Daniel I. Wasserman‐Soler : Truth in Many Tongues: Religious Conversion and the Languages of the Early Spanish Empire. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020; pp. xi +227.
2022; Wiley; Volume: 46; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1467-9809.12843
ISSN1467-9809
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American history and culture
ResumoDaniel Wasserman-Soler explains in Truth in Many Tongues: Religious Conversion and the Languages of the Early Spanish Empire that language and conversion combine together. Arabic, the colloquial language of the forcibly baptized Muslims (Moriscos) of the kingdoms of Granada and Valencia in the Iberian Peninsula, and the multiple languages of Central Mexico, such as Nahuatl, Otomi, Mixtec, Popoloca, P'urhépecha, Huastec, and Chontal, all needed to be considered in the conversion of the conquered peoples. However, Wasserman-Soler asserts that language translation, understanding, and even prohibitions did not take precedence over the goal of conversion for the early Spanish empire builders, nor should it for us today. Hindsight privileges the written record (the bishop's synods, councils, assemblies, catechisms). However, as modern readers, Wasserman-Soler reminds us that religion is more than books, writings, and reports. For the clerics, “vivid artwork, the fragrant smell of incense, the sense of inclusion in a community and the example of the pious” (p. 167) took precedence over preaching. Wasserman-Soler organizes the book into an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. Chapter 1 examines the 1558 Inquisition case against Bartolomé Carranza, the Archbishop of Toledo. The case has often been explained as a vendetta of Melchior Cano, censor and theologian of the Inquisition. Instead, Wasserman-Soler explains that suspicion about vernacular books, such as the Castilian catechism that Carranza wrote, influenced the Inquisition officials to imprison and try the Archbishop. Today, the vernacular seems an obvious aid to understanding. But in the early Spanish empire, there were different pastoral convictions. We mistake the 1558 case if we categorize it as a battle between the intransigent or progressive leaders. They shared convictions about the danger of translating the Bible, preferring the Latin and valuing priestly guidance for the faithful. Chapters 2 and 3 begin the comparative structure of the book, analysing the clerics' approaches and writings about Morisco parishioners. Early in the sixteenth century, the recently conquered Kingdom of Granada and the predominantly Morisco Kingdom of Valencia included newly baptized Christians and their descendants until the Morisco Expulsion in 1609–1614. In these archdioceses, the ecclesiastical leadership worked towards the conversion of the once-Muslim Christians, who also spoke the Romance vernaculars as second languages — the first being Arabic vernaculars. Knowing how different literate Arabic was from regional dialects of Arabic five hundred years ago (as it continues to be today), along with a similar possibility for romance vernaculars such as valenciano and castellano today and in the past, the analysis missed the lived experience of language. However, Wasserman-Soler succeeds in examining the hindsight “language policy,” insisting that for both kingdoms the seeming contradictions from our perspective were less salient for the archbishops and their helpers. Their goal aimed to “foster religious conversion in their unique circumstances” (p. 68). In both chapters, I read with growing interest but equal frustration about the cultural blindness or personal obtuseness of the leadership. When Philip II and Archbishop Pedro Guerrero of Granada prohibited written and spoken Arabic in 1566, I accept that they believed this would facilitate the religious conversion of the Moriscos. But to punish the first offence with jail for thirty days, exile from Granada for two years, and a third with a fine of six thousand maravedís asked for rebellion. Wasserman-Soler urges us to see the nuances and resist our breezy opposites. Still, I am left asking, what did Philip II and the Archbishop expect? They certainly ignored any lessons about human nature. The Morisco leader, Francisco Núñez Muley, warned them. In Valencia, the king thought that “it would be good to take the Moriscos' spoken language away from them” (p. 79). How does an outsider force people in their own communities to refrain from speaking the language they are most comfortable speaking? In chapters 4 and 5, Wasserman-Soler turns his attention to linguistic policy for the assimilation of indigenous peoples in the Kingdom of New Spain, more specifically the Central Valley of Mexico. The two chapters analyse native tongues and multilingualism in a chronological division from 1520–1585 and then 1550–1600. Our hindsight might assume conflict between the indigenous languages and Castilian. Indeed, by the late eighteenth century, Charles III called for the elimination of all indigenous languages in the Americas. Historical thinking is all about time, though. Church leaders in the sixteenth century took each case as it came, acting within the doctrine but implementing diverse forms of practice. It was not a contradiction to want churchmen to study indigenous languages and to instruct native peoples in Castilian. The priests and friars worked with interpreters, used painted images for confession, and “sought any means possible in order to communicate with natives and thus further their desire to build a Christian new world” (p. 109). In the provincial councils, the church leaders pragmatically encouraged priests to learn the indigenous languages. The archbishop incentivized learning the people's idiom, but not every priest needed to become fluent. The Franciscan Maturino Gilberti published Diálogo de doctrina christiana in P'urhépecha, the language of Michoacán. It had titles and marginalia in Castilian to help the ministers find the material they needed on any particular Sunday. The purpose was to have at hand the things the priests should preach, “giving them the bread of the Holy Gospel in the smallest pieces possible” (p. 152). The Church and the Crown contributed to the ongoing use of Amerindian languages. The expansion of Spanish did not necessarily mean the exclusion of native tongues. This book compares and contrasts the Morisco policies of conversion in two peninsular kingdoms of Spain to the Spanish kingdom in Mexico in fruitful ways. The Spanish church rarely, if ever, made comparisons between Morisco and indigenous American conversion processes. There was some awareness of “our Indies,” such as remote areas of Italy among Jesuit ministers. The expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609–1614 stopped the Morisco conversion, whereas in modern Mexico Catholicism predominates. That we consider the vernaculars and the spoken word as obvious says more about modern literacy than it does about sixteenth-century religious practices (p. 167).
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