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Confessionario en lengua mexicana y castellana
1 2015-04-01T10:23:01-07:00 Anonymous 4358 1 From Primeros Libros. Printed by Melchior Ocharte, 1599. plain 2015-04-01T10:23:01-07:00 Hannah Alpert-Abrams 9dd7500ea284b1882c8042744db689b17f2c2255This page has annotations:
- 1 2015-04-02T14:19:35-07:00 Hannah Alpert-Abrams 9dd7500ea284b1882c8042744db689b17f2c2255 Melchior Ocharte Hannah Alpert-Abrams 3 plain 2015-04-02T14:21:10-07:00 Hannah Alpert-Abrams 9dd7500ea284b1882c8042744db689b17f2c2255
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1
2015-02-20T19:27:23-08:00
Path: Production
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This path explores the narratives of production embedded in the material qualities of the Advertencias.
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152785
2015-05-06T18:12:12-07:00
In 1538, the Italian printer Juan Pablos arrived in Mexico with orders to establish a printing press. Pablos arrived with support from the Bishop Zumarraga and Viceroy Mendoza, in Mexico, and from the Cromberger publishing house, in Seville. The Manual de Adultos, which he printed in 1540, remains the oldest surviving text printed in the Americas.The following decades saw the rapid growth of the printing industry in Mexico and Peru. In 1558, Pablos' assistant Antonio de Espinosa went to Spain to obtain permission to break Pablos's monopoly; in his wake, printing houses were established by Pablos' son in law, Pedro Ocharte; Pedro Balli; Antonio Ricardo; Enrique Martinez, and Melchor Ocharte. In ~1580, observing the saturation of the market in Mexico City, Antonio Ricardo acquired patronage from the Jesuits to travel to Peru, where he established the first printing press in Lima.Printing operations in sixteenth-century Mexico were complex. Materials from metal type and wood-cuts to paper were originally acquired from Europe at great expense, though printers later developed the tools to produce materials in-house. Presses were ostensibly run by printers, but operations involved multiple workers, from female spouses to African slaves and European immigrants. Though recent scholarship has shown that the role of the inquisition in censoring early Mexican print production was relatively minimal, printers nonetheless had to deal with multiple regulatory offices and systems of hierarchy.This video (in Spanish) tells the story of a modern-day printing press based on the early colonial model.In this path we explore the production of the Advertencias through a close examination of its material record: title page and colophon, duplicate pages, excised phrases, and inconsistent catchwords. We hope that this exploration demonstrates the multiphonic quality of the printed book as a historical artifact. Though it may appear to be a single, coherent object in the shelf (or on the web), close examination reveals traces of the culturally complex scene of its production.
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2015-04-22T12:15:14-07:00
Writing the Advertencias
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Introduction to the Advertencias: who wrote it, how it was written, what it's about.
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2015-05-04T15:03:54-07:00
Writing the AdvertenciasAccording to a conventional reading of the Advertencias, the book was written by the Franciscan Fray Juan Bautista. Born in New Spain in 1555, Bautista taught philosophy and theology at the convent of Mexico City, then moved to serve as guardian of Tezcoco before appearing near the end of the century as the guardian of the convent at Tlatelolco, where he wrote his confessional manual. Though the date of his death is uncertain, we know he was at Tacuba in 1605 and Tezcoco in 1606, and that he died no later than 1613.In addition to the two-volume Advertencias, Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta provides the following bibliography of Bautista's works, drawn from Bautista's own Seminario, though he does express doubt over some of the texts:
- Indulgentiae ac peccatorum remissiones a Summis Pontificibus concessae Regularibus et iis etiam qui eorum gaudent Privilegiis. (1602?)
- Catecismo breve en lengua mexicana y castellana
- Tepiton Amuxtli, a brief treatise on the erasure of sin
- "Hieroglificos de conversion"
- Teoyoticatezcatl, Espejo Spiritual
- Las indulgencias que ganan los cofrades del cordon
- La Vida y Muerte de tres niños de Tlaxcalla
- La Doctrina Cristiana dividida por los días de la semana
- Oraciones muy devotas a la Santisima Trinidad
- Huehuetlahtolli
- La Vida y Milagros del glorioso y bienaventurado S. Antonio de Padua
- De la Miseria de brevedad de la vida del hombre y de sus cuatro postrimerías
- Confesionario en lengua mexicana y castellana
- Sermonario en lengua Mexicana
If we attribute the Advertencias to Bautista alone, we can locate it within a body of texts authored by the first generation of criollo Mexican writers, as part of a large corpus of writing about religion and conversion in the New World. Authorship, however, as writers from Roland Barthes to Michel Foucault and Adrian Johns have shown, is constructed by social and historical factors. The author as we know him is a product of a confluence of ideas often traced to the nineteenth century. To call Bautista the author of the Advertencias is to erase a complicated process of textual production - the "scene" of its writing.In fact, authorship of the Advertencias is challenged on two fronts: from the prior texts that Bautista draws on, and from the scribes or translators who Bautista employed at Tlatelolco. As García Icazbalceta writes, "Dió el fruto de sus conocimientos en las numerosas obras ... pero de los datos conocidos des desprende que no fueron enteramente originales, sino que se sirvió de los trabajos inéditos de otros padres, y en Tlatelolco sacó gran partido de los estudiantes indios más aprovechados, á quienes hacía traducir de castellano á mexicano lo que le convenia" (356).Pre-textsVerónica Murillo Gallegos, editor of a new translated (Spanish) edition of the Advertencias, has written a careful study of the sources on which the Advertencias is based, drawing particular attention to the influence of American writers Juan Focher, Bernardino de Sahagún, Alonso de la Veracruz and Miguel de Gornales. When Murillo Gallegos writes about influence, however, she doesn't just mean the passing down of ideas; she's writing about the kind of influence that would, today, be a violation of copyright law.Consider, for example, Bautista's use of Bernardino de Sahagún's HistoriaFor example, as Murillo Galleyos writes, "El texto de Sahagún que aparece en las Advertencias es una transcripción casi completa del «Apéndiz del quinto libro, de las Abusiones que usaban estos naturales»" (362). The transcription appears on folios 105-112; it draws on a manuscript from Bernardino de Sahagún's Historia General. Importantly, the Advertencias doesn't plagiarize Sahagún; it's very explicit about the process of copying, titling the section "Abusiones antiguas que estos Naturales tuvieron en su gentilidad, segun que escrive el Padre fray Bernardino de Sahagun, en el libro segundo de su Bocabulario [sic] Trilingue." Furthermore, this explicit copying of other texts is not unusual for Bautista's Advertencias. Instead, it is the norm. The Advertencias is a pastiche; a document made up of other documents, and Bautista is a compiler as well as author.Indigenous WritersWhen describing the production of early colonial Mexican books, it has become common to read them as a collaboration between Spaniards and indigenous Mexicans. This is particularly true for books produced at places like Tlatelolco, which were centers of indigenous scholarship. In the prologues to his Historia General, Bernardino de Sahagún describes in some detail his relationship with indigenous collaborators, explaining in the prologue to Book Two that he worked with a team ten or twelve "principales ancianos" (leading elders), along with "hasta quatro latinos" - four Latinists, former students at the Colegio at Tlatelolco. Later, he collaborated with friars and students at Tlatelolco, and later at San Francisco de Mexico.Though Bautista's method is less clearly articulated, we know that he was not a native speaker of Nahuatl, and that he used student translators while director at Tlatelolco. In the prologue to his Sermonario en lengua mexicana, he writes, "He me ayudado en e|ta obra de algunos naturales muy ladinos, y habiles," providing a brief biography of each of the eight men who provided particular support, with a description of their contribution: Hernando de Ribas, Don Iuan Berardo, Diego Adriano, Don Francisco Baptista de Contreras, Estevan Bravo, Don Antonio Valeriano, Pedro de Gante, and Agustin de la Fuente. Though some of these men were no longer living by the time the Advertencias was composed (notably Hernando de Ribas), others may have been involved in its composition.We consider this significant for two reasons. First: the designation of authorship to the criollo author consolidates knowledge in the name - and hands - of the Spaniards, effectively erasing the contribution of indigenous scholars in the early colonial period. Second, this erasure in turn impacts our ability to interpret the texts. As Louise Burkhart described in her 1989 book The Slippery Earth, early colonial religious texts must be understood as sites of cultural contact. This is seen not just in the hybrid language of these books, but also in the scene of their production. As we reframe the authorship of the Advertencias, we open new analytic possibilities for reading the text.Reading the AdvertenciasMark Christensen's Nahuatl and Maya Catholicisms (2013) situates the Advertencias within the genre of the confessional manual: books which aided in the appropriate administration of the sacrament of confession. First established among Christian practitioners between the third and seventh century, confession as a regular practice accompanied by penance was formally established between the twelfth and thirteenth century. After annual confession became obligatory in 1215, various summae were written to help guide this practice; the confessional manuals of subsequent centuries were vernacular variations on this model. They frequently guide the priest on an exploration of a penitent's soul, and call for instruction on the requirements for salvation (Christensen 162-3).American confessional manuals were an important part of the process of indigenous indoctrination. Christensen identifies seventeen Nahuatl confessionals composed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, beginning with Alonso de Molina's 1565 manual and ending with an anonymous 1803 text. These manuals were distinguished, as Christensen describes, by both their style and their content. Written at least partially in indigenous languages, they employ a unique indigenous rhetoric. Their content, furthermore, frequently refers to unique local practices. In the Advertencias, for example, there is an extensive discussion about the theft of fruits from an orchard: if a native steals "unas Peras de un arbol, las quales su señor tenia guardadas para de ellas hazer un presente, como comunmente estos Naturales guardan sus frutillas," Bautista writes, he sins mortally (f14). The New World poses new problems for confessors; at the same time, we might observe that embedded in this religious discourse is the relation of cultural practices during a period of contact and conflict.Within this context, the Advertencias para los confessores de los naturales (Warnings for the Confessors of Natives) stands out in several ways. Bautista's manual is the fourth text to appear in Christensen's list, following those of Molina and Juan de la Anunciación. In this case, Christensen, like many others, lumps the Advertencias together with Bautista's earlier Confesionario en lengua mexicana y castellana (1599, printed by Melchior Ocharte). The 102-folio Confesionario, which also features an index and errata, was written in Spanish and Nahuatl; it shares with Advertencias certain frontmatter and is often bound together with the first volume of the Advertencias. Yet it is distinct in both content and context from the later Advertencias, a significantly longer two-volume text written in Nahuatl, Spanish, and Latin.Christensen describes Bautista's goal as the simplification of confessional practices among indigenous converts, explaining: "Bautista produced his Advertencias to reduce the burden of all confessors, both within and without the order, and instruct them on what was necessary and unnecessary in a confession. His two-volume work exempted natives "of little capacity" from having to remember their sins, know the sacraments of the Christian doctrine by memory, and show real contrition because their invincible ignorance excuses [them]" (172-173). However, he remarks, subsequent manuals show that this advice was largely ignored. -
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2015-05-05T13:21:51-07:00
Reading the Advertencias
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Discussion of how the Advertencias has been read.
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2015-05-06T18:05:48-07:00
Mark Christensen's Nahuatl and Maya Catholicisms (2013) situates the Advertencias within the genre of the confessional manual: books which aided in the appropriate administration of the sacrament of confession. First established among Christian practitioners between the third and seventh century, confession as a regular practice accompanied by penance was formally established between the twelfth and thirteenth century. After annual confession became obligatory in 1215, various summae were written to help guide this practice; the confessional manuals of subsequent centuries were vernacular variations on this model. They frequently guide the priest on an exploration of a penitent's soul, and call for instruction on the requirements for salvation (Christensen 162-3).American confessional manuals were an important part of the process of indigenous indoctrination. Christensen identifies seventeen Nahuatl confessionals composed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, beginning with Alonso de Molina's 1565 manual (pictured above) and ending with an anonymous 1803 text. These manuals were distinguished, as Christensen describes, by both their style and their content. Written at least partially in indigenous languages, they employ a unique indigenous rhetoric. Their content, furthermore, frequently refers to unique local practices. In the Advertencias, for example, there is an extensive discussion about the theft of fruits from an orchard: if a native steals "unas Peras de un arbol, las quales su señor tenia guardadas para de ellas hazer un presente, como comunmente estos Naturales guardan sus frutillas," Bautista writes, he sins mortally (f14). The New World poses new problems for confessors; at the same time, we might observe that embedded in this religious discourse is the relation of cultural practices during a period of contact and conflict.Within this context, the Advertencias para los confessores de los naturales (Warnings for the Confessors of Natives) stands out in several ways. Bautista's manual is the fourth text to appear in Christensen's list, following those of Molina and Juan de la Anunciación. In this case, Christensen, like many others, lumps the Advertencias together with Bautista's earlier Confesionario en lengua mexicana y castellana (1599, printed by Melchior Ocharte). The 102-folio Confesionario, which also features an index and errata, was written in Spanish and Nahuatl; it shares with Advertencias certain frontmatter and is often bound together with the first volume of the Advertencias. Yet it is distinct in both content and context from the later Advertencias, a significantly longer two-volume text written in Nahuatl, Spanish, and Latin.Christensen describes Bautista's goal as the simplification of confessional practices among indigenous converts, explaining: "Bautista produced his Advertencias to reduce the burden of all confessors, both within and without the order, and instruct them on what was necessary and unnecessary in a confession. His two-volume work exempted natives "of little capacity" from having to remember their sins, know the sacraments of the Christian doctrine by memory, and show real contrition because their invincible ignorance excuses [them]" (172-173). However, he remarks, subsequent manuals show that this advice was largely ignored.The Advertencias were influential in other ways, however. One remarkable instance is illustrated by the online exhibition "California's Legal Heritage," produced by the Robbins Collection at the University of California, Berkeley. They feature the Advertencias in their section on Spanish Law in the Americas, writing:Though largely concerned with Catholic teaching and practice, the works of men like Bautista and fellow missionary scholars had a profound impact on the evolving legal and political development of Spanish America. Their treatises established principles and arguments for colonial administrative practices and native rights and privileges that informed the secular legal works of future generations of jurists such as Juan de Solórzano and helped to shape the decisions of the crown.