Aztec Latin

Andrew Laird is the John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities at Brown University. His previous publications include Powers of Expression, Expressions of Power; The Epic of America; and, as editor with Carlo Caruso, Italy and the Classical Tradition: Language, Thought and Poetry 1300-1600.

• PrefaceAcknowledgmentsList of IllustrationsIntroduction 1. Faith, politics and the pursuit of humanity: The first scholars in New Spain 2. Persuasion for a pagan audience: Rhetoric, memory and action in missionary writing 3. Between Babel and Utopia: Renaissance grammar and Amerindian languages4. Education of the indigenous nobility: The Imperial College of Santa Cruz at Santiago Tlatelolco5. From the Evangelia et Epistolae to the Huehuetlahtolli: Indian Latinists and the creation of Nahuatl literature 6. Humanism and ethnohistory: Petitions in Latin from Tlacopan and Azcapotzalco 7. A mirror for Mexican princes: The Nahuatl translation of Aesop's Fables 8. Aztec gods and orators: Classical learning and indigenous agency in the Florentine Codex 9. Universal histories for posterity: Native chroniclers and their European sources10. Conclusions and Envoi Appendix 1: Catalogues and ConspectusesAppendix 2: Texts and Translations Appendix 3: Excursus: Antonio Valeriano and the Virgin of GuadalupeBibliographyIndex

The encounter of the Nahua with Latin and the literate culture of the Renaissance is masterfully explored in this book. Medical treatises, vocabularies, grammars, biblical translations, pedagogical manuals, and edifying dialogues—some created to spread Christianity and others to account for the pre-Hispanic past—all pass under the careful gaze of the author, who manages to reconstruct the humanistic environment in which they were produced. With an unusual mix of directness and erudition, Andrew Laird changes our perspective and sheds new light on some of the most important works and personalities of sixteenth-century Mexico.