Alonso de la Vera Cruz, Recognitio Summularum and Dialectica Resolutio (Mexico, 1554)
In the spring and summer of 1554 a press in Mexico City printed two folio volumes of logic by an Augustinian who had spent years teaching it in New Spain. They were the first books of philosophy printed anywhere in the Americas. Their author's stated purpose was to cut away what he called the useless subtleties he had himself wasted years learning — an aim his nineteenth-century cataloguer judged he pursued with far too much timidity.
Why this wins its question: The line "the first philosophy books printed in the New World" travels widely and almost always alone: a title, a year, a printer, and nothing that would let a reader judge what kind of books they were or whether the claim being made for them is the right one. This object prints what the standard descriptive catalogue actually records — the two imprints with their devices, their collations, the woodcut figures for the opposition of propositions and the full-page Pons asinorum, and the three dated colophons that put both books in the same fortnight of July 1554 — and then sets the author's own statement of purpose beside his cataloguer's flat judgement that he cut a few superfluous branches and did not dare put the sickle into the undergrowth. It also carries the fact that sits in the same volume and is never quoted next to the achievement: that the professor of rhetoric who wrote the book's commendatory letter was, four years later, selling half of four enslaved people and one man branded on the face with an encomendero's name. A single deed does not settle what the university was; leaving it out would settle it falsely.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Both books are described in this object from Joaquín García Icazbalceta's Bibliografía mexicana del siglo XVI (Mexico, 1886), which transcribes their title pages, colophons and preliminaries and collates copies. The 1554 sheets themselves were not opened for this entry, and the evidence tier is set accordingly; where the cataloguer says he worked from a copy in his own hands, that is recorded below as part of the claim rather than assumed.
Entry 20 of the year 1554 is the Recognitio Summularum, whose title page names its author "Reverendi Patris Ildephonsi a Vera Cruce, Augustiniani, Artium ac Sacrae Theologiae Doctoris, apud Indorum inclytam Mexicum primarii in Academia Theologiae moderatoris" — holder of the prime chair of theology in the academy at Mexico of the Indians. Under a device of a heart in the sea pierced by arrows with the motto "Sagitaveras tu, Domine, cor meum charitate tua", and a large engraving of St Augustine, the foot of the page reads "Mexici. Excudebat Joannes Paulus Brissensis, 1554".
Entry 21 of the same year is the Dialectica Resolutio cum textu Aristotelis, "edita per Reverendum Patrem Alphonsum a Vera Cruce, Augustinianum, Artium atque Sacrae Teologiae Magistrum, in Academia Mexicana in Nova Hispania cathedrae primae in Theologia moderatorem", with the imprint "Mexici. Excudebat Joannes Paulus Brissensis. Anno. 1554". Both books therefore came from the same Mexico City press, that of Juan Pablos, in the same year.
The two were finished within weeks of each other, and the dates are printed in the books. The printer's notice on the verso of the Recognitio's title page is dated "Mexici, Anno Domini, 1554, pridie Kalendas Maias" — the last day of April — and its closing line, at the end of eight unnumbered leaves carrying an Epithome Summularum that also serves as index, reads "Ad dei magni gloriam explicitum fuit opus tertio idus Iulii Anno. 1554". The printer's address to the reader in the Dialectica is dated "Mexici ex nostra calcographica officina idibus Iulii. Anno. 1554". The two colophons fall two days apart in the middle of July 1554.
They are substantial books rather than pamphlets, and they are illustrated for teaching. The Recognitio is in folio, with a title page in red and black and roman type at two columns, and carries woodcut figures at folios 30, 34 verso, 36, 37, 48 verso and 49 to explain the opposition and contrariety of propositions, with a further engraving occupying the whole of folio 57 entitled Pons asinorum. The Dialectica is likewise in folio, in roman type at two columns with marginal apostillas in small gothic and various geometrical figures, its title page set inside a historiated frame; its text runs from folio 3 to folio 86, with the fe de erratas at folio 88.
The dedication of the Dialectica is to the University of Mexico, described as founded the year before, and the preliminaries place the book inside a working faculty. Folio 2 recto carries a commendatory letter signed "Franciscus Cervantes Salazarus, Toletanus, Bonarum Artium Candidatus, et in Caelebri Novae Hispaniae Academia Mexicana Rhetorice Professor" — the professor of rhetoric — who calls himself a disciple of the author, holds that three things make a work commendable, the usefulness of the matter, the manner of treating it and the authority of the writer, and says all three are found in this book. Verses by two further disciples, Fr. Juan de la Peña and Fr. Estéban de Salazar, stand in the Dialectica and the Recognitio respectively.
The author had been teaching the material for years before he printed it. What was then called the Curso de Artes was the course in philosophy, and he had given it in the houses of study of his order; the treatises composed in that period were the ones he brought out as soon as the University was founded. A note added among the corrections of the same catalogue, taken from the University's first Libro de Cátedras y Claustros, records that on 30 June 1553, by appointment of the viceroy, he began to read the Epistles of St Paul "en la cátedra de Blibia".
The purpose stated in the Recognitio's dedication is a reform of teaching, and it is argued from the author's own wasted labour. In the cataloguer's Spanish rendering: dedicated for years in this New Spain to teaching dialectic from its first rudiments, he says, he always took care to guide his disciples as though by the hand along the road to sacred theology, so that they should not grow old in those labyrinths nor turn back at the magnitude of the difficulties; he often considered how many vigils and fatigues he had once spent, or rather lost, in learning "aquellos silogismos caudatos, aquellas oposiciones impenetrables y otras mil cosas de ese jaez", which burden the understanding rather than polish it, and harm more than they help — "en suma, allí sólo se aprende lo que bien podríamos olvidar".
The programme that follows is explicitly conservative in substance and radical only in arrangement: fully experienced and convinced of this, he set himself to teach everything belonging to dialectic in such a way that, all the superfluous removed, the student should miss nothing; "no trato de poner nada nuevo, sino de dar á lo antiguo tal orden, que en brevísimo tiempo puedan los jóvenes alcanzar el fruto". The same purpose is said to be declared in the prologues of the Dialectica Resolutio and of the Physica Speculatio of 1557, and when their author later went to Spain he had all three reprinted there.
The counterpoint is printed by the same cataloguer, at length, and it is severe. It must be confessed, he writes, that Vera Cruz proceeded with the utmost timidity, and that if he removed something from those tangled doctrines they did not gain much in clarity; above all the book he calls Physics is as obscure and useless as any other of his school, filling its pages with the metaphysical machinery that then occupied the place of true experimental physics. "Cercenó algunas ramas superfluas; pero no se atrevió á meter la hoz en la maleza." He was a man of his century, and in justice we cannot require that he should have got ahead of it.
The verdict is nonetheless not a dismissal, and the balance is worth quoting whole: even when his books produced no great improvement in teaching, they are notable for their intent, and because they show "un espíritu menos servil, que el de la generalidad de los profesores de su época, quienes miraban con supersticiosa reverencia el vetusto edificio y no permitían que se le tocase ni en un ápice". The attempt at reform at the University of Mexico is described in the same passage as very weak and confined to a narrow field, but not on that account less interesting, and as almost unknown.
A second cost stands a few hundred pages away in the same volume, attached to the man who wrote the Dialectica's commendatory letter. Among the corrections, from authenticated deeds, the catalogue records that on 27 August 1558 Francisco Cervantes Salazar sold to Alonso de Pareja half of two and a half caballerías of land in the woods of Tacuba, together with half of four black slaves, half of all the oxen, tools, implements, houses and pens, sheep, goats and mares, all the sown fields, and an enslaved ladino "que tiene letras en el rostro que dicen Villaseca" — a man branded on the face with the name of the encomendero who had first been granted the land — for twelve hundred gold pesos of mines. The cataloguer's own comment is that Cervantes Salazar had complained in his Diálogos of 1554 of the meanness of the University professors' salary, that the complaint was justified, and that some other resource must have been found for him to be a landowner a few years later.
Both books were rare by the nineteenth century and were valued accordingly. The cataloguer states that the copy of the Recognitio he describes was in his own hands, that there had been two in the library of José Fernando Ramírez, and that one of those was sold, together with the Dialectica, for seventy-one pounds sterling.
What this object does not establish should be said. It rests on a single nineteenth-century catalogue, so the 1554 wording is at one remove throughout and the dedication of the Recognitio is quoted in that cataloguer's Spanish rather than in its Latin. The pages opened do not establish how many copies were printed, what the books cost, whether they were used as classroom texts outside the Augustinian houses and the University, whether indigenous students at Tlatelolco or elsewhere read them, or how the Spanish reprints differ from the Mexican sheets. Nor do they establish the priority claim in the strong form it is often given: the catalogue shows two philosophy books printed at Mexico in 1554, and does not adjudicate what may have been printed elsewhere in the hemisphere before them.