E-raamat: Aztec Latin: Renaissance Learning and Nahuatl Traditions in Early Colonial Mexico

The encounter of the Nahua with Latin and the literate culture of the Renaissance is masterfully explored in this book. Medical treatises, vocabularies, grammars, biblical translations, pedagogical manuals, and edifying dialoguessome created to spread Christianity and others to account for the pre-Hispanic pastall pass under the careful gaze of the author, who manages to reconstruct the humanistic environment in which they were produced. With an unusual mix of directness and erudition, Andrew Laird changes our perspective and sheds new light on some of the most important works and personalities of sixteenth-century Mexico. * Berenice Alcįntara Rojas, Institute of Historical Research, UNAM, Mexico * In Aztec Latin, Andrew Laird transforms the intellectual history of the early modern Atlantic world. His learned and lucid book reveals the deep impact of Renaissance humanism on Europeans and Nahua alike. As Franciscans set out to form a cultivated indigenous elite, Latin and Nahuatl, classical texts and myths, and indigenous traditions and practices fused in novel and fascinating ways. These exchanges, made possible by force and disease, were highly unequal. Nonetheless, Mexican authors mastered classical rhetoric and Latin style, and used them to create innovative texts and advance favorable interpretations of their society and its past. * Anthony Grafton, Princeton University * Aztec Latin is important for several reasons. It explains how and why alphabetic writing, Latin, and humanism spread among indigenous elites in colonial Mexico; it uncovers the work of Amerindian scholars who mastered classical and biblical legacies which today are little known; and it revisits the politics of Spanish colonization in the Americas. Andrew Laird's book means that the contribution native Mexicans made to early modern intellectual history can no longer be ignored. * Serge Gruzinski, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris * This book delves into over a dozen original texts and translations from 16th-century Mexico, written in Latin and Nahualt using Western alphabetic writing...this text is a valuable resource for scholars interested in the history of literature and philosophy in Mexico and Latin America... Highly recommended. * Choice * Aztec Latin is a magnificent exploration of the deployment of a humanistic educational system in Mexico that ensured the endurance of important aspects of Greek and Roman culture while retaining enough flexibility to accommodate indigenous cultural expressions. It is too easy to assume that the process was just another aspect of the imperial suppression of indigenous culture, but Aztec Latin offers incontrovertible evidence that it is high time to begin to see it as one of the most remarkable--and remarkably neglected--episodes in the history of Christianity. * Times Literary Supplement * An artfully crafted study of the importance of Latin in early colonial Mexico. This is an important contribution to a growing literature concerning Latin and Nahuatl. This study is grounded fully and completely in a thorough understanding of Latin and Nahuatl. Laird's insightful scholarship regarding both languages and his profound understanding of humanism in the early modern period are key to this excellent work. Just as the scholars about whom he writes, he clearly moves with ease between those worlds. * Hispanic American Historical Review *