Idolatry's Workshop: The Manuscripts of Pablo José de Arriaga, SJ [El taller de la idolatría: los manuscritos de Pablo José de Arriaga, SJ], edited by José Carlos de la Puente Luna and Jimmy Martínez Céspedes. Lima: Biblioteca Nacional... more
Idolatry's Workshop: The Manuscripts of Pablo José de Arriaga, SJ [El taller de la idolatría: los manuscritos de Pablo José de Arriaga, SJ], edited by José Carlos de la Puente Luna and Jimmy Martínez Céspedes. Lima: Biblioteca Nacional del Perú & Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, 2021. 424 pp. ISBN: 978-612-4102-63-9.
Pablo José de Arriaga was a prominent Jesuit in seventeenth-century Lima and the author of an influential treatise, published there in 1621. His work is considered the standard manual for “extirpators of idolatry,” ecclesiastic judges tasked with rooting out “idolatrous” beliefs and “superstitions” among the indigenous populations of the viceroyalty. He collected the papers now being published (letters, reports, drafts of official decrees) while he was working on his treatise. The manuscripts offer a rare glimpse at a colonial author’s “workshop,” unveiling a constellation of native informants and collaborators behind Arriaga’s intellectual production. The publication includes an introductory essay (60,000 words), a transcription of the 40 manuscripts, and a facsimile of said manuscripts.
After the conquest of Mexico, colonial authorities attempted to enforce Christian beliefs among indigenous peoples—a project they envisioned as spiritual warfare. The Invisible War assesses this immense but dislocated project by examining... more
After the conquest of Mexico, colonial authorities attempted to enforce Christian beliefs among indigenous peoples—a project they envisioned as spiritual warfare. The Invisible War assesses this immense but dislocated project by examining all known efforts to obliterate native devotions of Mesoamerican origin between the 1530s and the late eighteenth century in Central Mexico.
The author's interpretation of these efforts is punctuated by three events: the creation of an Inquisition tribunal in Mexico in 1571; the native rebellion of Tehuantepec in 1660; and the emergence of eerily modern strategies for isolating idolaters, teaching Spanish to natives, and obtaining medical proof of sorcery from the 1720s onwards. Rather than depicting native devotions solely from the viewpoint of their colonial codifiers, this book rescues indigenous perspectives on their own beliefs. This is achieved by an analysis of previously unknown or rare ritual texts that circulated in secrecy in Nahua and Zapotec communities through an astute appropriation of European literacy.
This work contends that native responses gave rise to a colonial archipelago of faith in which local cosmologies merged insights from Mesoamerican and European beliefs. In the end, idolatry eradication inspired distinct reactions: while Nahua responses focused on epistemological dissent against Christianity, Zapotec strategies privileged confrontations in defense of native cosmologies.
In 1570, the Franciscan friar Jerónimo de Mendieta bestowed a rare gift on Juan de Ovando, then president of the Council of Indies. Mendieta placed in Ovando's hands a small manuscript volume in superb Gothic script with illuminated... more
In 1570, the Franciscan friar Jerónimo de Mendieta bestowed a rare gift on Juan de Ovando, then president of the Council of Indies. Mendieta placed in Ovando's hands a small manuscript volume in superb Gothic script with illuminated initials and color illustrations, one of several important manuscripts he had brought to Spain for various prominent recipients. Were it not for its contents, one could have thought it a meticulous version of a breviary or a book of hours, but its contents were unprecedented. This tome contained a scholarly Nahuatl translation of the most popular devotional work in Western Europe in the previous century. It was Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ, which caught Iberian Christians under its spell between the 1460s and the early sixteenth century by means of multiple Latin editions and translations into Portuguese, Catalan, and Spanish, including a version in aljamiado (Spanish in Arabic characters). Indeed, a decisive turning point in the Iberian...