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.
Why this wins its question: Valadés reaches English-language readers, when he reaches them at all, as a biographical label — "the first mestizo author printed in Europe" — and through one endlessly reproduced engraving of a Franciscan atrium, with the book itself left unopened. Read from the sheets, the interesting thing is not the label but the argument: Nahua picture-writing entered into a European art of memory as the second species of the art, named alongside Publicius and Dolce and said to serve for letters as well as figures; an engraved alphabet of Mesoamerican images printed as an alternative to an alphabet of European objects; the calendar left out because it could not be carried across without the language; the friars' own statement that it seemed easier for them to learn Nahuatl than for the Nahua to learn Spanish; and penitents who took the friars' notation over and kept their own accounts with it. The costs travel with it: the chapter that supplies the author's credentials is a defence against the charge that the whole conversion was imitation and compulsion, the book claims credit for its order against rivals, and it repeats a figure of seventy-six thousand sacrificed at one ceremony which is flagged here as reported testimony rather than a count. The label is also examined instead of repeated: the printing's own preliminaries call him "Hispani" and "Iberus", and state no birthplace at all.
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 digitisation read here carries no printed title page — Google has substituted a cover of its own making — and no leaf of the front matter carries an imprint, so the place, printer and year of this printing are not asserted here. The work is identified from its running head, "Rhetorica" on the verso and "Christiana" on the recto, and from its dedication, which reads "SANCTISSIMO D. N. GREGORIO XIII. PONT. OPT. MAX. F. Didacus Valades, ordinis Minorum Regularis obseruantiae sacrosanctos pedes osculatur".
The commendatory verses are headed "IN RHETORICAM CHRISTIANAM ET TABVLAS INDICAS" and name the author "Frater Didaci Valades Hispani". They credit him with the plates as well as the text — "Has quoque qui tabulas tibi fecit, candide lector, Subiecitque oculis Indica gesta tuis" — and close by claiming him for Spain: "Hic est de nostris, Didacus Valadesus Iberus, Ordinis & gentis gloria magna suae". Popular accounts introduce Valadés as a mestizo born in Tlaxcala; nothing in these sheets states a birthplace, and what the book's own preliminaries say is that he was Spanish. The identification is not settled from this document either way, and is not asserted here.
The author states his standing in the first person, and it is experiential rather than scholarly: he has lived among the Indians "plus minus triginta annos", and has given himself to preaching and hearing their confessions for more than twenty-two of them, "in tribus illorum idiomatibus, Mexicano, Tarasco, & Otomi". He adds that he writes as one "qui non auditus sed oculatus, non modo interfuerim sed & praefuerim" — not by hearsay but as an eyewitness who did not merely attend but presided.
The chapter in which he says this is headed "Defensio synceri Indorum Christianismi contra inconsideratam accusationem praedictam", and the accusation is set out before it is answered: that the Indians come to the sacraments and sermons as apes imitating what they see, or not of their own accord but driven by the fiscales and prefects; that their love of the friars is not love but fear; that what they do proceeds neither from perfect faith nor from constancy, but from habit. The book is therefore an advocate's brief in a live sixteenth-century quarrel about whether the conversions were real, and its praise of indigenous capacity has that argumentative purpose.
The book's most consequential move is a technical one. Setting out the kinds of artificial memory, it gives the first to Iacobus Publicius and Ludovicus Dolce, and then: "Secunda vtebantur Indi nostri occidentales in suorum negotiorum explicatione vt in ipsis liquet, quae quidem tam pro literis quam pro figuris plurimum valere comperiet facile, qui eis vsus fuerit." The picture-writing of the Indians of the west is entered as the second species of the art, said to serve both as letters and as figures, and vouched for by anyone who has used it. The claim is made inside a European technical literature, on a level with its named authorities.
That claim is carried into the engravings. After the rules for forming images of letters, the text says that having corrected the alphabet contained in the first plates the author took care to set down others, "alia Indorum", which will serve for the same letters. Two of the resulting plates were opened here. One holds European objects shaped into letters — dividers, a ladder, a barrel, a wheel, a snail, a tower. The other holds twenty-one heart-shaped cartouches, each with a Mesoamerican figure keyed to a letter of the Latin alphabet: a seated lord, a warrior, a bird, a shield, a stepped platform, a deer. The two systems are printed as alternative solutions to the same problem.
The same page marks the limit of the transfer, and does it in a single sentence: the author warns the reader that he omits the declaration of the Indian calendar, "eò quòd in illorum lingua debuisset poni" — because it would have had to be set down in their language. A European printing could carry the images; it could not carry the language they were read in, and the author says so rather than papering over it.
The teaching method is described as an established practice. In their sermons to the Indians the religious use "inauditis & stupendis figuris", and for that purpose keep painted hangings into which are woven the heads of Christian religion — the Creed, the Decalogue, the seven deadly sins with their offspring and circumstances, the seven works of mercy, the seven sacraments. The author then claims priority for his own order, complaining that others take the credit, and adds a careful disclaimer: he does not wish to detract from the inventors of engraving, who were many and ancient, but says that the use of it in teaching, and the manner of that use, ought to be credited to the religious of his nation.
What follows is the part that makes the method two-sided. The audience took it over: after the sermon was finished, he writes, they would compare among themselves the figures that had been explained to them, and the more ingenious of them, in confessing, would show by a picture where they had offended God, laying down pebbles to signify how many times the same sin had been repeated, against the sign by which the vices or the virtues were denoted. The friars supplied a notation; the penitents used it to keep their own accounts.
On language the book records an asymmetry of effort. The friars, it says, took interpreters at first, but with God's help came to sound the languages themselves in a short time and with great readiness, "praecipuè uerò Mexicanam, quae reliquis est politior" — Nahuatl above the rest, as the more polished — and so perfectly that they composed books in that idiom and made dictionaries, so that later labourers might be provided for. The reason given is blunt: "Videbamur enim commodius illorum sermonem percepturi, quàm illi nostrum." It seemed to us easier that we should learn their speech than that they should learn ours.
The book also carries an atrocity number, and where it came from matters. The author says he heard from certain indigenous elders that in the temple at Tetzcuctzingo, half a mile from Tezcuco and the most famous of all their temples, seventy-six thousand captives from the Tlaxcala war were once immolated at a single solemn sacrifice — a thing, he interjects, tearful and lamentable to behold. The figure is reported testimony collected by a member of the mission whose necessity it demonstrates; it is not a count, it is not corroborated in this document, and numbers of that order were exactly what a defence of the conquest needed. It is recorded here as what the page says, not as a quantity.
Elsewhere the argument is straightforwardly institutional. He asks who it was that first drew that ferocity out of the minds of the Indians, and answers that it was the religious who bore so many labours and hardships for them; and he offers the concord of the three orders — Franciscan, Dominican, Augustinian — who visit one another's houses without distinction, as an example set "& Indis & Hispanis", to Indians and Spaniards alike. He also describes how confession was organised in practice, with written memorial schedules given out and a fixed number assigned to each day of the week, so that a whole town could be heard in order rather than at once.
The Indies material is structural rather than decorative, and the book's own index shows it. Among the entries opened here are "Catechistica doctrina qualiter Indis inculcetur", "Comunicandi modus apud Indos", "Confessionum modus apud Indos", "Confitendi zelus apud Indos" and "Areae Indorum quid & in eis plantetur" — the practice of a mission in New Spain indexed as part of a general art of Christian rhetoric.
What the document is bounds what it proves. It is an apologia published in Europe, dedicated to the reigning pope, written by a friar of the order whose method it defends and whose priority in that method it claims against rivals. Its portrait of indigenous capacity is advanced to win an argument about the sincerity of conversion; its plates are, among other things, advertising for a technique. It is first-rate evidence of what one missionary understood about Nahua writing and was prepared to argue in print for a Roman readership, and it is not an independent account of what the people he describes believed.