Alonso de la Vera Cruz, Speculum coniugiorum (third edition, Alcalá 1572)
The marriage treatise written in Mexico by the first holder of the prime chair of theology in the university there, and the earliest sustained attempt to work out what canon law should do about the marriages of people it had never contemplated. Its practical conclusion is procedural: with the natives of the new world, drop the notary, the sworn witnesses and the forms, because the forms cost more than the people have and the truth is reachable without them.
Why this wins its question: Vera Cruz is known in English, when he is known at all, as a name attached to two facts — first professor at Mexico, wrote on indigenous dominion — and the reachable literature quotes the unpublished Relectio rather than the book he actually got past the censors three times. This object reads the 1572 Speculum itself: the title page and the royal licence for who he was and what the Crown allowed, and the articles on ecclesiastical procedure for what he actually argued, which is narrower and more useful than the summaries suggest — that the apparatus of notary, oath and written process should be waived for the natives of the new world because they cannot pay for it. The paternalism is quoted in the same breath as the protection, from the same page, including the printed marginal note that labels the passage a favour to the Indians.
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 book announces its author's offices on its own title page: master of good arts and of sacred theology, and "moderatorisque cathedrae primariae in vniuersitate Mexicana in partibus Indiarum maris Oceani" — holder of the prime chair in the university of Mexico in the parts of the Indies of the Ocean sea — formerly provincial of the Augustinian hermits there, and at the time of printing prior of San Felipe at Madrid.
The 1572 sheets are a third recension, not a first edition, and say so: the work is "nunc tertio opus elaboratum, ab authore a plurimis mendis, quibus scatebat, limitatum, et in multis locis auctum", brought into line with what the sacred council of Trent defined and declared, by way of an appendix at the end. The imprint is "COMPLVTI, Ex officina Ioannis Graciani, Anno, 1572" — Alcalá de Henares, from the press of Juan Gracián.
The royal licence bound into the front of the volume is an administrative record of the same facts and of the book's history. It recites the petition of "el maestro fray Alonso de la Vera Cruz de la orden de sant Augustin, cathedratico de la cathedra de prima de Theologia en la vniuersidad de Mexico", who had composed the Speculum coniugiorum, had enlarged it and printed it under licence "en el año passado de sesenta y dos", and had now revised it again and added all the determinations of the council of Trent that dealt with marriage. It is dated at Madrid, 17 November 1570.
A colleague's letter in the same front matter attests the office independently of the author. It is headed "DOMINVS IOANNES NIGRET IN ARTIBVS, ET Theologia Magister, et in metropoli Mexicana Archidiaconus, et Vniuersitatis Rector, Fratri Illephonso a Vera Cruce religiosissimo Augustiniano, sapientissimoque magistro, et primario moderatori in Academia Mexicana" — the university's own rector addressing him as the holder of its first chair.
The article on what an ecclesiastical judge must observe reaches a conclusion about jurisdiction in the Indies: bishops are not held to keep that solemnity of law "cum noui orbis indigenis", with the natives of the new world, and it is enough that they commit the business to men who can act simply and plainly.
The ground given is poverty, stated in figures of subsistence rather than in charity. The neophytes of the new world are so wretched that "si opus sit notario, nec necessaria solum habet pro victu quotidiano praestare poterunt" — if a notary were required they could not even meet what daily food demands — so the requirement would fall heavily on bishops and neophytes alike.
Where truth can be had without writing, the treatise argues, there is no necessity to compel witnesses to swear; in the simplicity of these people the truth comes out "sine aliquo strepitu, et figura iudicij" — without any noise or the form of a trial. The rule the article draws for prelates is a rule about posture: "Habeant ergo se obseruandi praesules cum illis velut patres, et non tanquam iudices", let them behave towards these people as fathers and not as judges, and understanding the matter in conscience render each his own.
The argument closes with a medical figure aimed at judges who will not move without the paperwork. To insist on the notary while the case waits is "perinde est, sicut si iaceret infirmus, et esset medicina in promptu: tamen quia medicus non est, permittatur mori" — as if a sick man lay there and the medicine were at hand, and yet, because there is no physician, he were allowed to die.
The favour to the Indians is explicit in the margin and paternalist in its reasoning, and both halves belong in the record. At the head of the article on the cases in which the marriage of infidels is dissolved, the printed side-note reads "In fauorem Indorum", and the text argues that among these neophytes such cases may well not arise at all, "propter eorum facilem conuersionem, et innatam mansuetudinem" — because of their easy conversion and inborn mildness. The protection offered rests on a characterisation of a whole population as simple and compliant, which is an assumption and not a finding, and it is the same assumption that makes dispensing with their legal forms look harmless.
A book written in favour of the Indians still reached print through the Crown's control of the press, and the licence sets out the machinery: the impression was to be made from the original signed by the scrivener of chamber Juan Fernández de Herrera and rubricated on every leaf, the printed book brought back to the council with that original before any copy was sold, and the price then assessed, on pain of the penalties of the pragmatic and laws of the kingdoms.