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  • The Jesuit and the Incas: The Extraordinary Life of Padre Blas Valera, S.J.
  • Kenneth J. Andrien
The Jesuit and the Incas: The Extraordinary Life of Padre Blas Valera, S.J.. By Sabine Hyland. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 269. Illustrations. Map. Notes. References. Index. $18.95 paper.

This controversial book provides a history of Blas Valera, a mestizo Jesuit intellectual in the post-conquest Viceroyalty of Peru. Valera entered the Society of Jesus at twenty-four, beginning life as a missionary, and he later wrote four important works defending Inca culture, religion, and language. According to Hyland, the Jesuits later imprisoned Valera for his unconventional, pro-Inca views after falsely charging him with fornication. Despite its contributions in piecing together the life story of the enigmatic Blas Valera, the book too often makes bold claims based on too little data or on highly controversial evidence.

Blas Valera was born in 1544 in Chachapoyas, the son of a conquistador and a woman of Inca descent. He joined the Society of Jesus in 1568 just months after the first Jesuits had arrived in Peru. Since Valera was fluent in Quechua, the Jesuits assigned him to missionary posts in Huarochirí, Lima, Cusco, Juli, and Potosí. He returned to Lima in 1582 as a translator for the Third Lima Council of Bishops. [End Page 122] Throughout his career, Valera was a staunch defender of Inca culture and language, particularly in his major work, Historia Occidentalis. Although the manuscript was burned when the English sacked Cádiz, portions of it were quoted by the mestizo chronicler, el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, in his Comentarios reales de los Incas. In these writings Valera asserted that the Inca language, Quechua, was as civilized a tongue as Latin. Moreover, he argued that the Inca Empire was over six-hundred years old, and that its civil organization, learning, and customs equaled those in Europe, making Inca religion an excellent foundation for the conversion of Andeans to Catholicism.

According to Hyland, it was these heterodox views that led the Jesuit hierarchy in Lima to concoct false charges against Valera for fornication. The order was still relatively new and its position within the empire insecure, which prompted the Jesuits in 1582 (shortly before Valera's imprisonment) to stop admitting mestizos, because their indigenous blood allegedly impeded full acceptance of Christian orthodoxy. For his supposedly "heretical" ideas, the order imprisoned Valera for ten years, before exiling him to Spain in 1594, where he ultimately died in 1597 of wounds suffered when the English sacked Cádiz. However, in piecing together the widely scattered documentary evidence on Blas Valera, Hyland too often makes bold assertions that rely on insufficient evidence. Her central argument, that Valera was imprisoned by the Jesuits for his heretical beliefs rather than by the Inquisition for fornication, for example, rests largely on a single, short testimony by a disaffected Jesuit before the Inquisition in Panamá. Hyland tries to corroborate this document by noting that two other Jesuits guilty of fornication were granted more lenient sentences than Valera, but neither were mestizos (who often received heavier penalties) and neither was a high-profile intellectual, such as Valera. In short, Hyland's data raises questions about Valera's sentence, but she has not proven her case.

Hyland also relies heavily on evidence drawn from the so-called Naples manuscripts, which make a series of thoroughly astonishing claims that, if true, would undermine much of the scholarly consensus about early colonial Peru. Among the most controversial are that Blas Valera faked his death in 1597 and returned to Peru where he wrote the Nueva crónica y buen gobierno (attributed to Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala), that the Inca had special quipu that recorded complex narratives and poems, and that Francisco Pizarro defeated the Inca at Cajamarca by poisoning Atahualpa and his retainers with tainted muscatel wine. The collection (kept in the private family archive in Naples) even has a narrative quipu and a letter from Christopher Columbus, annotated by Blas Valera. None of these manuscripts have been available for scrutiny by scholars, other than the few individuals approved by the collection's owner...

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