644 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY VOLUME LXXIV, NO.

vices; and Baird offers a fascinating analysis of the seemingly discordant relationship
between the illustrated Nahuatl lexicon of human anatomy and Sahagún’s lament for
the loss of life and the fragmentation of the body politic in the midst of the 1576 plague.
This book is an important contribution to Sahaguntine studies in its collection of
insightful essays by established scholars, including revised versions of some now-classic
scholarship. The relatively succinct chapters are well suited for university instruction,
for both core curricula and specialized courses. It is a beautifully illustrated volume
that will appeal to anyone interested in the early modern humanities. More is yet to
come. The editors are part of the Getty’s digital Florentine Codex Initiative, which
promises to generate a new wave of scholarship on this singularly important
sixteenth-century work.

Lisa Trever, Columbia University

doi:10.1017/rqx.2021.50

Tongues of Fire: Language and Evangelization in Colonial Mexico. Nancy Farriss.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xxii + 410 pp. $99.

The Mexican Mission: Indigenous Reconstruction and Mendicant Enterprise in

New Spain, 1521–1600. Ryan Dominic Crewe.
Cambridge Latin American Studies 114. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2019. xviii + 310 pp. $99.99.

The subject of the Spanish missionary effort in sixteenth-century New Spain continues
to exercise considerable influence on the scholarly imagination. The violent nature of
the initial conquest and the massive amount of converts added to the Catholic Church
in the early years, combined with the subsequent demographic collapse, make the story
of this endeavor one of the most dramatic and captivating episodes of the last half mil-
lennium. Two recent monographs attempt to add important tiles to the mosaic of our
understanding of this time period, albeit from quite different perspectives. The works
are tied together by the notion of doctrina. Within the sixteenth-century Spanish mis-
sionary context, doctrina could refer to the set of Christian truths that the faithful were
expected to adhere to (doctrine, in English), the catechism lessons that Native congre-
gations were taught at the mission, or the physical mission parishes established within
Native communities. All three of these realities played a crucial role in the establishment
of Catholic communities in Mexico.
Tongues of Fire examines the question of doctrina in the first two of the above mean-
ings—how missionaries sought to transmit the content of Catholic teachings to Native
people who had no frame of reference for those teachings. This work will be of partic-
ular interest to those keen to understand the study of indigenous languages in the early
years of the Spanish presence in Mexico. In order to make themselves understood

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 REVIEWS 645

during the earliest phases of the conquest, both clerical and secular Spaniards had no
recourse but to rely on signs and gestures. But as soon as it became feasible, the clumsy
code of hand signals was jettisoned in favor of spoken language through the use of local
interpreters, either voluntary or forced. And while interpreters represented a massive
leap in the quality of communication, churchmen were concerned that the message
communicated also represented Catholic orthodoxy, something more difficult to
achieve.
Drawing her examples from Dominican efforts at missionization in colonial Oaxaca,
Nancy Farriss assiduously documents the quest to balance concerns for orthodoxy with
intelligibility. The key to achieving communicability was through alliances with Native
elites, whose sons were often educated by the friars as intermediaries between them and
their indigenous flocks. The church in Mexico came to depend “on a cadre of literate
Indians educated by the friars, the ‘catechism boys’ promoted to ‘church Indians,’ or
adult members of the church staff” (148). With time, basic doctrinal instruction fell
to indigenous catechists, but when it came to preaching, hearing confessions, and draft-
ing written texts, delegation was not an option. These functions called for a direct com-
mand of Native languages—not only linguas francas such as Nahuatl, but also local
languages and sublanguages. In their attempt to master these languages, mendicant
clergy continued to rely on the aid of highly educated Native collaborators, and together
they drafted doctrinal and devotional texts as well as dictionaries. As their linguistic
skills evolved, friars eventually attempted to employ the persuasive power of indigenous
literary and rhetorical devices. The ultimate result was the birth of a type of doctrinal
language with its own unique hybrid stylistics that also penetrated over time into secular
discourse.
In Tongues of Fire, the author argues that despite the increasing levels of linguistic
finesse, Spanish missionaries were ultimately unsuccessful in converting Amerindians
into the type of Christians they hoped to form. The root of their failure was not a
lack of sophistication, either on the part of Spaniards or Zapotecs, but rather a seem-
ingly unbridgeable cultural divide. For Farriss, unsuccessful does not mean futile, how-
ever. An increasing level of linguistic acumen went hand in hand with a rising level of
interpenetration of the two cultures. The result over time was, as the author mentions,
the subsuming of new concepts into an indigenous cultural framework, “but that frame-
work was at the same time also being transformed through Christian influence” (302).
Far from focusing on methods of rhetorical persuasion, in The Mexican Mission,
Ryan Dominic Crewe examines the sociopolitical ramifications of the evangelical pro-
ject. He argues that Mendicant missionaries in sixteenth-century Mexico leveraged both
colonial violence and pre-Hispanic patterns of conquest to create a uniquely successful
system, whose symbol was the monumental doctrina churches. The power of this system
lay in its collusion with the political objectives of local indigenous elites, who ensured
the compliance of the common people in the new order. And although it managed to
supplant the exploitation that already existed in the pre-Hispanic world by building

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 646 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY VOLUME LXXIV, NO. 2

upon its material and psychological infrastructures, the missionary system brought
about an enormous advance with respect to that old order. According to the author,
“in just thirty years, the mission enterprise achieved something that the Aztec
Empire had never accomplished: it united the length and breadth of sedentary
Central Mexico from Jalisco to Veracruz and from the Río Pánuco to Southern
Oaxaca under the sway of Spanish-held Tenochtitlán” (3).
Thus, Crewe makes the case that the mass acceptance of baptism in the 1530s was
the result of a complex mixture of motives, which included the desire for a status that
conveyed legitimacy in the new political realm while also offering protection from the
religious violence of the friars and the secular violence of the conquerors. At the same
time, general conferral of baptism brought about the paradoxical reconstitution of the
fabric of Native communities along new lines.
Although The Mexican Mission depicts a broad series of pressures that assaulted
Indian society, it also addresses the key issue of indigenous collaboration in the mission
enterprise and how this collaboration served the specific goals and interests of those
groups who cooperated in its growth. This becomes particularly clear in part 2 of the
book, when the great demographic collapse begins to threaten the existence of the peo-
ple on which the success of the missions depended. Such immense loss of life, however,
does not seem to slow the creation of massive doctrina churches. According to Crewe,
rather than simply reinforcing the power of the Mendicant orders, the doctrina churches
were erected by Native communities as permanent monuments to the persistence of the
communities themselves.
In part 3, these very churches become the locus of struggles between the different
actors in an increasingly complex society in New Spain. Even as the mission enterprise
was in decline at the end of the sixteenth century, rivalries between secular and religious
clergy, as well as between Native nobles and commoners, engulfed the missions in yet
more drama. Yet as their control shifted, the doctrinas endured as prized symbols of local
legitimacy, many into the nineteenth century. In summing up the book’s argument in
its epilogue, the author notes that far from fading into the background, the Mexican
missionary endeavor continued to serve as fodder for dreams of evangelization much
further afield to Asia, beginning with the Philippines but ultimately aimed at China.
In their own ways, each of these books provides a contribution to the literature on
Mexican missions by emphasizing a particular facet of their development. But both
share in highlighting the fundamental element of indigenous agency in creating the
legacy of those missions.

Damian Bacich, San José State University

doi:10.1017/rqx.2021.51

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