Book Event: Aztec Latin: Renaissance Learning and Nahuatl Traditions in Early Colonial Mexico by Andrew Laird (Brown University)

94 George Street

Providence, RI

(Please use the main entrance.)

The image shows the cover of the book Aztec Latin by Andrew Laird, which features a map on the cover.

The Brown Departments of Classics and Hispanic Studies cordially invite you to join us for the presentation of Professor Andrew Laird’s new book Aztec Latin: Renaissance Learning and Nahuatl Traditions in Early Colonial Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2024), hosted by the John Carter Brown Library.

There will be comments from Louise Burkhart, Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of Albany, SUNY, and David A. Lupher, Professor of Classics, Emeritus, University of Puget Sound. Professor Jeremy Mumford, Brown Department of History, will chair the event.

In 1536, only fifteen years after the fall of the Aztec empire, Franciscan missionaries began teaching Latin, classical rhetoric, and Aristotelian philosophy to native youths in central Mexico. The remarkable linguistic and cultural exchanges that would result from that initiative are the subject of this book. Aztec Latin highlights the importance of Renaissance humanist education for early colonial indigenous history, showing how practices central to humanism — the cultivation of eloquence, the training of leaders, scholarly translation, and antiquarian research — were transformed in New Spain to serve Indian elites as well as the Spanish authorities and religious orders.

While Franciscan friars, inspired by Erasmus’ ideal of a common tongue, applied principles of Latin grammar to Amerindian languages, native scholars translated the Gospels, a range of devotional literature, and even Aesop’s fables into the Mexican language of Nahuatl. They also produced significant new writings in Latin and Nahuatl, adorning accounts of their ancestral past with parallels from Greek and Roman history and importing themes from classical and Christian sources to interpret pre-Hispanic customs and beliefs. Aztec Latin reveals the full extent to which the first Mexican authors mastered and made use of European learning and provides a timely reassessment of what those indigenous authors really achieved.

The author of Aztec Latin, Andrew Laird, is the John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities, Professor of Hispanic Studies.