Juan Baptista de Lagunas, Arte y dictionario en lengua Michuacana (Mexico, 1574)
The grammar and dictionary of the language of Michoacan printed at Mexico in 1574, four years after a Franciscan working out of Tarecuato and Guayangareo submitted it for approval. Page one announces the book in that language rather than in Spanish; the dictionary quotes sentences collected in the field; and the modern edition that reproduces it opens by admitting that the very name of the language - tarasco or purepecha - carries a colonial episode its speakers were ashamed of.
Why this wins its question: The missionary linguistics of Spanish America is told in English through Nahuatl, Quechua, Aymara and Guarani; Purepecha, the language of an empire the Mexica never conquered, is almost never part of the story, and Lagunas is absent from it entirely. This object gives the printed evidence: the 1574 Pedro Balli imprint, the heading that opens the book in the language itself, the four-year paper trail from the approval of December 1570 to the press, the dictionary sentence collected at Uruapan, and the archival notes that place the author in a baptismal-font suit at Patzcuaro. It also names the cost in the same breath - the grammar exists to make conversion work, and the very word tarasco comes from an episode of 1521 that its bearers resented - and it states openly that a facsimile is not an original, which is why the tier here is secondary.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The volume read here reproduces "Arte y dictionario con otras obras en lengua Michuacana", composed by Fray Juan Baptista de Lagunas and printed at Mexico in the house of Pedro Balli in 1574. The reproduction was issued at Morelia in 1983 by Fimax Publicistas as the opening volume of a series titled "Fuentes de la lengua tarasca o purepecha".
The modern editor states why this book was chosen to open the series: it is "muy poco conocida y ademas contiene muchos datos etnohistoricos sobre Michoacan". The judgement that the work is little known comes from the people republishing it, which is an interested position, but it is consistent with its absence from general accounts of sixteenth-century American printing.
Printed page 1 of the 1574 imprint carries a woodcut, a Latin couplet beginning "Regis signum ducem dignum", and then the heading of the work in the language of Michoacan rather than in Spanish or Latin: "TY, ETIMA ARTE CA DICTIOnario Hingu matero Siranda Doctrinaenhas Y squihtsi exeuacamiuatahperansqua, vtaya quarho, Thuhchanapuvandaquahibo." A book whose first page addresses its subject in their own language is making a statement about who it is for.
The passage from manuscript to press took roughly four years and is documented. In December 1570 the canon Br. Juan de Velasco wrote a formal letter of approval, giving Lagunas the title of guardian of Tarecuato; on 29 October 1571 Doctor Antonio Morales de Molina, bishop of Michoacan, gave permission to publish, with the friar still in the same post; by June 1573 he had been transferred as guardian of the convent of San Francisco in the city of Guayangareo, the present Morelia; and the book was printed in 1574.
The dictionary carries traces of how it was assembled. Its compiler had lived at the convent of Tzintzuntzan and attended the Indians of Patzcuaro and its barrios; he travelled at some point to the tierra caliente, where he came upon a medicinal plant called "pheuame"; and the modern editor infers a visit to Uruapan from an example sentence used in the dictionary itself, "Aqui en Uruapan en diversas partes tienen cantidad de aguacates". The illustrative sentences of a missionary dictionary are field notes as well as grammar.
The name of the language is itself contested, and the introduction puts the unflattering version on the record rather than avoiding it. There seems to have been no general term used by the people of Michoacan covering all social classes; the Spaniards used "tarasco" from the earliest contacts; and the Relacion de Michoacan of 1539-1540 gives the earliest account of where that came from. Spaniards leaving Tzintzuntzan in 1521 took two Indian women given them by the Cazonci's relatives, and the Indians travelling with them called the Spaniards "tarascue, que quiere decir en su lengua yernos"; the Spaniards then turned the word on the Indians and "en lugar de llamarlos tarascue llamaronlos tarascos, el cual nombre tienen ahora, y las mujeres tarascas". The Relacion adds the detail that matters: "y corrense mucho de estos nombres" - they are much ashamed of them.
The historical introduction that accompanies the facsimile is built on archival record rather than on tradition: its notes cite the Archivo General de Indias, Justicia legajo 178 number 1, for the 1573 suit between the Franciscans of the province of Michoacan and the cathedral over the right to a baptismal font at Patzcuaro, in which Lagunas gave testimony; a letter of the viceroy Martin Enriquez of 10 December 1576 and a royal cedula to the Audiencia of New Spain of 13 May 1577; and Garcia Icazbalceta's Bibliografia mexicana del siglo XVI.
The book was not reprinted for over three centuries: the notes record that Nicolas Leon reprinted it for the first time at Morelia in 1890, and this 1983 facsimile is a later return to it. A grammar of a major Mexican language printed once in 1574 and not again until 1890 is a fair measure of how thin the transmission of this material has been.
A small cross-reference worth recording rather than over-reading. The plant name "pheuame" that the introduction reports Lagunas finding in the tierra caliente of Michoacan appears again, as "phehuame", in the index of remedies of a medical book printed at Mexico in 1607, where its decoction is prescribed for the pains of bubas. The recurrence of the name across two independent Mexican imprints is a fact about the texts; identifying the two plants with each other would need botanical evidence neither volume gives.
What this is, and is not. The Arte was written to make preaching and confession possible in the language of Michoacan, and its title places a Doctrina alongside the grammar and the dictionary: recording the language was an instrument of conversion and of colonial administration, and its author appears in the archives as a party to jurisdictional suits as well as a lexicographer. And what was opened here is a 1983 photographic reproduction of the 1574 imprint together with a modern scholarly introduction, not the imprint itself, which is why this object is tiered secondary rather than primary.