Over the course of this semester, I have satisfied these reasons. Reading Bernal Diaz and the Cortes letters certainly presented the Conquest as the capstone event of the Reconquista, and these texts were fascinating in their own right. It is fair to say that I now know significantly more about Latin America than I did in December, though I also recognize that the significant nineteenth century is still murky for me. As for comparing the Conquest and the establishment of Spanish authority in the New World to the creation of the barbarian kingdoms in fifth-century Europe, I gained much from this course. The two phenomena are only marginally similar, but it struck me that the manner in which Cortes treated Charles V may be very similar to the manner in which barbarian kings regarded the Roman Empire. In particular, the letters of Cortes seem to be a prime example of how one could operate in the grey areas of pre-modern political authority and legitimacy. Cortes’s efforts toward securing an office from Charles V seem to mirror exactly the efforts of barbarian kings toward securing official Roman administrative positions after they had already taken de facto control of parts of the empire.

Finally, this course had me reevaluate my conception of the undergraduate (and high school) Western History class. I had always thought of the Conquest and the Spanish experience in the New World as a matter for World or American History classes. That now seems silly to me. For one thing, the transmission of Western civilization to the New World is significant and requires emphasis in a broader context. At the same time, the encounter that created the early modern Atlantic Civilization wrought important changes in Europe that simply cannot make sense outside of such a context. Too, I’ve rethought the colonial experience in the Americas. I have never appreciated the extent or duration of Spanish control in the present-day United States. It now seems to me that there would be much value in beginning American History courses with the Spanish experience in Florida and New Mexico rather than the British experience in Massachusetts and Virginia. Indeed, if I ever again find myself teaching an American History course in a high school, I may try to teach the class entirely from the Spanish perspective, only turning to the perspective from the United States after the Mexican-American War.

Canizares-Esguerra’s arguments are convincing. It is clear that Christian fanaticism was a shared attribute among European colonials regardless of their denominational or national affiliation. Canizares-Esguerra’s evidence demonstrates that the British experience should not be seen as exceptional or isolated from the Continental experience, and certainly indicates that any lingering teleological ideas of a triumphal march towards enlightened democracy should be abandoned. In the end, Puritan Conquistadors advances the project of Atlantic history into the realm of religious zeal and makes a compelling case for the importance of the Spanish experience in the Americas for the British understanding of the New World.

Patricia Seed received her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin.   Seed worked at Rice University before moving to the University of California, Irvine.  Seed’s other books include To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico:  Conflicts Over Marriage Choice, 1574-1821 and American Pentimento:  The Pursuit of Riches and the Invention of “Indians”.  Most recently, Seed has published studies on the continuity of Iberian Arabic love poetry in the early Atlantic world, and a comparative study of treaty systems in Canada, New Zealand, and the United States.

Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640

Seed’s work is principally a study of the ceremonial practices Europeans employed to initiate colonial rule in the New World.  Seed’s goal is to compare “how Europeans created political authority over New World peoples, lands, or their goods between 1492 and 1640″ (3).  In the end, Seed finds that each European polity employed unique ceremonial practices because they had different conceptions of what political authority over the New World meant and the legal manner in which authority was demonstrated.  This book, then, is a comparative analysis of the early European experience in the New World, a legal history of European expansion, and a also a comparative intellectual history.

Seed begins with an analysis of English possession in the New World.  Here, she argues that the English concept of possession relied on the cultivation of land and the construction of material boundaries.  In analyzing the French experience, Seed argues that the French employed highly ritualistic ceremonies involving alliances with native populations in order to claim legitimacy.  The Spanish used legal protocol in order to establish their right to conquest in the form of the Requirimiento.  Seed argues that the Requirimiento was both a continuation of martial protocol from Al Andalus and a specific invention of Spanish lawyers responding to the objections of Dominican friars.  Seed maintains that the Portuguese saw discovery as their legal right to possession of territories.  In the Portuguese understanding, their invention of the technology that enabled overseas expansion allowed a claim to whatever lands they discovered, whether or not any conquest or territorial possession occurred.  Finally, Seed turns to the Dutch, whom she finds likewise employed a notion of discovery, but with the added element that formally describing a region was necessary in order to lay claim to it.  Additionally, the Dutch concept of possession  was largely commercial, and in the Dutch understanding, the maintenance of trade routes and continued commercial interaction with the natives was necessary to claim possession.

Ultimately, Seed’s book offers a new look at the variety of the European experience in the New World.  Seed demonstrates that it is probably not correct to speak of a single European experience or goal in the New World, but to treat each European polity on its own terms.

Regardless of its merits and flaws, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away has altered the way I think about the colonial experience in North America and the trajectory of US history.  In particular, if I ever find myself teaching high school again and stuck with an American history class, I may very well start the year by exploring the Spanish colonial experience in California, New Mexico, and Florida before ever getting into the extent of Massachusetts’s awesomeness and Tea Parties and democracy and stuff.

Richard Trexler lived from 1933 until 2007.  Trexler received his BA from Baylor University, and earned his PhD in 1964 from the University of Frankfurt.   Trexler worked at the University of Texas and the University of Illinois, but in 1978 he moved to SUNY Binghamton, where he worked until his death.

Trexler was principally a scholar of Renaissance Florence, but worked on many areas of Early Modern and Renaissance Europe.  In addition to Sex and Conquest, Trexler is best known for his three-volume study Power and Dependence in Renaissance Florence.  All told, Trexler wrote or edited nearly twenty books and authored over sixty scholarly articles.

Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas

Trexler’s work is principally a study of the berdache, a poorly understood figure nearly ubiquitous in indigenous American cultures.  Trexler’s goal is to “describe and analyze American homosexual practices and the male transvestism often associated with them, as the Iberians heard of these practices” (2).  In the end, Trexler finds that the berdache is an important component of a political and social order based on gendered violence.  In this order, male sexual domination of women, other males, and children was an instrument of social and political authority.  Such domination manifested itself in both the threat and the execution of sexual violence.

Assigning a fundamental social and political role to sexual violence is a bold and contentious analysis.  To support his claim, Trexler draws on the ancient and medieval pasts in the European and Mediterranean worlds.  Trexler devotes several chapters to demonstrating that gendered violence was common in the ancient world, even if its prominence is often obscured in the evidence.  Trexler maintains that homosexual acts of violence were prominent in ancient martial experiences and a normal component of conquest.  Soldiers brought such behaviors home with them, and over time they became an accepted component of domestic life.  Trexler points to the Islamic world as the inheritor of these practices, but he also strives to find examples in medieval Europe, and even presents evidence of homosexual violence in modern wars.

Ultimately, Trexler’s Sex and Conquest provides a useful discussion of the construction of human sexuality and the role of sexuality in creating social and political order.  While many of Trexler’s assertions are provocative and even confrontational, this study demonstrates that sexuality, violence, and social order need to be examined as parts of a whole, not as isolated components of the human experience.

With Malintzin’s Choices, Camilla Townsend has crafted an eminently readable and highly gripping tale of the native woman at the heart of the Spanish conquest of Mexico.  The book reads like a novel, and while it passed the time enjoyably, it seemed to be full of emotional and impressionistic assertions that cannot be demonstrated or supported by the evidence.  Let me offer two examples.

On page 130, Townsend describes the political situation in Tetzcoco.  She writes, “when the Spanish came, Ixtlilxochitl saw a marvelous political opportunity and went to ally himself with them, hoping to gain control over the entire kingdom.  After the Spanish arrested and then killed Cacama, Coanacochtli — Ixtlilxochitl’s full brother — was able to replace him as king of the southern part of the altepetl, the part still known as Tetzcoco.  He did not share his brother’s desire to ingratiate himself with the powerful strangers; he simply hated them.”  This is an evocative passage that continues for another half-dozen sentences.  Yet, in this account, Townsend makes a number of questionable assertions without a single citation or mention of the source material.  Claims about desire, hatred, and hope create an entertaining story, but it is difficult to see how Townsend can know about the emotional states of these historical actors.  Still, such writing techniques need not necessarily be problematic, but in this episode, Townsend explains the actions of these figures by invoking their emotional states; these emotions, then, are acting as historical agents.  Such claims are both problematic and troubling.

On pages 44 and 45, Townsend describes an episode of the Spaniards’ misconceptions about indigenous wealth, taken from the account of Bernal Diaz.  Describing Malintzin’s response to the Spaniards’ misunderstanding, Townsend writes, “whether or not she actually made a joke of it that bright June day we will never know, but certainly she and the other women must have laughed to themselves more than once to see these great strong men with their remarkable machines turn out to be more gullible than they had ever known any of their own warriors to be.”  Words such as “certainly” and “must” seem overly bold and out of place in a sentence that is an interpretation based on inference rather than on textual evidence.  I am, however, willing to concede that Townsend is probably correct in making this inference from Diaz’s account, but at the same time Townsend goes too far with it in making the response to Spanish ignorance and gullibility a matter of gender.  It does not seem evident to me that Malintzin’s laughter originates from expectations about gender, but rather from an obvious cultural divide, from social and cultural expectations that may have something to do with gender, but are not ultimately based on gender.  I might be wrong, and Townsend may be correct.  But Townsend fails to offer any evidence or even supporting analysis for her reading of the text.  Instead, she simply wraps her assumptions in the language of facts and continues with her narrative.

I found such incidents of scholarly sloppiness on nearly every page of the text, and ultimately I found it very disappointing.  I am glad that someone has written an evocative account of the Conquest from a perspective that offers an alternative to the cultural, social, and gender assumptions that come from a mere rewriting of the Spanish narrative sources.  But I do think that such an account could have been more scholarly.  As a case in point, I would offer Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre.

Language shapes the way we see the world. Terms for abstract concepts, social structures, and complex relationships necessarily convey information beyond merely providing a convenient label for a thing. Grammatical forms, especially those expressing states of being, the possession of attributes and characteristics, and the relationship between objects and action vary from language to language, and these forms contain an inherent (and typically unconscious) cosmology. By learning a language, especially a first or native language, one is indoctrinated into a way of viewing the world.

Recording a language by means of graphic symbols complicates this. For one thing, we tend to label this process “writing,” and then impart onto it all of the subconscious meanings associated with “writing” in our own culture. For example, we automatically assume that language recorded by means of graphic symbols is meant to exactly mirror spoken language, or we assume that it is mean to be read silently by an individual reader, or that it is intended to have a single meaning. These, of course, are false assumptions, and as we learn more about how pre-modern societies employed “writing,” it is becoming clear that the modern concept of “writing” is an aberration.

The encounter between the Spanish and the various indigenous people of the Americas, then, really was the meeting of different linguistic and cognitive worlds. Reading about native languages from Lockhart, and now reading native language texts, I now appreciate the alterity of the Americas. Additionally, it strikes me that the Conquest brought with it a linguistic imperialism, that even allowing for double mistaken identity, the Conquest was in part the imposition of an Italic cognitive world onto a Mesoamerican society.

Rather than try to compose a single commentary on a collection of many articles, I will instead offer some thoughts on those articles that made a strong impression on me.

“A Historian and the Disciplines”

In this article, Lockhart discusses something that I’ve been pondering for a while – why are the humanities arranged into disciplines? I realize, of course, that the answer has to do with the growth of the university and the development of scholarship as institutions, and even more importantly, that the business of academia is so entrenched in these disciplines that they will not ever go away. Still, Lockhart’s point that he had little to do with most of his peers in the history department that employed him while he had a great deal of contact with anthropologists and linguists should at least demonstrate the importance of creating inter-disciplinary bodies to bring together scholars in different disciplines working in the same field.

“A Double Tradition: Editing Book Twelve of the Florentine Codex” and “Between the Lines” — the Paleography Articles

In these two articles, Lockhart brings his audience with him as he delves into the nuances of studying the written word in the pre-modern world. “Between the Lines” is particularly fascinating as the presentation of a three case studies on how to study a manuscript in early Spanish Peru. Lockhart’s explication of these manuscripts is a fine demonstration of the historian’s craft, further enhanced by use of a description of the paleography courses he taught to his graduate students as a means of setting the stage. The lesson is that it isn’t just the meaning of the words that matters, but how words are recorded, and deciphering the messages encoded in the act of writing is a tricky business. “A Double Tradition” is a wonderful comedy of errors involving the process of moving thoughts across languages, through alphabets (so to speak), between genres, and onto the page. Lockhart makes it clear that deciphering all of this is important to the social history of early Spanish Mexico, but is in itself a daunting task. In both of these articles, then, Lockhart exposes his audience to the mechanics of doing history, not as a leisurely, gentlemanly affair, but as a real labor.

“The Social History of Early Latin America”

This article is a really lucid and really useful introduction to the foundational studies on the social history of the period under consideration. Here, Lockhart has crafted a survey that both introduces us to the important historiography of the topic and serves as an example of how to construct an engaging historiographical article. Interestingly, Lockhart opens with an attempt to define “social history,” but in the end gives up on it. This opening may offer us the opportunity to craft our own definition of social history, which no doubt will be useful if we are going to be discussing it over the next few weeks.