I The cultural encounter between old words in the New World

Historians are increasingly cognisant that the encounter between European, Amerindian and African cultures shaped the institutions, laws and religion of New Spain. The texts created in this colonial environment were almost inevitably hybrid.Footnote ¹¹ Sophisticated studies by new philologists of Nahuatl translations of European texts and Nahuatl compositions in various European genres have opened a new vista on New Spain. Of particular importance for this study is the research that has shown that Christianity was transformed by Nahuatl translation.Footnote ¹² Until very recently, however, scholars have tended to treat huehuetlahtolli as immune from European influence. These repositories of authentic ‘linguistic information’ were deemed to reveal the ‘political and religious speech used in the most diverse situations of daily life in the Mexica culture’ and shed light on ‘the pre-Hispanic Indian mind and thought’.Footnote ¹³ This study, however, asks whether and how the Huehuetlahtolli was inflected by its colonial context. It takes its point of departure from scholars’ frequent descriptions of the Nahuatl speech of the ancients as analogous to Greek and Roman discourse, as it was revived by humanists in the sixteenth century.Footnote ¹⁴ It contends that these modern comparisons derive from the way that the huehuetlahtolli was framed by humanists associated with the Colegio de Santa Cruz.

This is not an attempt to suggest that Europeans invented the huehuetlahtolli. Both pictorial codices and Nahuatl morphology show that eloquence played an important role in pre-contact Mesoamerica. Images in pre-Columbian and early contact codices depict rulers, priests and parents with the attribute of speech scrolls.Footnote ¹⁵ The Nahuatl terms for ruler (tlatoani, ‘speaker’) and ambassador (tlatocatitlantli, ‘messenger of the speaker’) derive from the verb (i)htoa (‘to speak’).Footnote ¹⁶ Nahua political, religious and familial culture evidently had recourse to a repository of past speech acts, which they described to the Franciscans as huehuetlahtolli. Nevertheless, the surviving pláticas were recorded in alphabetised form after the arrival of Europeans; Franciscans and Jesuits, including Andrés de Olmos, Bernardino de Sahagún, Juan Bautista and, later, Horacio Carochi (1586–1666), initiated the process. Liberally educated Tlatelolcans did not concoct the ‘speech of the ancients, but they certainly inflected the form in which we have received it.

Indeed, Franciscans teaching at Santa Cruz initiated descriptions of the huehuetlahtolli as analogous to classical rhetoric. In his Spanish prologue to Book vi of the Florentine Codex, Sahagún argued that, like the Greeks and Romans, and the modern Europeans who imitated them, the Nahua elected ‘wise, virtuous and forceful Rhetoricians’, who knew the huehuetlahtolli, to be ‘high priests, lords, leaders, and captains, no matter how humble their estate. These [orators] ruled the states, led the armies, and presided in the temples.’Footnote ¹⁷ Missionaries claimed that pre-contact Nahua intellectuals had taught the huehuetlahtolli much as Renaissance humanists taught Virgil or Cicero. In a letter to the Jesuit José de Acosta (1540–1600), fray Juan de Tovar (1543–1623) argued that Nahuatl orators and priests trained ‘the principal youths, who were to be their successors’, using ‘continual repetition’ of the speech of the ancients until they ‘remain in their memories, without any discrepant words’.Footnote ¹⁸ In the prologue to the Huehuetlahtolli, fray Juan Bautista claimed that the study of ancient speech inculcated ‘the precepts of natural law’ and ‘the virtues of Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance’ in Nahuatl youth, much as liberal education (allegedly) did in Europe.Footnote ¹⁹ Book iii of the Florentine Codex located this instruction in the calmecac, a place dedicated to ‘the teaching of good letters (qualli tlahtolli)’. Qualli tlahtolli was a Nahuatl cognate of the Latin phrase, bonae litterae, that Erasmus had popularised to describe classical literature and scripture.Footnote ²⁰

Many educated Europeans saw the New World through a classical lens.Footnote ²¹ When they compared classical Latin or Greek pedagogy to Mexican education, the missionaries were emphasising the wit and civility of the indios and the value of their mission. In the 1530s, Ramírez de Fuenleal, the president of the second Audiencia, the body responsible for the administration of justice in Mexico, responded to Dominican attempts to disparage the indios’ intellectual and moral capacities by turning to the Franciscans.Footnote ²² He asked Andrés de Olmos and Bernardino de Sahagún to compile accounts of indigenous language and customs. Between 1533 and 1539, Olmos alternated between teaching Latin at Santa Cruz and meeting native principales in Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlaxala to collect evidence of their political culture. A manuscript associated with Olmos described him seeking out ‘the accounts of the elders, and of those who were priests and fathers in the time of their infidelity’.Footnote ²³ With the assistance of indigenous collaborators, Olmos transcribed and translated the speeches. He turned at least one plática into an appendix to his Arte de la lengua Mexicana [1547], a Nahuatl–Spanish grammar.Footnote ²⁴ It offered a version of indigenous culture that was well fashioned to please (or at least, to avoid frightening) fellow-missionaries.

In 1601, Juan Bautista asserted that Olmos's Spanish translation of Nahuatl speeches were reliable. ‘Nothing was added, and nothing of substance was taken away’, he insisted. Olmos and his collaborators had exchanged ‘sense for sense, not word for word’, as Cicero and Erasmus had advised.Footnote ²⁵ Even a cursory comparison between the Spanish and Nahuatl versions of Olmos's speech reveals the translation to be a loose summary. As with other humanist translations, moreover, the object was not verisimilitude but an elegant argument.Footnote ²⁶ In this case, translations were intended to support the Franciscan mission.

Olmos circulated selected Spanish orations to carefully chosen allies. In the wake of the 1550 Valladolid debate with Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (c. 1490–1573), Olmos sent eight pláticas to Bartolomé de las Casas (c. 1484–1566), Dominican and bishop of Chiapas. Las Casas incorporated them in the second part of his Apologética historia (written c. 1556–9, printed 1909). The Apologética vindicated the intellectual, moral and spiritual capacities of the indios against Sepúlveda's assertion that ‘in prudence, wisdom, every virtue, and humanity’ indigenous people were ‘inferior to the Spaniards. . .almost as monkeys are to men’.Footnote ²⁷ Las Casas retorted that the indios lived in a different but comparable manner to the gentiles. He used Olmos's huehuetlahtolli to show that the Mexica's discourse was sophisticated, even though they lacked an alphabetic script, and that their pedagogy rivalled the ancient Athenians and Romans. Indeed, Nahuatl speech could not be heard ‘without great advantage to most of us who call ourselves Christian’. The Nahua, ‘who have never read [Greek or Roman] philosophy’, nevertheless adhered more ‘closely to the rules of Aristotle’ than supposedly civilised nations.Footnote ²⁸

Other early modern defenders of the indios also used Olmos's speeches in translation. In 1585, for instance, the royal judge, Alonso de Zorita (1514–85), incorporated several in his Relación to Philip II. Zorita's renderings were similar to Las Casas's speeches but more compressed. Like Las Casas, Zorita used them to evidence the Mexica's pre-contact prudence in ‘government and judicature, and in keeping the laws and doing justice and in raising their children’. The indios, he argued, were called ‘barbarous’ on account of their former idolatry and different customs, rather than their lack of elegant speech or civility. They owed much of their contemporary corruption to the rapaciousness of their conquerors.Footnote ²⁹

Zorita had probably acquired the Spanish speeches from a draft of fray Gerónimo de Mendieta's (1525–1604) Historia eclesiástica indiana (c. 1595). In addition to praising the Nahua's eloquence, Mendieta hazarded that their capacity to assimilate the liberal arts derived from their pre-contact pedagogy.Footnote ³⁰ Either Mendieta or, more probably, Bautista shared eight Spanish huehuetlahtolli with fray Juan de Torquemada (c. 1557–1624), who printed expanded versions in his Monarquía Indiana (1615). Torquemada augmented the pláticas with scriptural references so that the ancient indios seemed to anticipate the words of the ancient Israelites. Their concern for ‘good education and teaching of the youths’ was Aristotelean and Platonic. The indios were clearly ‘rational and political and living the lives of [civilised] men’ and ripe for conversion.Footnote ³¹ In the late seventeenth century, Augustín de Vetancurt (1620–1700) took up the refrain, arguing that the speeches proved that the indios had ‘put into practice honest customs in the education of their children’ prior to European contact.Footnote ³²

The tradition of using Olmos's huehuetlahtolli as classical artefacts in the defence of the indios spread to accounts of the Americas printed in Europe. Fray Diego Valadés's Rhetorica Christiana (1579) described the glyphs that accompanied the ‘speech of the ancients’ as approaching letters for fixity and sophistication. In his oft-translated De natura Noui Orbis (1589), the Jesuit, Juan de Acosta, distinguished the ‘barbarous’ Chichimeca from the Mexica, who used ‘the speeches that the orators and ancient rhetoricians made’.Footnote ³³ Subsequently, Joannes de Laet's and Samuel Purchas's seventeenth-century compendiums of travel literature reiterated Acosta's claims for Dutch, French and English readers.Footnote ³⁴ These works did not include the speeches gathered by Olmos but they certainly referred to the huehuetlahtolli to propagate the mendicants’ account of Mexican civility.

There was, as Thelma Sullivan argued, ‘a striking similarity’ between humanist rhetoric and ‘the method used by the Aztecs, and this similarity could not have escaped the friars’.Footnote ³⁵ Rather than merely noticing this similarity, however, the mendicants amplified it in their translation and use of the Huehuetlahtolli. As we will see, moreover, the Tlatelolcan editors actually reshaped the style and arguments of the Nahuatl orations to enhance their neo-classical qualities. Franciscans did not invent the ‘speech of the ancients’ but they certainly initiated its transformation and dissemination in order to defend the indios’ capacities and their mission.

II Liberal education and the Colegio de Santa Cruz, Tlatelolco

The propagators of the Huehuetlahtolli had close ties to Tlatelolco. Sahagún and Olmos were among the first Latin masters at the Colegio de Santa Cruz and Bautista and Torquemada were guardians of the Convent de Santiago.Footnote ³⁶ The college was managed for much of its history by indigenous alumni, but it lost vice-regal support in 1564 and was returned to Franciscan oversight in 1570. At any time, in its prime, it was liberally educating between 60 and 100 sons of caciques, a term used by the Spanish for indigenous leaders.Footnote ³⁷ This much is well established. The debt that the college's intellectual culture owed to Erasmus of Rotterdam is less frequently recognised. Erasmians were persecuted in Spain after 1543 and in Mexico in the 1570s, particularly.Footnote ³⁸ There is evidence to suggest, however, that the humanist's pedagogical influence endured at Tlatelolco. In addition to furnishing the ladinos with a grammatical and rhetorical tool kit, Erasmus's works may have informed their intellectual activities, including their work on the Huehuetlahtolli.

The initial impulse for founding the Colegio de Santa Cruz may have been the creation of an indigenous clergy.Footnote ³⁹ Yet well before 1555, when the first church council of New Spain determined against native or mestizo ordination, the purpose of the school had broadened.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Tlatelolcans’ enthusiasm for Erasmus's spiritual and pedagogical writings contributed to the process. In sixteenth-century Europe, Erasmus's jibes at the friars’ expense had not gone unnoticed. Spanish Franciscans joined with other mendicant orders in submitting a list of Erasmus's errors in biblical scholarship and theology to the convenors of the Valladolid Assembly in 1527.Footnote ⁴¹ Nevertheless, within the observant friars in Spain, many were drawn to aspects of Erasmus's work. Franciscans at the University of Alcalá, founded by the observant friar and archbishop of Toledo, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436–1517), used Erasmus's pedagogical works to hone their Latin. Some Alcalán Franciscans, including Fray Francisco de los Ángeles Quiñones (1482–1540), engaged critically with Erasmus's New Testament scholarship.Footnote ⁴² A number of Franciscans associated with the alumbrados, mysticism and the devotio moderna drew on Erasmus's spiritual writings for their Christocentricity, criticisms of superstition, praise of apostolic simplicity and calls for ecclesiastical reform. Indeed, contemporaries often conflated Erasmianism with these other strands of spiritualism in sixteenth-century Spain.Footnote ⁴³

The first twelve Franciscans who travelled to New Spain in 1524 were observant friars who practised apostolic poverty and contemplative piety. They were instructed by Quiñones, who became commissary general of the order in 1523.Footnote ⁴⁴ Once the Franciscans began their New World missions, Erasmus's Christocentric and scriptural account of faith proved useful for tackling indigenous idolatry. In New Spain, moreover, his support for vernacular preaching and scripture sounded like practical solutions to the challenges of evangelisation rather than the germs of Lutheranism. Juan de Zumárraga, the Franciscan, first bishop of Mexico and co-founder of Santa Cruz drew on Erasmus's Paraclesis (1516) and Enchiridion (1501) to make these arguments in his Doctrina breue (1544) for catechising the indios.Footnote ⁴⁵ He excerpted Erasmus's defence of turning scripture ‘into all the languages of the world, not only that it might be read by the Indios, but also that all other barbarous nations may read and know’ it too.Footnote ⁴⁶ Zumárraga owned at least fourteen of Erasmus's works, including his Paraphrases on Luke and On the Apostolic Letters.Footnote ⁴⁷ The bishop used Erasmus's writings to emphasise the spiritual and civic benefits that elite laymen in the Americas could derive from studying classical texts and scripture. Rather than churning out candidates for ordination, Erasmus's bonae litterae could prepare noble Nahuatl youths to be faithful magistrates in the localities, champions of the gospel and moral exempla in New Spain.

Santa Cruz's commitment to vernacular scripture and the liberal education of indigenous students survived Zumárraga. Indeed, their interest in Erasmus persisted, despite the placement of all his writings on the Tridentine Index of 1559, fourteen of them on the Spanish Index of 1559, the prohibitions and expurgations listed in Gaspar de Quiroga's Indices of 1583 and 1584 and the blanket ban in 1612. In 1571, Pedro Moya de Contreras (c. 1528–91), the first inquisitor general and third archbishop of Mexico, ordered a general purge of prohibited books in his diocese. Bibles, Erasmus's works (predominantly the Adagia) and Zumárraga's Erasmian Doctrina dominated the haul from convents and clerics.Footnote ⁴⁸ New evidence, however, from books in the convent library at Tlateloco shows that the Franciscans managed to save some editions of Erasmus. The front matter of their copies of Erasmus's Life of Origen and Erasmus's edition of Hilary's (d. 367?) Lucubrationes, were expurgated, since they were ‘full of heresies and impiety’. Yet the convent retained the texts themselves, even after 1612. Not only did the Tlatelolco's copy of Erasmus's edition of Arnobius's commentary on the Psalms survive unmolested but Erasmus's prefatory material was annotated approvingly by a sixteenth-century clerical reader.Footnote ⁴⁹ This pattern suggests they may have retained other works, too. By sticking with Erasmus, the Tlatelolcan Franciscans do not seem to have been trying to be obstreperous. Their attitude to the deliberately subversive Erasmian, fray Alonso de Cabello (c. 1555–83), who used Erasmus's writings to criticise the rules of his order, is suggestive. The convent assumed responsibility for Cabello's house arrest while he was under Inquisitorial investigation in 1576 and 1577, yet he seems to have had access to Erasmus's works in his cell.Footnote ⁵⁰ Tlatelolcan friars could see the danger posed by Cabello's sermons but they did not necessarily blame his source texts.

The college adopted and probably kept using Erasmus's grammatical and rhetorical works because they were fit for purpose. Material from the northern humanist’s Libellus de octo orationis partium constructione (1513), Formulae colloquiorum familiarium (1518), De conscribendis epistolis (1522) and De copia (1512) filled fray Maturino Gilberti's Grammatica (1559), the first Latin grammar printed in New Spain. Gilberti and his publisher were confident that they could sell textbooks in Mexico by openly declaring that ‘the works of Erasmus demonstrate no small degree of learning’.Footnote ⁵¹ Treatises by Erasmus's pedagogical ally, Juan Luis Vives, were also popular. Indeed, demand for his Exercitationes linguae latinae (1539) was sufficient that Francisco Cervantes de Salazar (c. 1514–c. 1575), the first professor of rhetoric at the Real y Pontificia Universidad de México, produced a Mexican edition in 1554. He supplemented it with three Latin dialogues about the New World, the second of which described and commended the Colegio de Santa Cruz.Footnote ⁵² Cross-referencing 1571 and 1574 inventories of Santa Cruz, surviving items from the library at Tlateloco and indigenous students’ compositions confirms that Erasmus's prescriptions guided Nahua students through Aesop's Fables, Cato's Disticha and works by Virgil and Cicero.Footnote ⁵³ Given the many copies of Erasmus's Adagia owned by friars and convents before 1574 (and possibly after), it seems likely that the ladinos extracted commonplaces from them to enliven their Latin compositions.Footnote ⁵⁴ Next, Erasmus recommended that students read the Proverbs of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus. The 1577 debates about the Nahuatl translations of both these texts, which climaxed in the prohibition of fray Luis Rodríguez's indigenous version of Proverbs, suggests that the colegiales did just that.Footnote ⁵⁵ Erasmus proposed that one of the most important exercises for enhancing students’ speech and their capacity to explicate rich concepts was translation between tongues and across genres.Footnote ⁵⁶ Tlatelolco's ladinos performed this exercise by translating Christocentric devotional works that encouraged personal piety and the preeminence of the spirit over the flesh. Scripture and Erasmus's spiritual writings almost certainly featured but the Franciscans prudently advertised their students’ familiarity with less controversial texts. In 1570, for instance, Mendieta presented Juan de Ovanda (1515–75), president of the Council of the Indies, with a Nahuatl rendering of Thomas à Kempis's De imitatione Christi (1424–7). This classic of the devotio moderna was often associated with Erasmus's Enchiridion militis Christiani (1501), but spared its infamy.Footnote ⁵⁷

Under this Erasmian regime, the students’ progress in grammar and rhetoric impressed their teachers and confounded detractors.Footnote ⁵⁸ In October 1584, for instance, Alonso Ponce (fl. 1584–92), the proposed Franciscan commissary general for the New World and an opponent of teaching indigenous boys grammar, visited the college. The students greeted him with Latin orations in which they protested their inability, as indios, to speak good Spanish. Tlatelolco's annotated copy of the Institutio oratoria (8.6.54–5) suggests that Quintilian's lesson on irony had not been lost on the ladinos.Footnote ⁵⁹ Erasmus's curriculum was producing results in the New World. The gramaticos learned ‘to instruct others in the schools of their towns. . .to translate from Spanish or Latin ecclesiastical matters, [and] to serve as interpreters for the Audiencias’. They prepared to serve as ‘judges and governors, and to [undertake] other duties in the republic’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Finally, Erasmus taught boys how to translate devotional works, sermons and scripture, an activity that Tlatelolcan friars lobbied (in vain) to continue when they resumed responsibility for Santa Cruz in the 1570s.Footnote ⁶¹

The Franciscans praised their former students for their intellectual and literary contributions to evangelisation and the huehuetlahtolli. Sahagún identified Martín Jacobita of Tlatelolco, Alonso Vergerano and Pedro de San Buenaventura of Cuautitlán for their contributions to Book vi of the Florentine Codex. In particular, these trilinguales ‘amended, explained, and expanded’ the orations.Footnote ⁶² Juan Bautista similarly praised Santa Cruz's ladinos. Hernando de Ribas (d. 1597) had ‘written and translated over 30 quires of paper on diverse things for [Bautista]’. Don Juan Berardo (d. 1594) and Don Francisco Baptista de Contreras served as native governors, writers and translators. Diego Adriano of Tlatelolco had ‘learned to compose and to set type for the printing press in any language’.Footnote ⁶³ Estevan Bravo of Texcoco wrote in Latin, Spanish and Nahuatl and was notable for copia, a rhetorical virtue in all three tongues. Pedro de Gante (d. 1605), native of Tlatelolco, had taught at Santa Cruz and translated the lives of saints for Bautista. Finally, Agustin de la Fuente, college master during Bautista's guardianship, had ‘gone over everything that [Bautista had] printed here’. He had also learned to compose sermons and composite type in order to correct missionary texts.Footnote ⁶⁴ The ladinos’ Erasmian education had made them textual editors, translators and persuasive speakers, and prepared several to serve as Christian governors in New Spain.

The gramaticos’ liberal educations may have encouraged them to collaborate on the Huehuetlahtolli. Don Antonio Valeriano of de Azcapotzalco (1526?–1605) was ‘the principal and wisest’ of Sahagún's collaborators on the Florentine Codex and praised by Bautista for ‘speaking Latin ex tempore with so much propriety and elegance that he seemed another Cicero or Quintilian’.Footnote ⁶⁵ After completing his studies at Santa Cruz, Valeriano remained at the college, first as a Latin lector and then as the rector. He translated Cato's Disticha into Nahuatl for the students, assisted Alonso Molina with the Vocabulario en lengua castellana y Mexicana (1555, 1571) and collaborated with Juan de Gaona on a set of Erasmian Colloquios de la paz y tranquilidad christiana en lengua Mexicana (1582). Valeriano was an editor of the Florentine Codex and contributed to Sahagún's Los coloquios de los doce, and Primeros memoriales. He provided Spanish glosses for Bautista's 1606 collection of Nahuatl sermons. It seems likely that he also worked on the Huehuetlahtolli.Footnote ⁶⁶ What motivated his intellectual activities?

Valeriano was probably aware that his liberal education facilitated his success in colonial government. After serving on the cabildo of Azcapotzalco, he married Doña Isabel de Alvarado, the daughter of the first judge-governor of Tenochtitlan. Valeriano was elected to that office himself in 1573. Don Antonio was not humbly born but the indigenous chronicler, Fernando Alvarado Tezozmoc, also associated his status as a tlatoani, or ruler, with his wisdom – he was a tlamatini or ‘one who knows things’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Valeriano served the Spanish empire but he was not a craven puppet. In February 1561, he petitioned Philip II on behalf of Azcapotzalco for exemptions from labour and tribute, the restitution of lands, the translation of their city's status from town to city (oppidum to civitas) and permission to establish a traditional market (tiyanquiliztli). These were typical cacique demands but Valeriano expressed them in good Latin and warranted his appeal by referring to Acapotzalco's ‘antiquity and nobility’. He added a more unusual request, too, a licence to establish a ‘house of the muses’ for teaching ‘[Latin] grammar and Spanish’. ‘These [tongues]’, Valeriano explained, ‘may be taught conveniently by some of us [Nahua], who have professed Latin frequently, and as well as the Spanish.’Footnote ⁶⁸ The letter was suitably unctuous but it also asserted its author's intellectual and cultural parity. As governor of Tenochtitlan, Valeriano continued to fight with his pen. In 1575, he roused a crowd of several thousand indios to protest at Spanish interference in the Convent de Santiago's jurisdiction over the nuns of Santa Clara. In 1578, he complained to Philip II again, this time about the ignorance of the secular clergy. ‘Most of them have no languages, the rest know [too] little, and they do not preach to the indigenous’, he fumed.Footnote ⁶⁹ Like Erasmus and the Tlatelolcan friars, he insisted on the effectiveness of evangelisation in the vernacular.

Valeriano's instruction at Santa Cruz had rendered him a sincere Christian, loyal to the friars, and ready to participate in imperial government. By urging him to write in Nahuatl and for the Nahua, however, his teachers had fostered his native cultural knowledge and affinities. As Valeriano told Philip II, he had learned to be both ‘cacique y gobernado’.Footnote ⁷⁰ In Erasmus's account of the responsibilities of rulers to advance the spiritual welfare of their subjects, moreover, Don Antonio may have found a model for reconciling his dual identities. He could use his trilingual rhetorical skills and his knowledge of the normative power that the past possessed for Europeans and Nahuas to advocate for the religious and moral education of the indios. Alumni like Valeriano may have collaborated with Bautista on the Huehuetlahtolli for the same reason that they defended Santa Cruz; the institution and its ancient texts offered indigenous boys opportunities for advancement, devotion and the preservation of Nahuatl culture in the new (colonial) world.

By the 1590s, the college needed support from alumni like Valeriano. It had been struggling for more than fifteen years. Sahagún lamented that it had lost its income-generating estates to the mismanagement of the Spanish majordomo, Diego Ruiz, and its good order to ‘the negligence. . .of the rector’, the counsellors and friars. The greatest blow, however, was the plague of 1576, which killed many of the college's pupils.Footnote ⁷¹ In this weakened state, Santa Cruz faced Archbishop Moya de Contreras's renewed criticisms of the Franciscan's educational mission, especially the Latin instruction of the indios. Indeed, by Sahagún's death in 1590, Santa Cruz's humanist curriculum had atrophied.Footnote ⁷² When Bautista became the guardian of the convent in 1597, he involved alumni like Valeriano in his Nahuatl-language print campaign to revive the college's fortune. It was time, he argued, to reassert the importance of ‘raising young people in the fear and love of Our Lord’. ‘Consider’, he wrote, ‘on the one hand the lack of education, respect or regard, and the barbarity of speech, and the little policy of the native youth of these times, and, on the other, the careful education, civility, respect, courtesy, and good diction and elegant speech of the ancient natives.’Footnote ⁷³ The text in which Bautista announced his campaign for vernacular education was the Huehuetlahtolli. The gramaticos brought their native knowledge of the ‘speech of the ancient’ Nahuas and their Erasmian study of the speech of the ancient Israelites, Greeks and Romans to bear on the project.

III Tlatelolco and the creation of the Huehuetlahtolli

Georges Baudot argued influentially that when fray Juan Bautista discovered Andrés de Olmos's collection of Nahuatl orations, he deemed them a ‘gift from God’ and printed them expeditiously.Footnote ⁷⁴ In fact, the last six Nahuatl speeches in Bautista's Huehuetlahtolli, one of which is addressed ‘to those who go to school or learn doctrine with the Religious in the Monasteries’, indicate that Bautista initiated more extensive augmentation and inventio. With a circle of ladinos, he adapted the ‘old words’ for their colonial, Christian context.Footnote ⁷⁵ Scholars have begun to recognise the syncretic style and evangelising purpose of the printed Huehuetlahtolli.Footnote ⁷⁶ By contextualising the collection in the Erasmian pedagogy of Santa Cruz, however, we glean a sharper sense of the rhetorical tools that Olmos, Bautista and the ladinos collaborators used to enhance the force of the orations for novices and indigenous readers. We are also better able to discern the contours of the theory of speech that animates the printed collection.

Andrés de Olmos gathered only eight of the twenty-nine speeches printed in 1601 but his 1547 Arte de la lengua Mexicana showed Bautista how huehuetlahtolli could extend the rhetorical lessons of Nahuatl–Spanish grammars and vocabularies for evangelising purposes. Olmos attached a speech, ‘Of a father to his son’, and the son's reply, to his Arte, and Bautista printed them with only slight modifications. The friar asked his indigenous collaborators to substitute the name of God verdadero for traditional Nahuatl deities in the huehuetlahtolli.Footnote ⁷⁷ The result is that the father and son of the speeches venerate a single, personalised deity, ‘Our Lord’, Totecuyo and Ipalnemohuani, ‘Giver of Life’ or ‘by whom one lives’, an epithet for God favoured by mid-century Franciscans.Footnote ⁷⁸ Further, Olmos and his collaborators inserted passages that taught readers and auditors how to worship the Christian deity. ‘When you pass before the venerable image of Our Lord, or his loved ones, or of the cross, (cruz)’, the father counselled, ‘you should bow before Him or bend the knee and much more if you go before the venerated body of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Iesu Christi), that is before the Holy Sacrament (isanto sacramento)’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Olmos understood the potential of huehuetlahtolli to lure new Christians back to old, idolatrous ways.Footnote ⁸⁰ By cleansing the Nahua antiquities of idolatry and enhancing their evangelising content, he showed the friars how to deploy the orations as weapons for spiritual conquest.

The friars and collaborating gramaticos also made accommodations in the Huehuetlahtolli to explain Christianity to Nahua readers and auditors. For instance, the father of the first speech explained to his son that, ‘God is your very mother, your father. [He] strives greatly to take good care of you.’Footnote ⁸¹ While sixteenth-century spirituali occasionally compared God to a nursing mother, it is unlikely that the dual-sex deity of this difrasismo is of European origin.Footnote ⁸² Traditional Nahuatl prayers, spoken during childbirth, frequently invoked a divine pair, ‘Our Mother, Our Father, the two lord and two lady’ who had power over human generation.Footnote ⁸³ One might assume that the editors had simply missed this reference to the old gods when they Christianised the speech but they knew it was there. They cleansed the Spanish-language version of its feminine aspect, leaving a conventional sentiment ‘[God] raised you to help you, for he is your Father.’Footnote ⁸⁴ This suggests that indigenous gramaticos had retained, or even added, the ‘mother, father’ couplet to explicate the life-giving power of the Christian God for Nahua students. Olmos and his collaborators may have made the ‘speech of the ancients’ sound Christian, but the inventio of the native linguists also made Christianity sound more like Nahuatl.Footnote ⁸⁵

Mónica Ruiz Bañuls has shown that Olmos, Bautista and their collaborators increased the evangelising potential of the huehuetlahtolli by interpolating biblical proverbs into the texts. They drew especially heavily on the Books of Proverbs and Sirach (or Ecclesiasticus), which Erasmus had prescribed for future rulers and which the gramaticos studied at Santa Cruz. The Vulgate places that they wove into the speeches described the duties of piety and filial obedience, the dangers of lust, intoxication and gluttony, the need for self-discipline, the duties of officeholders and the inevitability of death.Footnote ⁸⁶ Strikingly, moreover, the gramaticos shaped the Nahuatl text to imitate the Vulgate Latin stylistically. Proverbs 4:1–4, for instance, begins with an exhortation:

In Latin, Proverbs 4:4 reads suscipiat verba mea. . .custodi praecepta mea, a syntactical pattern of jussive subjunctive + plural neuter + first person possessive, then the same with an imperative verb, then a future indicative, et vives, to soften the command into a conditional. The Nahuatl oration ‘Of the mother to her daughter’ in the Huehuetlahtolli concluded with a very similar admonition:

In Nahuatl, the final phrase reads oticcuic intla moxillan, intla motozcatlan oticmopachilhui. It is a plaited pattern of preterit verb + conditional conjunction + possessed noun that mimics the syntax of the Vulgate proverb while incorporating a traditional Nahuatl couplet, ‘into your stomach, down your throat’. The effect is to merge the prophetic tone and account of moral causation contained in the ‘speech of the ancient’ Israelites with the elevated tone and vivid, corporal imagery of traditional difrasismo. To the well-trained humanist, writing was ‘most learned and eloquent’ when it was sprinkled ‘freely with adages’.Footnote ⁸⁹ By seasoning their huehuetlahtolli with Vulgate passages, the Tlatelolcans enhanced their evangelising potential and demonstrated the stylistic complementarity of Latin and Nahuatl. They also got away with printing some Old Testament proverbs in the vernacular.

The friars and ladinos did not merely integrate Vulgate passages. Rather, they adopted Erasmus's advice that an orator might vary proverbs syntactically or substitute their diction in order to explicate their meanings and ornament speech. For instance, the father of Sirach 4.7 urged his son: ‘Address yourself courteously to the congregation of the poor, and humble your soul before the elders of the church, and bow your head before the great men.’Footnote ⁹⁰ When the editors of the Huehuetlahtolli interpolated this passage into the first speech of the father to the son they used the future tense in place of the imperative and maintained the ascending tricolon of identities that gave Sirach 4.7 its force. Nevertheless, they inverted the order of the original set, rendering it as, ‘You will greet them. . .the nobles. . .the padres. . .but also. . .the humble.’Footnote ⁹¹ The effect was to emphasise the courtesy due to impoverished people, an appropriate sentiment for a Franciscan text.

Within this inverted tricolon structure, moreover, the Tlatelolcans made further elaborations. They took their strategies for copiousness from Erasmus's Familiarium colloquiorum formulae (1522), as it was relayed in the Mexican Grammatica Maturini. Erasmus began his instructions by telling schoolboys to greet others and by identifying the circumstances in which a salutation was appropriate: ‘It is a mark of politeness (urbanitas) to greet those who meet us, or those we meet. . .likewise [to greet] those carrying out some work.’Footnote ⁹² The friars and ladinos followed their main verbal clause of instruction, ‘You will greet them’, with congruent details, ‘anywhere they are going about their doings or simply where you will encounter them.’Footnote ⁹³ Where Erasmus had used an active present participle + ablative construction (operis. . .agentes) for ‘going about. . .work’, the Tlatelolcans derived an equivalent with a possessed deverbalised noun + stative verb (itlachihul[huan]. . .cate) for ‘going about their business’. They showed Nahuatl's capacity to match the plenty and dignity of Latin, a desirable achievement among vernacular tongues in the renaissance, not least because it demonstrated the cultural and political sophistication of its speakers.Footnote ⁹⁴

Next, the Tlatelolcans ornamented the passage by synthesising elements of Nahuatl and European rhetoric. They inserted pairs of synonyms (los difrasismos) for the three sorts of people requiring salutation (the nobility, clergy and indigent) and used the particle ‘in’ to connect them syntactically and subordinate them to the main clause of the tricolon. Olmos's team explained that the ‘nobles’ were also ‘rulers and those standing over the people’ (in tlatoque yhaun in tepan ihcanime). To the category of padres, Bautista's team added ‘religious leaders and prelates’ (in teoyotica teyacanque in tepachohuanime). The meek, the largest class of persons, was distinguished by the new sentence particle, auh. It included ‘the old man, the old woman’, whose decrepitude (rather than wisdom) was suggested by mock reverential suffixes (in huehuentzin in ilamatzin), along with ‘the humble and the lowly, the unhappy and the joyless’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Los difrasismos are the most important figure of Nahuatl rhetoric yet Erasmus also described synonyms as the ‘first and simplest form’ of copia. He followed Quintilian in encouraging schoolboys to ‘collect a vast supply of words like this’ so that they could deploy them in their speaking and writing.Footnote ⁹⁶ By enhancing the Nahuatl plática, the editors displayed their own storehouses of los difrasismos. By putting them in print, the Tlatelolcans provided clerical and indigenous readers with sets of paired entries to start building their own rhetorical reed chests. With the Huehuetlahtolli, the ladinos used their knowledge of Latin grammar and rhetoric to demonstrate the powerful techniques of Nahuatl discourse for a colonial audience.

In explaining why eloquent Nahuatl was morally, politically and religiously valuable, the friars and gramaticos also drew on Erasmus's account of the nature and function of good speech. It is striking, for instance, that despite the Tlatelolcans’ frequent recourse to Proverbs and Sirach in the Huehuetlahtolli, they avoided the (many) Old Testament adages that associated ready speech with moral degeneracy. ‘Listen, children, to the doctrine of the tongue’, the speaker of Sirach 23 warns in a representative passage, ‘He who guards it shall not perish by his lips; he will not be led into sin by the most wretched deeds.’Footnote ⁹⁷ In contrast, in the Huehuetlahtolli the father urges his son to address others ‘by means of most elegant speech (huel qualli tlahtotica). You will not go about as if you are voiceless.’Footnote ⁹⁸ Moreover, when the editors of the Huehuetlahtolli did draw on Sirach's prescriptions (5:13–17, 32:10–13), they adapted the proverbs to emphasise the benefits that accrued to civil speakers. For example, a father tells his son to be modest in the company of social superiors:

Erasmus had evoked the same Vulgate authorities in a different order in his colloquy, Lesson on Manners (1522), for boys at a feast:

Erasmus anticipated and possibly guided the ladinos in specifying the social circumstances that called for restraint and in concluding the Vulgate admonitions with a clause emphasising that good speech brought honour to the orator and strengthened civil bonds.

Indeed, qualli tlahtolli, the ladinos’ phrase for ‘good speech’, was an exact Nahuatl cognate for Erasmus's preferred term, bonae litterae.Footnote ¹⁰¹ To qualify as ‘good’, Erasmus argued that speech had to emerge from the careful study of classical texts and scripture, imitate ancient usage (though not slavishly) and enhance the moral probity and religious devotion of orator and auditor. In an early epistle, Erasmus contended that good speech or letters ‘were not conferred, like worldly honours, upon the idle and undeserving. They did not distract one from practising virtue but themselves conferred it. . .without them we could not even be human.’Footnote ¹⁰² To be human meant to be drawn from the caves of the savages and into society, as Cicero had argued in De Inventione. For Erasmus, eloquence and virtue encouraged civility, concord and piety. As such, Erasmus argued that governors had a particular responsibility to speak well and champion scripture.Footnote ¹⁰³ God's word was the most powerful way to cultivate virtue, peace and the Christian faith. While Erasmus's account of personal piety owed much to the devotio moderna tradition, his emphasis on language as central to the human capacity to understand and embrace Christ and to order moral and political life accordingly was distinctive.

The Huehuetlahtolli drew on Erasmus's argument to elucidate good Nahuatl discourse. Tlahtolli was qualli when it encouraged moral probity and civility. In one speech, a Nahua mother instructed her daughter that if she wished ‘to live very well’ (yc nelli huel tinemiz) and be of good reputation, she would follow maternal guidance and the precepts of ‘the good song, the good words’ (in qualli cuicatl, qualli tlahtolli). The mother confirmed that she, herself, was transmitting these precepts in her advice. She took on the identity of ‘a male elder, a female elder, and a pedagogue, a tutor’ when she addressed good words to her daughter.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In another discourse, a father instructed his son to imitate ancient usage: ‘May you speak [those words] that the ancient man, the ancient woman spoke.’Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Like humanist Latin, moreover, ancient usage in Nahuatl qualli tlahtolli had a particular grammar, diction and syntax. We overhear a different Nahuatl father tell his son: ‘Don't you forget those good letters (qualli tlahtolli), when conversing. If [words] are not spoken correctly by you, then you will practice extensively, then you will correct them according to those [words] that the ancients speak.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Yet ancient usage was also intimately connected to virtuous conduct. As another father exhorted his just-married son, ‘Let your words be good (qualli immotlahtol), let them be pure (yectli) because you must respect them, you must honour them.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The creators of the Huehuetlahtolli employed traditional couplet metaphors for wise counsel, ‘a lip, a mouth’, for repositories of ancient wisdom, ‘the black, the red’, and for the value of good advice, which was like ‘the jade, the turquoise’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The Tlatelolcans drew on Erasmus's defence of the bonae litterae to unpack these metaphors for novices and convent-educated indigenous students. They argued that Nahuatl ‘good speech’ demonstrated individual virtue, encouraged moral probity in others and tightened the bonds of family.

The Huehuetlahtolli also echoed Erasmus's insistence that rulers should speak well, ‘so that [they] are always educating [their people], instructing them’ with their words.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In one of the political orations in the collection, a Nahua nobleman reminds a new ruler that the virtue and piety of the city depended on his discourse:

A prince's speech, then, needed to be more than qualli. In Book vi of the Florentine Codex, Sahagún had glossed the couplet that the Tlatelolcans used in this passage, ‘ihijo, itlatol’ or ‘ihijotzin, itlatoltzin’ in the reverential, as literally ‘his breath or spirit[,] or his word’. He emphasised that the metaphor traditionally referred to the speech of rulers (tlatoque, principales) but was now employed by Christian preachers.Footnote ¹¹¹ On their arrival in the Mexico valley, the Franciscans had been struck by ‘his breath, his word’, a phrase so pleasingly redolent of 2 Timothy 3:16–17, ‘All scripture is divinely inspired [or breathed] and useful for teaching’, and 2 Peter 1:21, ‘Inspired [or breathed into] by the Holy Spirit, the holy men were speaking of God.’ They swiftly coopted ihiyotzin, tlahtoltzin to refer to the Christian message.Footnote ¹¹² In this passage of the Huehuetlahtolli, Bautista and the ladinos connected the traditional and missionary meanings of the metaphor – the ruler's speech is also divine speech – to allude to Proverb 16:10, ‘Divination comes from the lips of the king.’

It seems unlikely that the Huehuetlahtolli was openly proposing that tlatoque should be preachers without ordination. Its authors may have been encouraging noble Nahua to consider a path tacitly reopened by the Third Provincial Council (1585) and the example of noble Texcocan, Antonio del Rincón (1555–1601).Footnote ¹¹³ Alternatively, they may have been thinking of temporal caciques y gobernadors like themselves. Erasmus had described the prince's religious duties to Charles V in the dedicatory letter to his Paraphrase on Matthew. Charles had been ‘anointed and consecrated expressly’ to ‘propagate the religion of the gospel’. He was not ‘a teacher of the gospel’ in the manner of a bishop, but he was ‘its champion’ (propugnator).Footnote ¹¹⁴ As Don Antonio Valeriano's letters to Philip II showed, Tlatelolcan caciques considered advocating for indigenous liberal education, Nahuatl preaching and evangelisation as pertaining to their civil office. In fact, another speech in the Huehuetlahtolli depicted the tlatoque of Texcoco, championing Christianity to their people:

The rulers’ advice was woven from Vulgate places, the threads of which were revealed by the abrupt shift between the second person singular (oticonili, oticcuili) of Job 22:22 ‘you [singular] shall receive instructions from His mouth’ and the second person plural (xocommoyollotican) of Deuteronomy 11:18 ‘Receive these words of mine in your [plural] hearts and minds.’Footnote ¹¹⁶ The final difrasismo of the passage (ma amechihuinti ma amechxocomicti) evokes, more poetically, Peter's sermon at Pentecost (Acts 2:1–22). Peter explained that the diverse people before him, speaking in tongues, were not ‘full with wine’ but ‘filled with the Holy Spirit’. It had come over them ‘like a sudden gust of wind (spiritus)’. The Lord had ‘poured from [His] Spirit onto all flesh’ and they were drunk with it. Despite their varied natural languages, the crowd before him understood each other perfectly; they spoke to one another in God's word.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Tlatelolcan gramaticos, like Valeriano, were keenly aware of the challenges that multi-lingual New Spain posed for Christianity. They had observed imperial and papal reversals on language education, vernacular preaching and scripture.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The Huehuetlahtolli made an argument in Nahuatl for the importance of religious education in native tongues and the liberal education of an indigenous elite for evangelisation. When the Mexica were filled by ihiyotzin, tlahtoltzin, they could participate fully in the spiritual discourse of New Spain.

In the Huehuetlahtolli, moreover, divine speech provided a pattern for good human speech in its political, social and familial manifestations. As Erasmus had explained in his Adagia and Paraphrase on John, good speech ‘carries the heart of the speaker by an invisible energy into the heart of the hearer’. Thanks to God's first and foremost creation, the word, ‘there is no other thing more effective for stirring up every movement of our heart than speech’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The editors of the Huehuetlahtolli drew on two cultures of ‘old words’ – traditional Nahua practices of counsel and rhetorical techniques, and the resources of the Vulgate and of Erasmian humanism – to model the affective and instructive power of good vernacular speech in the New World.

The Huehuetlahtolli did not arrest single-handedly the college's decline in the seventeenth century but its argument did not go unheard. We have seen that the Spanish translations of Olmos's speeches circulated widely to defend the capacities of the indios. Fuller engagement with the argument of the Nahuatl orations came in the Enlightenment, when creole patriots and indigenous intellectuals campaigned for the revival of the Colegio de Santa Cruz and the creation of similar institutions.Footnote ¹²⁰ In particular, the Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero (1731–87) responded to Bourbon reforms, secularisation and the deprecations of Mexico by certain Europeans in his Historia Antigua de Mexico (1780). Clavijero included two of the Huehuetlahtolli, the father's speech to his son and the mother's exhortation to her daughter, in his Historia in order ‘to confound the arrogance of those who believed that the empire of reason belonged only to Europe’.Footnote ¹²¹ While the Jesuit drew on the Spanish versions of the orations, there is every reason to think that he knew the Nahuatl Huehuetahtolli. Clavijero had studied the language extensively, taught in indigenous schools and researched colonial Nahuatl texts in Mexico's convent libraries. He identified Olmos as a collector of antiquities, Bautista as an accomplished writer of evangelical Nahuatl texts and named the Tlatelolcan ladinos as examples of the indigenous facility for higher learning.Footnote ¹²² Through their good speech in Nahuatl, Clavijero argued, the Mexicans ‘engraved their instructions on their children's hearts’. Further, the ‘great copiousness of the words that shape the flow of the Mexican language’ made it well suited to communicate abstract ethical concepts and Christian doctrine.Footnote ¹²³ Clavijero invoked the Huehuetlahtolli’s account of Nahuatl qualli tlahtolli to defend indigenous liberal education and vernacular Christianity in Mexico.