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The Church in Colonial Middle America: Non Fecit Taliter Omni Nationi

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AMBIVALENT CONQUESTS: MAYA AND SPANIARD IN YUCATAN, 1517–1570. By CLENDINNENINGA. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pp. 245. $34.50.)
FRAY BERNARDINO DE SAHAGUN (1499-1590). By LUIS NICOLAU D'OLWER. Translated by MIXCOMAURICIO J. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987. Pp. 201. $25.00.)
THE WORK OF BERNARDINO DE SAHAGUN, PIONEER ETHNOGRAPHER OF SIXTEENTH-CENTURY AZTEC MEXICO. Edited by JORGE KLOR DE ALVAJ., NICHOLSONH.B., and KEBERELOISE QUIÑONES. (Austin: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, University of Texas, 1988. Pp. 372. $25.00 paper.)

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Frederick P. Bowser
Frederick P. Bowser*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Type
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Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , 1990 , pp. 137 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 by the University of Texas Press

References

Notes

1. Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531-1813, translated by Benjamin Keen (Chicago, 1976), 95, 224.

2. David A. Brading, Prophecy and Myth in Mexican History (Cambridge, 1984), 31.

3. For an overview, see Joseph M. Barnadas, “The Catholic Church in Colonial Spanish America,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America, edited by Leslie Bethell (Cambridge, 1984), 1:511-40, 616–20. For the most recent work on the Mexican Church, see also Asunción Lavrin, “Estructuras, personalidades y mentalidades populares: la nueva historiografía de la iglesia en México,” Mexican Studies 4, no. 2 (1988):319-25.

4. Robert Ricard, Conquête spirituelle du Mexique, translated by Lesley Bryd Simpson from the 1933 French edition as The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico (Berkeley, 1966).

5. Ibid., 16.

6. I rely here on Sabine MacCormack, “The Heart Has Its Reasons': Predicaments of Missionary Christianity in Early Colonial Peru,” Hispanic American Historical Review 65, no. 3 (1985):443-45.

7. Ricard asserted that “the missionaries insisted on presenting Christianity, not as a perfecting or a fulfilling of native religions, but as something entirely new, which meant an absolute and complete rupture with the whole past.” See Spiritual Conquest, 35. But James Lockhart observes (in a soon-to-be-published study discussed below) that “Spanish ecclesiastics … spoke mainly in terms of instruction or indoctrination rather than conversion, and never referred to themselves as missionaries, the term so many modern scholars have anachronistically preferred.”

8. The chronology of Sahagún's manuscript preparation given in the 1952 edition has been revised in many particulars in Nicolau D'Olwer and Howard F. Cline, “Sahagún and His Works,” Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources, Part Two, edited by Cline and John B. Glass, Handbook of Middle American Indians (Austin, 1973), 13:186-207.

9. The reader who wishes to understand Fray Bernardino's career within the cultural ambience that prevailed on both sides of the Atlantic may consult Miguel León-Portilla, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (Madrid, 1987).

10. See Serge Gruzinski, Societés indigenes et occidentalisation dans le Mexique espagnole, xvi–xviii siècle (Paris, 1988). Other works of interest by Gruzinski are: Man-Gods in the Mexican Highlands: Indian Power and Colonial Society, 1520-1800, translated by Eileen Corrigan (Stanford, 1989); “Normas cristianas y respuestas indígenas: apuntes para el estudio del proceso de occidentalización entre los indios de Nueva España,” Historias 15 (1986):31-41; and (with Carmen Bernand) De l'idolatrie: une archélogie des sciences religieuses (Paris, 1988).

11. For more on the use of translated moral dialogues as a means of introducing Christian moral precepts, particularly the concept of sin, to Nahua converts, see also Louis M. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Tucson, 1989).

12. See note 1.

13. William B. Taylor, “The Virgin of Guadalupe in New Spain: An Inquiry into the Social History of Marian Devotion,” American Ethnologist 14 (1987):9-33.

14. D. A. Brading, The Origins of Mexican Nationalism (Cambridge, 1985), 7–12. For interesting observations on the role of the Virgin of Guadalupe in later Mexican history, see also William B. Taylor, “Between Global Process and Local Knowledge: An Inquiry into Early Latin American Social History, 1500–1900,” in Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History, edited by Olivier Zunz (Chapel Hill, 1985), 155–62.

15. Taylor, “Between Global Process,” 149.

16. See ibid., 182–83, n. 70, for a listing of recent research.

17. John Leddy Phelan, The Millenial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World (2d rev. ed. of the 1956 original: Berkeley, 1970).

18. Lockhart notes that the same saints appealed to both the Nahua and Spanish populations and that both were moved by the rash of miracles attributed to certain holy objects in the seventeenth century. Expanding upon O'Gorman's account of the origins of the Guadalupe cult, Lockhart thinks its veneration was doubtless created and sustained by Mexican Spaniards before its explosive growth after 1650.

19. Charles Gibson, Aztecs under Spanish Rule (Stanford, 1964), 111–14. Lockhart explains Gibson's impression by noting that by that date, the great monastery churches of the orders were nearing completion and the Nahua communities were turning their attention to constructing and maintaining their own lesser churches. Lockhart analyzes Gibson's work with affectionate respect in Charles Gibson and the Ethnohistory of Postconquest Central Mexico, La Trobe University Institute of Latin American Studies Occasional Paper no. 9 (Melbourne, 1988). But it is clear that Lockhart's work will supplant it in many important particulars.

20. Taylor, “Between Global Process,” 151. Preliminary work by Taylor along these lines is his “Conflict and Balance in District Politics: Tecali and the Sierra Norte de Puebla in the Eighteenth Century,” in Five Centuries of Law and Politics in Central Mexico, edited by Ronald Spores and Ross Hassig (Nashville, 1984), 87–106. My information on his current project comes from personal communication.

21. In addition to the monographs of Asunción Lavrin, a recent splendid exception to this rule is Patricia Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574-1821 (Stanford, 1988).

22. The phrase is that of Barnadas, cited in note 3.

23. See Irving Leonard, Baroque Times in Old Mexico: Seventeenth-Century Persons, Places, and Practices (Ann Arbor, 1959), 1–20.

24. J. Benedict Warren is perhaps a bit severe on this score in an otherwise fair review in Hispanic American Historical Review 68, no. 4 (1988):823.

25. A final chapter discusses the momentary crisis in tithe revenues caused by the effects of the 1576 epidemic. But Schwaller concludes that the Church grew prosperous once more after 1590 with stabilizing conditions and the expansion of the hacienda and commercial agriculture.

26. For some tentative conclusions about consolidación, see Margaret Chowning, “The Consolidación de Vales Reales in the Bishopric or Michoacán,” forthcoming in the Hispanic American Historical Review, and the studies cited therein. The standard work on Church wealth and the Reform is Jan Bazant, Alienation of Church Wealth in Mexico: Social and Economic Aspects of the Liberal Revolution, 1856-1857 (Cambridge, 1971).

27. For what is known about the Church's activities in the credit markets, see the essays compiled by Arnold J. Bauer in La iglesia en la economía de América Latina, siglos xvi al xix (Mexico City, 1986); Francisco Cervantes Bello, “La iglesia y la crisis del crédito colonial en Puebla (1800-1814),” in Banca y poder en México (1800-1925), edited by Leonor Ludlow and Carlos Marichal (Mexico City, 1986), 51–74; and Asunción Lavrin, “El capital eclesiástico y las elites sociales en Nueva España,” Mexican Studies 1, no. 1 (1985):1-28.

28. For the actual workings of the Ordenanza during this period, see Schwaller, Church and Clergy, 81–109.

29. David A. Brading, “Tridentine Catholicism and Enlightened Despotism in Bourbon Mexico,” Journal of Latin American Studies 15, pt. 1 (1983):7. According to van Oss, after an abortive attempt in 1582 at secularization in Guatemala, the balance there between regulars and seculars in parish control remained almost unaltered until the Bourbon decree of 1753. See Catholic Colonialism, 128–35.

30. Nancy Farriss, Crown and Clergy in Colonial Mexico, 1759–1821: The Crisis of Ecclesiastical Privilege (London, 1968).

31. See note 29.

32. For the role of the Church in colonial culture under the Hapsburgs, see Octavio Paz, Sor Juana, or, The Traps of Faith, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden (Cambridge, 1988), esp. 11–59; and Luis Weckmann, La herencia medieval de México, 2 vols. (Mexico City, 1983) 1:199-394.

33. See David A. Brading, “El clero mexicano y el movimiento insurgente de 1810,” Relaciones 2 (1981):5-26.

34. Farriss, Maya Society under Colonial Rule (Princeton, 1984), 314–15.

35. On the political and intellectual marginalization of the Church in Mexico after independence, see Brading, Origins of Mexican Nationalism, 66–101; and Jorge Adame Goddard, El pensamiento político y social de los católicos mexicanos, 1867-1914 (Mexico City, 1981). Van Oss sketches a similar pattern for Guatemala in the conclusion to Catholic Colonialism.