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Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas

2023; Duke University Press; Volume: 75; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00104124-10729039

1945-8517

Ana Schwartz,

Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies

The historical secret hidden in plain sight in the title of Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s new book Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons is that for at least part of the period of Cotton Mather’s life during which he was learning Spanish, someone may have been teaching him. To the degree that the Mather of those lessons was a student, the possessive genitive in this title might point to someone else entirely. There are reasons, of course, that Mather is the eponymous protagonist. Books about Mather will probably sell better than books about almost anyone else in his world, especially when they’re published by the press at his alma mater, Harvard University. Relatedly, but more saliently, we don’t actually know for sure what to call the person whom Gruesz narrates as his teacher, a man who appears elusively in the written archive produced by Mather and his contemporaries, and who is most vividly named by Mather’s neighbor Samuel Sewall as “Spaniard Dr. Mather’s Negro.” Even if Spaniard was the name Creole English settlers knew him by, it is unlikely that was the name by which he recognized himself. Gruesz’s book wagers that this archival frustration can be fruitful; she turns what could otherwise be yet another biography of early America’s most famous, or infamous, personality into a story that illuminates not so much what latinidad is as the history of the difficulty of answering that question.The fact that Cotton Mather wanted to learn Spanish may not be that surprising. It’s not a secret that he knew several languages, nor that multilingualism, fluency in both speaking and reading, was a conventional skill practiced by the earliest generations of Harvard students like Mather. Mather and all of his peers and closest friends would have known Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, many of them quite well. They learned these languages in order to understand their deity better, and in Mather’s mind, Spanish would extend the significance of what they could understand about him. Spanish, to him, was an instrument. It had practical value. With it, he could extend the knowledge he believed was true about the deity he believed it was Protestants’ responsibility to know intimately. And two of the greatest obstacles in extending that knowledge across the globe were, first, nearly two centuries of Catholic evangelization, and second, the Spanish language that had mediated those conversions. And so the specific goal that organized the lessons Gruesz examines in this book is his goal of publishing an evangelical tract, La fe del Cristiano, to send en masse to Spanish America in order to spread what his theology called the good news. The evangelical context—reviewed and elaborated in Gruesz’s first, second, and third chapters—will be familiar to many twenty-first-century historians of early America, a field that has, for a long time now, elaborated the theological and political contours of the evangelical imperative sensitively. What’s new, and astonishing, isn’t exactly the tract; it’s the far from simple fact that Mather had to learn Spanish, and that learning was an experience rich with social, political, and emotional complexity.That lessons—and their implied distribution of ignorance and knowledge—are the most important noun of Gruesz’s title is a decision that poses a subtle question, with many possible answers, about the experience of language and multilingualism that saturates many, many scenes across the book: What good is someone else’s language for? Mather would have considered that question in a variety of contexts, but maybe more explicitly, even frustratingly, in his efforts to learn Spanish because, distinct from his experience of learning Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, if he had sought Spanish instruction and conversation, it would have been from someone alien to him, both personally and categorically. But who was Spaniard? It’s not an easy question to answer, and in pursuit of something like an answer, Gruesz’s book leans toward thick description rather than certainty or narrative closure. Her attention to the strangeness of these lives constitutes this book’s most profound disciplinary contribution. Her book reflects sensitively and persistently on the contours of Mather’s complicated life—complicated for reasons that also shaped the lives of less archivally visible individuals like his possible teacher.Language, Gruesz’s book observes, following provocative recent advances in early American studies by Lisa Brooks, Anna Brickhouse, and Sarah Rivett, is a rich window into the experiential world of early America’s less celebrated residents. The book begins and begins to end with Mather and his family, in a more or less recognizable biographical mode. But the chapters in the middle widen their attention to the networks and social exchanges in which Mather pursued his goals. They reach back across the Atlantic, but also south to Mexico and Peru, to Mather’s influences and rivals, men like José de Acosta or Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora; and reach, too, forward to us, particularly those of us who inherited, maybe, an identity category punctuated by the historical forces that Mather was hoping to harness. The thematic scope is broad—the book contemplates the reverberation of these historical forces in contemporary claims on language rights. But it is also intimate—it turns its attention to such minute details as what the awkward improvised fabrication of the tilde above the unique Spanish letter “enye” can tell us about some English Creoles’ investments in accuracy and truth.In this immersive account, the most compelling chapters are the ones that recreate the life of Mather’s Spanish teacher. He appears in Mather’s documents fleetingly but provocatively. He is part of the Mather household but in a materially and emotionally complex way: Cotton Mather first records his presence on the occasion of having purchased him as a gift to his father, the second-most famous Mather in America, Increase. In her fifth chapter, “Becoming a Spanish Indian,” which recovers his life and the histories that shaped his acquisition of Spanish, Gruesz follows recent historical strategies of fabulation that seek to repair the violence of the archive and renames him according to the Indigenous language, Timucua, that was probably natally his: Tuqui. At some point, in engaging with Spanish colonists, Tuqui learned their language. Later, in engaging with English colonists, he began to learn English, too. But it was the earlier acquired language that would have interested Mather. Gruesz speculates that Spanish was something like a “bargaining chip” between Mather and Tuqui, mediating the manumission that Mather eventually offered him with the obligation he, Mather, could now claim on the accidental hispanophone’s attention, time, and pedagogical care. These would have been delicate negotiations. That such negotiations are not preserved explicitly in the written archive is one reason they have eluded historians’ notice, yet their delicacy is also a very important part of their complex significance. The obligation Mather could now claim on Tuqui’s part would smooth over the potentially embarrassing fact that his desire to vindicate his knowledge of the transcendent world was so great that he would risk humiliating himself in the material world to prove it.What Gruesz’s book brings to this linguistic moment in early American studies—and to larger literary historical inquiries into the complex lives of texts—is sensitivity to how tangled up one’s ability to communicate is with one’s confident selfhood and, in turn, what some of the political conditions and consequences to that entanglement are. And shame is probably one of the more elusive historical experiences to understand, since there are some obvious reasons why someone invested in recording the past they participated in would want to erase a shameful experience from memory. This book, accordingly, treads lightly. Throughout the book, not only in this chapter, Gruesz attends closely to the experiential strangeness of colonial life, and though the book largely avoids a unified arc or overconfident imputations about individuals, its organization stages this strangeness vividly. When Gruesz narrates the relationship between Mather and Tuqui in the fifth chapter, for example, readers build on their memory of a similar awkwardness noted—though abstractly, in a prescriptive rather than descriptive register—by Jose de Acosta in his De procuranda Indorum salute: “We have to enter the real world and study seriously with the Indians themselves through frequent conversation,” he advised, “leaving behind shame and fear. In fact we have to make many mistakes to learn not to make any mistakes!” (quoted 92). Learning Spanish was probably often humiliating to Mather, and not all of that humiliation was likely to have been repressed safely and successfully.Again, the humiliation itself is not exactly the point. Some readers may feel inclined to protest at this moment by noting, correctly, that the affective lives of colonizers, especially the Mathers, have been overrepresented in the archive and in the historiography, particularly relative to the Tuquis, when their lives appear at all. But shame, as with a range of subtle but powerful and negative affective experiences, has also been underrepresented in the literature on colonial subjection, despite the very great likelihood that it powerfully shaped the lives of Black and Indigenous individuals like Tuqui. Shame hounded so many of the figures to whom we would like to imagine our work does justice, from the 1635 conversion testimony of Dorcas, a Black member of the congregation shepherded by Cotton Mather’s grandfather Richard who was eventually manumitted but was at that time enslaved in the household of Israel Stoughton; to the seven Algonquian proselytes who narrated their conversion experiences at Plymouth in 1666 and who were presided over, documented, and also very rudely interrupted by John Eliot, the man who had taught these men English. It makes sense that in our recovery efforts, we might want to ignore such moods in favor of recovering the subversive, the triumphant, and the righteous. Yet shame was almost certainly there, along with other feelings that were strange, unhappy, difficult to name, all of which would be an important register of historical experience, the “traces” of material experience that Said’s Gramsci implores us to inventory.Belonging is what’s at stake in shame, and Gruesz elaborates in her coda why a more subtle understanding of belonging would be especially important in thinking about the history of linguistic proficiency in America. Shame, as cultural theorists like Sara Ahmed have proposed, often consists of the experience of being adjudicated by someone whose evaluation matters to one, for better or for worse, yet judged according to a rubric one may not will for themselves. Shame, like language, is social, an experience of being shaped by forces one does not control. That social quality testifies to a profound but sometimes very distantly located historical contingency, and for Latinx people in America, knowledge of historical contingency may be the most reliable quality shared in common given the ethnogenesis beginning to take place in Mather’s world, an emergence nearly invisible in his archive yet obliquely preserved in a phrase like “Spaniard Dr. Mather’s Negro.” For Gruesz, the history of latinidad is an especially, but not singularly, intense experience of disconnection—it consists mostly of the nullification “of the ability of many people of color in the Americas to identify with a single ancestral origin or place” (234), and as a consequence, to know, clearly and confidently, that these are the people and this the rubric by which I want to be judged. Few of us, of course, get to choose the worlds in which we make our history, or learn the language with which we want to greet it. Mather almost did, maybe. The wild speculation implicit in Gruesz’s title is that, for the period of his pedagogy, Tuqui might have done so, too.