Ideology and Inquisition: The World of the Censors in Early Mexico (review)

In their thesis on the role of acculturation and thought control during the age of the Counter-Reformation, the French historians Pierre Channu, Jean Delumeau, and Robert Muchemledt depicted a deeply divided society, two disconnected worlds: "the superior," to which belonged jurists and the Republic of Letters, and "the inferior," the uncouth, that by nature required control and suppression. In the age of the post-Tridentine Church, the term "acculturation" indeed signified repression—of sexuality, thoughts, magic, popular religion, festivals, and language. Nevertheless, in his 1984 response to these authors ("Against the Acculturation Thesis"), the French art historian Jean Wirth challenges their views by proposing that the Catholic reformists directed their moral reproach specifically towards the cultivated, the lettered, and the wealthy echelons of European society and that the criticism was focused on sexual and moral permissiveness among the priesthood and the nobility rather than on the "madding crowds." According to Wirth, Church elites endeavored to protect themselves against, and ward off, all those who criticized them concerning their bad habits and their ill performance, "far more than they ever wished to acculturate other peoples."

Would Wirth's hypothesis have any bearing on Martin Nesvig's present book, then? The answer to this is positive. Nesvig's erudite, thought-provoking, and meticulously researched study on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico examines the inner workings and local debates "about the ideological justification for censorship from the points of view of the censors themselves" (p. 6). This study is divided into three parts: the first part, titled "Theories of Inquisitional Authority," addresses the theological, scholastic, and ideological upbringing of the Iberian and Mexican censors (namely, the credo). The second part is titled "Practice of Censure in Mexico" (namely, praxis), while the third is entitled "Censors and their Worlds." However, the latter embodies the issue of control, which would have fit much better into the second part of the book, while its other contents, namely the mental world of the Mexican censors (though nothing of their clientele's) could well have been placed in the first part of the book. The world of the Mexican censors indeed intersects in many direct and indirect ways with the issues challenged by the Catholic Reformation and its agents in continental Europe as well as in its overseas colonies. The major issues dealt with in the present study are a direct continuation of the very same concerns deliberated within the confines of the convents, universities, Inquisition chambers, and reformed colleges back on the old continent, from where many of the Mexican censors rose to fame. Moreover, the responses produced for such concerns were also generally on the same lines in Mexico as in the Old World. The censors in Mexico were an inseparable part of a whole apparatus of Spanish inquisitors, secular clergy, and mendicant superiors who concerned themselves with the goals set out for them by the Tridentine reforms and ordinances. Apart from endeavoring to establish clear-cut definitions as to what was considered heresy, blasphemy, sin, or simply immorality in accordance with the new morality, they were also deeply committed to a new definition of literacy. All these agents, including the censors, sought the best possible channels through which to curtail, curb, and purge such sins, as well as all the various kinds of printed materials that reverberated through the processing of such major or minor offences. However, questions of the solidity or effectiveness of their control or the degree of the independence they maintained in their judgments of the cases brought forward before them are thoroughly treated here, throughout the period concerned. Nesvig thus effectively demonstrates the feeble state of the censors' control of their likely "clientele" in the cities and the countryside and in particular, in the port of Veracruz, where special inspections were held.

Yet another point which is worth a discussion here: Nesvig's proclaimed goals. On the one hand, he aims "to reverse the investigative focus from those...