A Guide to Confession Large and Small in the Mexican Language, 1634 (review)

A Guide to Confession Large and Small in the Mexican Language, 1634. By Don Bartolomé de Alva. Edited by Barry D. Sell and John Frederick Schwaller, with Lu Ann Homza. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 1999. Pp. xii, 174. $40.00.)

Bilingual confessional manuals in Spanish and indigenous languages are an important genre of colonial Mexican religious text. Explicitly designed for friars' use in hearing Indians' confessions, these manuals contain a wealth of information, a source for the translation of Christian religious concepts into native languages, as well as giving insight into Spanish friars' assessments of Indians' religious and moral practices. The manuals' intent was to guide confessors in their questions and penitents in making a proper confession. In this sense, confession offers the confessor the opportunity to clarify church teachings and for the penitent to understand the specifics of the Christian concepts of sin and atonement. Confessional manuals can be viewed as the Church's serious attempt to give confessors the proper tools to minister to Indians. From the indigenous side, it is far more difficult to get information on what the Indians understood about confession and whether the confessional manuals served the purpose for which they were designed.

The volume under review is a superb contribution to the scholarship on early colonial Latin America, containing English translations of the complete Spanish and Nahuatl texts of Don Bartolomé de Alva's manual, as well as three essays placing the work in its larger context. This publication of the manual itself gives the original of both the Spanish and Nahuatl texts with readable and accurate English translations in parallel columns. The editors' notes on translation of particular terms or phrases, as well as other explanatory material are excellent.

Each of the three introductory essays deals with a particular scholarly question relating to Alva's confessional manual. The essay by John Frederick Schwaller is a biographical sketch of the confessional manual's composer. Don Bartolomé was born in Mexico, of mixed white-Indian parentage, a native speaker of both Spanish and Nahuatl (Aztec). Through meticulous scholarship, Schwaller has pieced together the fascinating story of Alva's life, giving us a clear portrait of one secular priest and the larger society in which he functioned. Not only could an elite mestizo be a university-educated, beneficed secular priest, but also one actively involved in the campaign against Indian sin and idolatry.

Barry Sell's essay on the classical age of Nahuatl publications places Don Bartolomé de Alva's confessional manual in further context. Sell's expertise on Nahuatl language, expression, and publishing in early Mexico gives the reader the larger an understanding of formal texts in Nahuatl. Lu Ann Homza's essay discussing the antecedents to Alva's confessional points out that while Alva's manual is important for understanding Christianity in Mexico, the long history of penitential practice in Europe is directly relevant. Spanish confessional manuals contain the same catalogue of sins that other European manuals of the period list, and Alva's follows those. Where Alva's Mexican manual differs is in questions of idolatry, clearly perceived as a continuing problem with Mexico's indigenous population. Spanish manuals consider excessive veneration of the saints as a form of idolatry, but in colonial Mexico, idolatry was a continuation of the Indians' old religion. Paganism and syncretism were unacceptable to orthodox Christianity. Alva was blunt in dealing with the problem, but Homza concludes that while his approach called for coercion and shaming of penitents to lead them to changed belief and behavior, confession was also a teaching moment for priest to penitent.

In sum, this publication makes a valuable contribution by making this text easily available to a wide readership in the English and Spanish speaking worlds, while at the same time providing the readers the full context for understanding the importance of the work...