Diego Valadés, Rhetorica Christiana

A Franciscan rhetoric printed in Europe by a friar who had spent some thirty years in New Spain, and who put the pictorial writing of the Nahua into a European art of memory as a working system rather than a curiosity. Its engraved plates set Mesoamerican images against the Latin alphabet; its twelfth chapter is a defence of the sincerity of Indian Christianity against the charge that it was imitation and compulsion.