Franciscan-Indigenous Authorship Communities and the Devotio Moderna in Colonial Mexico

The production and reception of Christian ideologies for and by Amerindian populations involved an immense amount of social and intellectual labor. In Central Mexico, these projects led to a native devotional literature that focused on spiritual self-improvement by the early seventeenth century. This paper investigates the formation of authorship communities in Central Mexico, which allowed mendicant authors to collaborate with indigenous intellectuals. As a case study, I appraise one of the most remarkable tasks undertaken by such a community: two attempts to translate into Nahuatl Thomas à Kempis’s Imitatio Christi (The Imitation of Christ). This Latin text, as an important work in the devotio moderna tradition, was a devotional guide written in accessible language for audiences with no formal theological education, and became one of the first early modern “best-sellers” through a plethora of editions and vernacular translations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that included many European languages, as well as Nahuatl and Japanese.

This essay analyzes the Nahuatl Imitatio as an ideological project and outlines the implications of the emergence of networks of indigenous and missionary authors. On the one hand, the early Nahuatl Imitatio—a full illustrated translation edited by fray Luis Rodríguez before the 1550s—showcased the abilities of Nahua students at the Franciscan Colegio de Santa Cruz, introduced innovative translation ideologies, and publicized the aims of a Franciscan educational avant-garde. The second Nahuatl Imitatio, an incomplete translation by fray Juan Bautista Viseo and native author Francisco Bautista de Contreras, was informed by a Counter-Reformation revisionist spirit and tested the boundaries of what was deemed appropriate for native Christians at the time. On the other hand, the Imitatio and other meditative Nahuatl works helped reconstitute authorship networks and redefined indigenous intellectual labor while providing revealing details about a native devotional sphere in a colonial society.