sabio and, 69, 78; archaeological study of, 115; Castile, 64–5; colonized territories, 18; corporeal, 213– 14, 236, 242, 244; Hispania, 39, 41, 42, 43, 61; imperial, 46–52; Templo Mayor, Mexico City, 177–8, 209; torture as, 249; and transcription, 196; and unity, 33; writing as, 22

293 interpreters, 245 (and see translators) iron: as a marker of civilization, 163; as a metaphor, 142 Iron Age, as antithesis of Golden Age, 142, 145, 146, 149 Irvine, Martin, 36, 44–5, 54 Isabel I, Queen of Castile: and espacio gráfico, 109–10; and Introductiones Latinae, 107; as the new Astraea, 122; and Peregrinatio Regis et Reginae ad divinum Iacobum, 120–1; and propaganda, 106, 111, 124, 125; as a role model, 105, 121; Siete Partidas as a bolster to, 86 (and see Catholic Monarchs) Isabel, Infanta, 122, 125 Isabel of Portugal, Empress, 238 Isidore of Seville, 15–16, 37–8, 52–4, 61, 263, 57 n.7; Chronicon Mundi, 41; Etymologiae, sive Origines, 36, 37–9, 40, 42, 53, 54; Book 13, 35–6; Book 9, 31– 2, 33; Historia de Regibus Gothorum, Vandalorum et Suevorum, 33–4, 42, 45, 46, 49– 52, 53, 54; Laus Hispaniae, 42, 47-48; as a Saint, 53 Isis (Egyptian goddess), 39 Islam, 84 (and see Muslims) Italy: Aragonese expansion in, 102, 128; civilization, 130; humanism in, 130 Ives, Peter, 219 n.27 Jalisco (Mexico), 237, 258 n.18 James I, King of Aragon, 87 n.2, 88 n.8, 90 n.20 Jesuits, 216 n.7 Jews, 19, 77, 78, 82 Jiménez de Rada, Rodrigo, 122, 90 n.21; De Rebus Hispaniae, 53, 61–2, 63–4, 72 John of Salisbury, 70-1. 75 Jordanes, Getica, 42 Juan, Prince, 125 Kabbalism: Christian, 189; Jewish,

294

Companion to Empire

19 Kadir, Djelal, 166 Kendrick, Laura, 174 n.17 kings: body of (see body); and emperors, contrasted, 44; as 'Emperors' of America, 98; as head of the realm, 85; Iberian Peninsula, 68; and literacy, 70– 1, 75; power of; and written word, 109; role of, 55 (and see monarchy) Kircher, Athanasius, 216 n.7 Klor de Alva, Jorge, 21 knowledge, objects of, and existence, 41 Kohut, Karl, 94 Krippner-Martínez, James, 235 lack, discourse of, 149 Lafitau, Joseph, Moeurs des Sauvages americains compareés aux moeurs des premiers temps, 174 n.20 language, alphabetization, 191; Amerindian, 17; Castilian, 104; and change, 210–11; and civilization, 155; codification of, 17; and contact, 211; evolution of, 118–19; humanists and, 116; Iberian, 104; and meaning, 204, 219 n.26; Middle Ages, 19; mimetic theory of, 208, 210; national, 265; and peoples, 33; planning, 72, 78, 87 n.5; policy, 138; and political ideology, 126; and political power, 96; Spanish American colonies, 138, 147–8; theory of, 35, 36, 262; and torture, 250, 251; universal, 183 (and see Lull, Raimundo; speech) Lapesa, Rafael, 77, 90 n.21 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 146, 159, 231, 235, 236; Brevísima relación 233, 246 Latin: and bilingualism, 171 n.3; compared with Castilian, 137; and continuity, 63, 64; grammars of, 94; history of, 15; kings'

knowledge of, 70–1; as a language of power, 114–15; Martyr D'Anghiera's use of, 148, 149; medieval, 127; as a metalanguage, 194; as an official language, 71, 78, 107, 112; relationship to Castilian, 117–18; and Romance languages, origins of, 9, 10; as a sacred language, 39, 60; as a source language, 71 (and see Nebrija, Antonio de, Introductiones Latinae ('El Antonio')) law: Canon Law, 70, 83; Castilian as the official language of, 79; codes of, 65–7; (and see Espéculo; fueros; Leyes de Toro; Liber Iudiciorum Ordenamiento de Alcalá de Henares; Ordenamientos de Cortes; Siete Partidas); language, of conquest, 225–31; criminal, 83; Derrida on, 259 n.22; etymology of, 54; Golden Age, 149; and literacy, 75–6, 224; and monarchy, 81–2; printing presses and, 111–12; Roman Law, 55, 68, 86; and speech, 75; terminology of, 73– 4; and violence, 254 (and see royal contracts) learning, Christian ideal of, 56 n.7 Leinhard, Martin, 167, 211 Leo X, Pope, 153 León, 53, 77 León Portilla, Miguel, 169, 170, 197, 208, 212, 172 n.9, 218 n.21 Leovigild, King, 46, 50 Léry, Jean De, Histoire d'un voyage en terre de Brésil, 163 letrados, 224 lettered culture, Carolingian renaissance, 54 letters: classical, 127; and elements, Greek association with, 160; symbolism of, 160 letters, alphabetic: and grammatical theory, 34, 35; Greek, 40; history of, 37–41, 61–2, 116;

Index Latin, 39, 63; and Llullism, 189– 90; and power, 36; Romans and, 115; as a tool of empire, 20 (and see writing) Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 172 n.6 Levin, Harry, 149, 162 lexical analysis, 53 Leyenda negra (Black Legend), 212, 233 Leyes de Toro, 86 Liber Iudiciorum, 'the Book of Judges', 54, 55 life and death, administration of, indigenous peoples, 231 linguistics: historical, 12; pre-modern theory of, 34; vernacular, 101 Liss, Peggy K., 124, 125 literacy: alphabetic, 140, 145, 162–3, 193; and colonization, 157; and conquest, laws of, 225–31; kings' need for, 70–1, 75; and law, 75– 6; Mesoamericans and, 145–6, 148; Middle Ages, 19; and orality, 204, 30 n. 6; Renaissance, 109 literate mentality, 17, 61, 74, 264 literature, Castilian, 104 litteratura (see grammatica) Lockhart, James, 179, 195–6, 197–8, 208; Templo Mayor, 218 n.24 Lodares, Juan R., 70, 104, 133 n.8 logico-empiricism, 18 Lomax, Derek W., 59 Lomnitz-Adler, Claudio, 231–2, 234, 242 López de Gómara, Francisco, 186, 188, 189; Conquista de México, 163; Historia de Indias (Hispania Victrix), 163–4 López de Mendoza, Iñigo, Marquis of Santillana, 135 n.16 López Madera, Gregorio, 137 Lot, Ferdinand, 9 Lucian of Samosata, 180, 173 n.15; Saturnalia, 152; True Stories, 152 Lull, Raimundo, 189

295 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 97 magic writing (see fetish/fetishization) Mani (Yucatán), 213, 214–15 manuscripts, 109 (and see books) Maravall, José Antonio, 20, 68, 91 n.27, 133 n.3 Marín Tamayo, Fausto, 237, 258 n.20 Márquez-Villanueva, Francisco, 90 n.23 marriage, strategic, 124 Marsá, María, 11 Martyr D'Anghiera, Peter: De Barbaria Fugata, 131–2, 141; De Orbe Novo, Decades, 16, 130, 140, 143, 145-151, 152-154, 169; and 'exotic' writing systems, 186, 187; and Golden Age myth, 263; influences, 180; on Nebrija, Antonio de, 128–9 Marxism, and fetishism, 165 massacres, 201–2 Matricula de tributos, 185–6 Maya: body decoration, 214; and cultural adaptation, 212; and literacy, 225–6 Mazzotti, José Antonio, 21 memory: art of, 30 n. 6; collective, 14, 62; and knowledge, 41; words and, 40 Mendoza, Antonio de, 230 Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, 104, 105; Orígenes del español, 10–11 Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino, 104 Menocal, Rosa María, 261 Mesoamericans, and literacy, 145–6, 148 messianism, Iberian, neo-Gothic theory of, 122, 125 metals as metaphors, 142 metaphors, scriptural, 19 Mexica, 199 Mexico, 230 Mexico City: Audiencia (court), 230; Templo Mayor, 177–8, 201, 209 Michoacán (Mexico), 225, 237, 239, 240, 256 n.5 (and see Cazonci of

296

Companion to Empire

Michoacán, the) Mignolo, Walter D., 140, 192, 211, 172 n.11, 216 n.10, 217 n.15, 221 n.36; The Darker Side of the Renaissance, 22 Milhou, Alain, 125 millenarianism, messianic, 125 minority groups, 82–3 missionaries: and castellanización, 138; and grammaticalization, 156–7, 190–5; and pictographic writing, 187 mnemonics, 40 Moctezuma, 177, 185, 186, 196, 240 modern/modernity: barbarism/barbarians compared with, 115; origins of, 101–2 Molina, Alonso de, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana, 157–8 monarchia universalis, 98 monarchy: centralized, 78; corporate, 89 n.13; duty of, 80; and ideology, 44, 83, 108, 109, 111; and imperium compared, 51; power of, 55; and vernacular writing, 66 (and see kings; Catholic Monarchs) monasteries, 56 n.7 Montaigne, Michel de, 259 n.22; Des Cannibales, 163; influence on Martyr D'Anghiera, 173 n.14 Moors, 83–4 More, Thomas, 152; Utopia, 180–2, 173 n.15 Moses, 39 Moslems, 78, 126, 127 Motolinía, Fray Toribio de Benavente, 158, 177, 230; Historia de los indios de la Nueva España, 183–4, 190, 217 n.11 Mozarabs, 55 mudéjares, 82 Muldoon, James, 57 n.11 Muslims (see Islam) Nahua, 177, 183, 185, 186–7, 191, 210 Nahuatl: alphabetic, 15, 16, 179;

dictionaries of, 157, 158; grammars of, 191; transcription of, 195–8 Nahuatl Studies, 197 Narváez, Pánfilo de, 201 nation states, 97, 99, 120 nationalisms, 101; Castile, 104; Catalonia, 104; Nebrija and, 103–6; proto-nationalism, 78 nature versus culture, 146 Navarrete, Ignacio, 118, 119, 134 n.12 Navas de Tolosa, battle of, 62, 77 Nebrija, Antonio de, 15–16, 93–7, 99–101, 107, 263; on barbarity, 126; and cultural reform, 128–9; De vi ac potestate litterarum, 116–17; Gramática castellana, 20, 93, 100–1, 103, 104, 105, 106–7, 108, 115, 117–19, 120, 121, 127, 132; as a humanist, 108–9, 115, 119, 120, 129–30; and imperial propaganda, 110; and imperio, 99; Introductiones Latinae ('El Antonio'), 94, 107, 113, 114, 120, 132, 194, 136 n.21; Latin poems, 120–6; Epithalamium, 121–4, 125–6; and Martyr D'Anghiera's De Orbe Novo, 172 n.8; and modern nationalism, 103–6; Muestra dela Istoria delas Antigüedades de España, 115–16; and patriotism, 129; quincentenary, 106; Reglas de Ortografía, 107; as royal chronicler, 130; Vocabulario de Romance en Latin, 129 Negri, Antonio, 265 Neo-Platonism, 41 New Galicia, 237, 238 New Philologists (Nahuatl), 179, 197, 200, 204, 210–11, 212 New Spain, 183–4, 224–5, 227, 230 'New World', concept of, 145, 180 Nieto Soria, José Manuel, 125 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 13, 28 n.2, 29 n. 4

Index Niranjana, Tejaswini, 205 noble savage: and 'letterless Indian' trope, 151, 172 n.11 (and see the wildman) North Africa, 125, 128, 132 numismatics, 115 Octavius Caesar (see Augustus Caesar) O’Gorman, Edmundo, 171 n.7, 172 n.12 Olid, Cristóbal de, 234 Olmedo, Felix G., 135 n.21; Nebrija, 93 (quoted) Olmos, Fray Andrés de, Arte de la lengua mexicana, 191 oral tradition: Spanish American colonies, 178 (and see writing, and orality) Ordenamiento de Alcalá de Henares, 86 Ordenamientos de Cortes, 86 Ordenanzas sobre el buen tratamiento de los Indios, 257 n.8 origins, search for, 13–14, 262–3 Orsúa, Pedro de, 227 orthography: Nebrija and, 117, 126; proto-nationalist, 63–5 Ortiz Muñoz, Luis, 104 Other, science of, 30 n. 5 Ovid: and Golden Age myth, 141, 142, 145, 149; Metamorphoses, 141 (quoted), 144; and More’s debt to, 180 Pablos, Juan (Giovanni Paoli), 178 pacificación, 233 Pagden, Anthony, 43, 51, 98–9, 139, 159, 166, 243, 256 n.2 Palacios Alcaine, Azucena, 59, 67 Palencia, Alfonso de, 135 n.17 Pané, Fray Ramón de, 152; Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios, 148 Pánuco (Mexico), 237 Paoli, Giovanni (see Pablos, Juan) Papacy, Investiture Crisis, 89 n.13

297 Papal bulls, 139; Inter Caetera, 137 (quoted), 151 papermaking, 181–2 Parry, John, H., 258 n.18 Pascal, Blaise, 259 n.22 patriotism, 80, 97, 128 Paul, Saint, 157, 160 Paulus Osorius, 42 Peitz, William, 164, 165 Penny, Ralph, 71, 220 n.34 'peoples without history' paradigm, 148 Petrarch, 97 Philip II, King, 98, 228 philology: Castilian, 104; definition, 11; emergence of, 115; Hispanic, 262; national, 262; "New Philologists", 179, 197, 200, 204, 210–11, 212; "New Philology", 11, 26, 197–8, 200, 204, 210; Post-Philology, 11–13, 14; Romance Philology, 10, 261–2; and unification, 106 Phoenicians, 39 phonemes, 117 phonetics, comparative, 116 phonocentrism, 190 Picaresque writing, 256 n.6 pictographs, 22, 189, 200 pillories, 224 Piña Homs, Román, 91 n.27 Pizarro, Francisco, 225 Plato: Phaedrus, 190, 174 n.16; Republic, 180; Timaeus, 180 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 180 Plomos del Sacromonte, 137 poets, Castilian court, 111 Policraticus (medieval treatise), 70 Portugal, expansion, 98 Portuguese, and fetishes, 165 post-colonial theory, 12, 14 Post-Philology, 11–13, 14 Prescott, William H., 197 presence, metaphysics of, 206 primitivism, 150–1 printing, and propaganda, 111–14 printing presses, 109, 111, 114, 178, 181–2, 256 n.5

298

Companion to Empire

Priscian, Institutiones Grammaticae, 57 n.16 pronunciation: and orthography, 117; proto-Romance, 19; spoken language, 126 propaganda: and history writing, 134 n.10; and messianic millenarianism, 125; Nebrija and, 108, 120, 122; and printing, 111–14; written word as, 110 Provençal, 261 Pulgar, Fernando del, Chronica de los muy altos y esclarecidos Reyes Catholicos Don Fernando y Doña Isabel, 136 n.25 Purchas, Samuel, 162 Quechua language, 170 Quintilian, 116, 117 quipus, Inca, 22 Quiroga, Vasco de, 181; Información en derecho, 153 (quoted) Rabasa, José, 144, 171 n.7, 257 n.8 Rama, Ángel, 224 Recarred, King, 37, 46, 50 Reconquest myth, 105, 122 Recopilación de leyes de los reinos de las Indias, 229 relaciones (reports), 229; Relación de Michoacán, 235, 247, 253, 254, 256 n.5 relics, 174 n.17 religions 84; Nahua, 177; Taíno, 152 (and see Christianity; Islam) religious minorities, Castile, 83, 84-5 Renaissance, 128, 130; Carolingian, 54 Requerimiento (‘Notification’), 166, 185, 232 Rescesvinto, King, 54 residencias (formal investigations), 256 n.5 Restall, Matthew, 225–6, 221 n.38, 221 n.39 revolutions, 265 rhetoric, 128 Ricard, Robert, 212, 218 n.16

Rico, Francisco, 107, 161 rigorists, 56 n.7 Roberto Pellerey, 216 n.7 Rodríguez Alonso, Cristóbal, 48 Rodríguez Freyle, Juan, 225 Rogerio Sánchez, José, 104 Roman Empire: bilingualism in, 171 n.3; Christianization of, 37; critiques of, 133 n.2; grammar and power in, 36–7; imperium in, 43–4; Spain compared with, 122, 137–8 Roman Law, 55, 68, 86 Roman Republic, imperium in, 43 Romance languages, 9–10, 11, 114 Romance Philology, 261–2 Romans, and alphabetic letters, 115 Rome, cultural legacy of, 128 royal contracts (capitulaciones), 229 Ruíz García, Elisa, 109–10, 111 sacred texts, 117 Sahagún, Fray Bernardino de, 191–2, 210, 264; Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, 158 Salamanca, 114, 120 Sánchez Prado, Ignacio M., 212 Santiago de Compostela, 120 Scarry, Elaine, 249–50 Scholes, France V., 246, 258 n.21 science, and history, 115 scribes, 170, 187, 196, 174 n.17 scriptocentrism, Jewish, 19 scripts, vernacular, 15 Seed, Patricia, 159 Seneca, 129 (quoted) Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 159, 162 sermons, 178 Seville, 77, 90 n.21 Siete Partidas (lawcode), 65, 67, 68– 76, 79, 81, 86, 114; Primera Partida, 69, 73, 74, 75–6, 79, 82; Segunda Partida, 69–70, 79–80, 82; Tercera Partida, 69, 73; Séptima Partida, 82–5 sign/referent relationship, 35 sign systems, 189, 193–4, 200; Mayan, 213, 214

Index sign theories, 19 signatures, confessions as, 246, 247–8 signification, notion of, 32 silver, 166 Sisebut, King, 46 slavery, 159, 203 slavery, natural, 162 social class, Spanish American colonies, 226, 227 Solórzano y Pereira, Juan de, Política Indiana, 138 Spain (see Hispania) Spaniards, Nahua reaction to, 196 'Spanish Empire', 98–9 Spanish language: role of, 264–5; and social class, 226; writing, 15 (and see Basque; Castilian; Catalan) speech, and law, 75 (and see language) Spiegel, Gabrielle, 37–8 status planning, 87 n.5 stereotypes: 'letterless Indian', 140, 145–6, 150, 172 n.11; Mesoamerican glyphs, 187–8; and social class, 227–8; Spanish soldiers, 228 Stock, Brian, 55, 88 n.8 Stone, Cynthia, 235, 253–4 sub-human condition, 162 subalternity, 17 Subirats, Eduardo, 257 n.9 Suinthila, general, 46; as ruler, 47, 51 superstition, 164 symbolism, pictorial, 188–9 Tacitus, Germania, 150 Talavera, Hernando de, 120 tanto monta, monta tanto motto, 110 Tarascans, 235, 253 Taussig, Michael, 263 technologies, 144, 181–2 (and see printing presses) Tenochca, 199 Tenochtitlán, 177, 199, 201 Teules-Chichimecas, 237 textuality: alphabetic, 157, 226; and

299 civilization, 159; hybrid, 194; and political power, 33, 113–14, 122; sacred, 156 Thoth (Egyptian god), 39 tierra, meaning of, 80 Tob de Carrión, Sem, Proverbios morales, 59 (quoted) Todorov, Tzvetan, 226 Toledo, 46, 53 Toledo Councils, 55 Torsedillas, treaty of, 98 torture, 213–14, 244, 246–52 Tory, Geofroy, Champ Fleury, 216 n.3 tradition, myth of, 36 Tragedia del fin de Atahualpa, 170 translation: Amerindian cultures, 186; Benjamin's theory of, 179, 205, 206–7, 208; Ficino and, 188–9; fueros, 76; indigenous peoples, 183–4 translators, 196 (and see interpreters) travel writing, 162, 182 Travels of Sir John Mandeville, The, 182 treason, 84 (and see Aguirre, Lope de) treatises, political, 97 Trent, Council of, 187 trials see residencias (formal investigations) Troy, and Renaissance genealogy, 142 Tupinamba, 163 Túy, Lucas de, 122; Cronicon mundi, 53–4, 61 Tzintzincha Tangaxoan (Don Francisco) see Cazonci of Michoacán, the unification, proto-national, 83 unity, Spanish, 105–6 universal rule, 97 Valdés, Alfonso de, 97 Valdés, Juan de, Diálogo de la lengua, 171 n.1 Valera, Diego de, Corónica de

300

Companion to Empire

España, 109 (quoted) Valla, Lorenzo, 108, 127; Elegantiae, 128 value systems, Spanish colonies, 166 Valverde Castro, María, 47 Vance, Eugene, 40–1 Varro (Roman polymath), 40 Vaz de Caminha, Pero, 147, 166 Vázquez, Francisco, 259 n.27; Jornada de Omagua y Dorado, 227 vernacular: and castellanización, policy of, 66, 138; colonies, spread to, 99; grammaticalization of, 119; as a language of power, 114, 115; Latin, as a challenge to, 127; and legalistic terminology, 74; as a lingua franca, 138, 139, 223; as an official language, 59– 60, 76–9, 112; and printing, 114 (and see Castilian) Vespucci, Amerigo, 147, 166, 181 Vidal, Hernán, 229 (quoted) Villalón, Cristóbal de, Gramática castellana, 171 n.1 Villegas, Francisco de, 244–5 violence: Benjamin's critique of, 241–2; foundational, 231, 264; histories of, 212–15; and law, 254; letrados and, 224–5, 226, 228; and writing, 128, 202–4, 214, 236, 218 n.15 Virgil, 125, 180; Fourth Eclogue, 122, 124, 142 Visigoths, 33, 42, 46, 49; and Catholicism, 50; grammar, 53; and imperium, 45–6, 47, 51–2; and unity, 53, 55 (and see Goths) 'visual thinking', 200 war: against barbarians, 128 (and see conquista; Granada, fall of) Warren, Michelle R., 10–13 wildman, the: concept of, 127, 155–6 (and see noble savage) Williams, Raymond, 21 Wood, Stephanie, 220 n.35, 221 n.37

words: and memory, 40; origins of (see etymology) Wright, Roger, 22–3, 59, 76, 77, 88 n.7 writing: alphabetic, 19, 159, 162, 163–4, 169–70, 178–9, 186, 196, 204; Amerindians' attitude to, 169–70; conception of, 17–19; as a 'conquering' practice, 241; control of, 73; distrust of, 174 n.16; divine quality of, 168; fetish of, 140, 164–70; history of, 62; importance of, 77; and knowledge, preservation of, 72– 3; Latinate, 33, 108; legal, 230– 1; meta-writing, 185; in Middle Ages, 19; non-alphabetic, 22; and orality, 22, 109–11, 145, 152–3, 156, 157, 158, 163, 167, 178, 200, 203–4, 246, 247–8; Picaresque, 256 n.6; pictographic, 187; and power, 23, 109–10, 250, 262; travel, 162; vernacular, 23, 76; in official documentation see Castilian, as an official language; Latin, as an official language (and see letters, alphabetic; orthographies; textuality) writing, and violence, 128, 202–4, 214, 236, 244, 246, 218 n.15 writing systems: castellano drecho , 72; and divine favor, 161; Mesoamerican, 145, 183; Nahua, 186–7; non-alphabetic, 184, 185; Spanish American colonies, 193-4 Yates, Frances, 40–1, 120 (quoted), 30 n.6 Yucatán, 212, 213 Zaragoza, 111 Zumárraga, Juan de, 236, 238