Bernardino de Sahagún's Psalmodia Christiana:

2014 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 619-684
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Candelaria
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New Spain ◽  
New World ◽  
Central Valley ◽  
Bernardino De Sahagun ◽  
Catholic Faith ◽  
Anthropological Study ◽  
Anthropological Research ◽  
Franciscan Order

In Mexico City, 1583, Pedro Ocharte published the first book of vernacular sacred song in the Americas—the Psalmodia Christiana (Christian Psalmody) by Bernardino de Sahagún, a Spanish missionary of the Franciscan Order. Sahagún composed his book of 333 songs in the Nahuatl language during the second half of the sixteenth century to promote the formation of Catholic Mexica (better known as “Aztec”) communities in the central valley of Mexico. Well-received in its day as a primer on tenets of the Catholic faith, the life of Christ, and the virtues of the saints, it was denounced before the Inquisition in the eighteenth century and has otherwise existed in the shadow of Sahagún's monumental Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, a pioneering anthropological study of the Mexica that did not become widely available until the nineteenth century. This article repositions the undervalued Psalmodia Christiana as a polished outcome of the anthropological research for which Sahagún is most remembered, setting in relief the understudied legacy of Western plainchant in the Christian evangelization of the New World and, more broadly, the extent to which the Mexica's native traditions were folded into the apostolic work of Catholic missionaries in post-Tridentine New Spain.

To Sin No More

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Rex Galindo
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
New Spain ◽  
New World ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Rural And Urban Areas ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Spanish Atlantic ◽  
Franciscan Order

For 300 years, Franciscans were at the forefront of the spread of Catholicism in the New World. In the late seventeenth century, Franciscans developed a far-reaching, systematic missionary program in Spain and the Americas. After founding the first college of propaganda fide in the Mexican city of Querétaro, the Franciscan Order established six additional colleges in New Spain, ten in South America, and twelve in Spain. From these colleges Franciscans proselytized Native Americans in frontier territories as well as Catholics in rural and urban areas in eighteenth-century Spain and Spanish America. This is the first book to study these colleges, their missionaries, and their multifaceted, sweeping missionary programs. By focusing on the recruitment of non-Catholics to Catholicism as well as the deepening of religious fervor among Catholics, the book shows how the Franciscan colleges expanded and shaped popular Catholicism in the eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic world. This book explores the motivations driving Franciscan friars, their lives inside the colleges, their training, and their ministry among Catholics, an often-overlooked duty that paralleled missionary deployments. It argues that Franciscan missionaries aimed to reform or “reawaken” Catholic parishioners just as much as they sought to convert non-Christian Native Americans.

Weakening the sex

2020 ◽  
pp. 89-116
Author(s):  
Yarí Pérez Marín
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Female Body ◽  
New World ◽  
Good Health ◽  
Physiological Processes ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Medical Traditions ◽  
European Women ◽  
Medical Books

Chapter 3 addresses the link between colonial ideas on femininity and period understandings of gendered physiology. Similar to their European counterparts in that they deemed women to have a weaker constitution compared to men, medical authors in New Spain, however, began linking arguments on the female body to American environments specifically. Descriptions of physiological processes favoured stricter controls of women’s diets and behaviour under the guise of ensuring their good health. The rising numbers of European women in Mexico are reflected in the fact that the two locally printed medical books that went into second editions in the sixteenth century—Alonso López de Hinojosos’s Svmma (1578, 1592) and Agustín Farfán’s Tractado breve (1579, 1592)—both revised and abridged their first versions in order to make way for sections focused on the treatment of women and children. My analysis traces notions on gender, particularly in the case of ‘exceptional’ gestational processes resulting in 'manly women' and 'effeminate men', showing how authors in the New World brought together under a colonial prism older medical traditions that had taken divergent paths in Europe.

scholarly journals OLD WORDS AND THE NEW WORLD: LIBERAL EDUCATION AND THE FRANCISCANS IN NEW SPAIN, 1536–1601The Whitfield Prize Winner

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 123-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aysha Pollnitz
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Education ◽  
New Spain ◽  
New World ◽  
Santa Cruz ◽  
Indigenous Youth ◽  
Indigenous Students ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
Bernardino De Sahagun

ABSTRACTThe Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, established in 1536, liberally educated the sons of Nahua (Aztec) leaders in New Spain. Its Franciscan pedagogues, including Bernardino de Sahagún (c. 1499–1590), Andrés de Olmos (1491–1571) and Juan Bautista (c. 1555–1606/13), worked with indigenous students and alumni to collect, edit and circulate Nahuatl huehuetlahtolli, or ‘speech of the ancients’. This paper examines the largest collection of these orations printed in pre-modern Mexico, the Huehuetlahtolli [1601] edited by Juan Bautista and indigenous intellectuals from the college. It argues that the Tlatelolcans adapted Nahuatl ‘old words’ for the New World of colonial society. They ornamented the speeches with rhetorical techniques derived from Santa Cruz's Erasmian curriculum. They interpolated biblical sentences, particularly from Proverbs and Sirach, to enhance the evangelising potential of the discourses. Finally, they drew on Erasmus's theory of speech, as expressed in his pedagogical and spiritual writings, to explicate Nahuatl los difrasismos concerning eloquence and good counsel. Contextualising the Huehuetlahtolli [1601] in Santa Cruz's Erasmian schoolroom reveals the contours of its argument for vernacular evangelisation, the liberal education of indigenous youth and for the elegance of the Nahuatl tongue.

scholarly journals Politicizing Aesthetics

2006 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoe Detsi-Diamanti
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Female Body ◽  
New World ◽  
White Male ◽  
Symbolic Representation ◽  
Indian Woman ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

The aim of this paper is to explore the changing aesthetic and ideological connotations of the representation of America as an Indian woman in the sixteenth-century engravings of the discovery and conquest of the New World and the late-eighteenth-century political cartoons of America's national conflict and eventual secession from mother England. In both cases, the male enterprise of colonization and nation-making is aesthetically expressed in the fetishistic and symbolic representation of the female body as the simultaneously alluring and devouring female, seductively naked before the white male European, and as the victim of political violence and the national struggle for independence.

Religious Women, Mystic Journeys and Agency in Early Modern Spain

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 9-27
Author(s):  
Silvia Evangelisti
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Early Modern Spain ◽  
Religious Women ◽  
Catholic Faith ◽  
Religious Engagement

Abstract This article examines the narratives of female mystic journeys that were sometimes included in the biographies and the autobiographies of religious women printed in Spain between the mid-sixteenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century. By showing the ability of women to convert non-Christians in Asia, North Africa and America, and to defend the Catholic faith in Europe, the texts provide the opportunity to examine idealized models of female religious engagement from an unusual angle.

Sixteenth-Century Reading in the Indies

1957 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Torre Revello
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
American Continent ◽  
The People ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One

Among the many books destined for children, the one preferred in America during the colonial period was the Fables attributed to the Phrygian slave, Aesop. Translated into Spanish, it was found in the hands of travelers and colonists throughout the Spanish empire. The simplicity of the tales and the morals which they point out made them the delight not only of children but also of adults, who explained the precepts with purposeful wit.Aesop was one of the authors most read in the New World, according to what we can deduce by consulting the numerous lists of books which were sent to various parts of the American continent. His fables were also circulated in Latin and Greek, surely for pedagogical purposes. In Spain there was no lack of poets who devoted part of their work to fables, such as the Archpriest of Hita with his Enxiemplos, up to the culmination in the eighteenth century with Félix María Samaniego and Tomás de Iriarte, whose works it is logical to suppose were brought to the New World with many others of various kinds. By that time the shores of America were being swept by other ideas, distinct from those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which brought unrest to the minds of the people, ideas foreign to the calm and well-being of the two previous centuries.

scholarly journals The Colony as the Mystical Body of Christ

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 21-41
Author(s):  
Jennifer Scheper Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New Spain ◽  
New World ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Violent Death ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Theological Concept

In New Spain in the sixteenth century, the colony was imagined as a sacred body, as the mystical body of Christ (corpus mysticum), in which millions of presumed Catholic Indigenous subjects figured as the body’s wounded feet. Beyond the simple secularization of a theological concept and its appropriation toward political ends, the colonial corpus mysticum became living, enfleshed, and incarnate, both sustaining the colonial project and rebelling against it. The Mexican corpus mysticum was grounded in the vernacular theologies and affects of the mortandad, the violent death world of the colonial cataclysm. The ‘mysterious materiality’ of the New World corpus mysticum points to signs of Mexican Indigenous communities’ theopolitical refusal to be subsumed into the Spanish colonial flesh-body.

The Herbal of the Florentine Codex: Description and Contextualization of Paragraph V in Book XI

2018 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-488
Author(s):  
Victoria Ríos Castaño
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Imperial College ◽  
Colonial Medicine ◽  
Santa Cruz ◽  
Bernardino De Sahagun ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Primary Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
Florentine Codex

In contemporary studies, three texts dating from the second half of the sixteenth century continue to be treated as essential primary literature concerning pre-Hispanic and early colonial medicine. These are the herbal Libellus de medicinalibus indorum herbis (1552), composed by the Nahuas Martín de la Cruz and Juan Badiano in the Imperial College of Santa Cruz of Tlatelolco; the Historia natural de Nueva España, written by Philip II's protomédico (royal physician) Francisco Hernández, a “scientific envoy” in New Spain in the 1570s; and the Florentine Codex, the only extant manuscript of the 12-book encyclopedia on the world of the Nahuas, Historia universal de las cosas de Nueva España (ca. 1577), which was directed by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún.

The Enlightenment in Spain: Influences Upon New World Policy

1985 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 436-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iris H. W. Engstrand
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Equality ◽  
National Life ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Insight Into

The Enlightenment in Spain defies definition. In certain respects it was a viable force opening up new vistas of knowledge and understanding, while in others it was a mild breeze rustling some leaves of insight into the possibility of human equality. For certain of Spain's royal officials, the ideas of the eighteenth century philosophes were refreshing and undeniably sound; for others even the gathering of knowledge in the new encyclopedias was a dangerously democratic trend. In some areas of national life, reforms gained immediate acceptance, in others the old ways remained entrenched.Spain has always been a country of extremes, of absolute alternatives. Spaniards strive to achieve impossible goals or they remain incredibly inert. With the discovery of America their ambitious undertakings excelled those of England or France, but subsequent neglect brought about failures of equal magnitude. In the sixteenth century they thought to conquer the world; in the next their weakened Hapsburg monarchs squandered the wealth of the New World while the country fell into economic ruin.

Comparing the New World and the Old: Fray Juan Bautista and the Languages of the Spanish Monarchy

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-258
Author(s):  
Daniel I. Wasserman-Soler
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New Spain ◽  
New World ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Indigenous Languages ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
Language Strategies

Abstract Born in New Spain, fray Juan Bautista Viseo (b. 1555) authored perhaps a dozen books in Nahuatl, Castilian, and Latin, making him one of the most prolific writers of the colonial period in Mexico. While many are lost, his available texts provide a valuable window into religious conversion efforts in the Spanish monarchy around 1600. This paper investigates his recommendations regarding how priests and members of religious orders ought to use indigenous languages. In the sixteenth-century Spanish territories, Church and Crown officials discussed language strategies on several fronts. This paper also compares Juan Bautista’s ideas about language use in Mexico to similar discussions elsewhere in the Spanish kingdoms. Existing scholarship has highlighted parallels in how the Spanish monarchy dealt with Native American and Islamic communities. However, an examination of Juan Bautista’s writing, together with that of contemporary churchmen, suggests fundamental differences in the ways that Spanish officials thought about and approached Amerindians and Moriscos.

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