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spanish america  Knowledge  Martin Oliver CarriÓn I n the organization and deployment of knowledge in Spanish America the Fran‑ ciscan and Jesuit orders played crucial roles. In order to bring Christian polity to native peoples, these orders developed systematic methods of gathering and shaping “facts.” The enterprise of learning about the “other” was not limited to the questioning of native elites and the writing down of their languages and histories but also included the retraining of these experts in the alphabetic writing system and visual arts. Neither the Franciscans nor the Jesuits totally succeeded in decentering native forms of knowledge. Instead they contributed to the construction of a veritable “archive” of native knowledge that was maintained and deployed bycriollos, mestizos, and Amerindians for their own ends. It was this written and visual archive of native pre- and postconquest knowledge that formed the basis of what today we call “El Barroco de las Indias.” In New Spain, the early Franciscans, under the guidance of Pedro de Gante (1479–1572), began the colonization of Amerindian language and memory by establishing colegios for indigenous nobles alongside monasteries. At the colegios the Franciscans taught Christian principles and European modes of learning and thinking to their pupils. They also learned from them the language and traditions of pre-­ Hispanic Mexico—a necessary forerunner to extirpating them or making them irrelevant. The most renowned of these colegios was the Colegio Imperial de Tlatelolco , which in 1537 opened its doors to eighty students from various parts of New Spain.The students were trained in the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music).1 These young nobles were educated on the assumption that they would both provide the friars with information about their pagan practices and ultimately serve as intermediaries in secular and religious matters.The end result of the Colegio Imperial de Tlatelolco was the development of a cadre of native intellectuals who appropriated European letters and iconography for their own ends. Among the most famous of these students were Martin de la Cruz, who wrote the Libellus de medicinalibus indorum herbis (Little Book of the Medicinal Herbs of the Indians , 1552, also known as the Codex Baldianus) in Nahuatl, and Juan Badiano, who translated it from Nahuatl into Latin. Another student was Don Antonio Valeriano of Atzcapozlco , who was co-­ author of the first bilingual dictionary in Spanish and Nahuatl with the Franciscan Alonso de Molina (1513–1579), the Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana (1571). He alsoworked closely with Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590) on the first Nahuatl drafts of the Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España.2 At the Colegio Imperial, as at other mendicant workshops , students were taught European forms of art. But native masters incorporated their own cosmological vision in their work. Among the first visual arts produced by native artists afterconquest were the illustrations that accompanied Sahagún’s Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España (1559–1580). The twelve-­ volume manuscript contains 1,846 illustrations done by native masters.3 Many of its illustrations include motifs related to preconquest glyphs, with some images clearly more Europeanized than others. Despite the trauma of conquest, however, there was undoubtedly continuity with Nahua language arts.The illustrators of Sahagún’s manuscript were amox-­tlacuilos (scribes) who before conquest had recorded information in amoxtlis—the screenfold manuscripts made of amate tree bark or deerskin, carefully stuccoed and painted with glyph “writing.”4 The earliest Spanish authorities did not recognize Mexican amoxtlis as the equal of books; nor did they find glyph “writing” capable of transmitting the same information as alphabeticwriting. In fact, even the Franciscan friar Toribio de Benavente (also known as Motolinía), who had arrived in Mexico in 1524 and was noted for his sympathetic attitude toward the indigenous peoples, reported that the native “books” could not be trusted because they were the work of the devil. In this sense, Motolinía was of the same opinion as the humanist Alejo Venegas (1496–1562), who defined a book as an ark in which important information was deposited by means of letters.Venegas further writes in the Primera parte de las diferencias de libros que hay en el universo (1540) that there are two types of books or knowledges: the “archetype book” (which contains the knowledge of God) and the “metagraph book” (which contains human knowledge). Thus, following the logic of Venegas, all that is good...

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