El silencio protagonista

This collection — drawn from the symposium “The First Jesuit Century in the Vice-royalty of Peru,” which took place as part of the 51st International Congress of Americanists, Santiago, Chile, 2003 — concentrates on questions raised by two documents discovered in the city of Naples: the Excul immeritus Blas Valera populo suo (1618) and the Historia et Rudimenta Linguae Piruanorum (1600 – 38). These texts attribute the authorship of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno to Jesuit father Blas Valera and brother Gonzalo Ruiz and correspondingly dismiss the long-standing attribution of authorship to Huaman Poma. According to these documents, Huaman Poma had acted merely as a “autor pantalla” — that is, he lent his name to Valera because the Jesuits had first persecuted the priest and then censored his writings for his questioning of the evangelization undertaken by the clergy and exposing the violent measures used by the Spaniards during the conquest. From this perspective, the Jesuits’ practices of silencing (or censorship) had a protagonists’ role, since it conditioned writers’ construction of history during the sixteen and seventeenth centuries and, as a consequence, shaped our knowledge of certain central aspects of Inca culture and the Spanish Conquest.Most of the essays deal with the history of the Jesuits in the viceroyalty of Peru between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. It presents studies on policies of conversion (Flavio Rurale and Giuseppe Piras), the relationship between Blas Valera and licenciado Francisco Falcón (Sabine Hyland), the activities of the Jesuit Luis López (Paulina Numhauser Bar-Magen), and the opinion of the Jesuit José de Acosta concerning native interpreters (Maurizio Gnerre). Other contributions deal directly with the so-called Neopolitan manuscripts described above (Laura Laurencich-Minelli, Davide Domenici, and Tom Zuidema), the ways in which colonial grammars described native languages (Vito Bongiorno), and the “anthropological” work of viceroy Francisco de Toledo in the context of his visita general of the viceroyalty (Antonino Colajanni).Due to space limitations, it is not possible to comment in detail on each one of the essays. However, I wish to underscore the importance of the articles written by Piras and Gnerre. In general, it is believed that the Society of Jesus functioned as a monolithic institution, whose members acted in consonance with the prevailing beliefs of their superiors. Nothing could be further from the truth. Piras and Gnerre demonstrate that opinions concerning how to carry out the conversion of the indigenous population were diverse and at times contradictory, which had an effect on the activities of the Jesuits. Grasping these differences is central to an understanding of the activities of the Jesuits in the colonial context.This book exhibits, in my opinion, three problems. The first is the quality of the documental sources. Several of the authors (Domenici, Numhauser, Hyland, Laurencich-Minelli, and Zuidema) use the Naples documents as sources for their respective studies. The authenticity of these manuscripts, as I have already show in a previous article (Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1, 99 – 103), is highly questionable. Furthermore, other authors have revealed that similar documents are false, fabricated in recent times. The second is the limited treatment of the topic of censorship exercised by the Jesuits. According to the volume’s editors, censorship is a central part of Jesuit activities with regard to colonial history; this practice merits attention beyond the case of Valera. In a manner similar to other religious orders, the Jesuits sought to model the activities of their members and their intellectual production according to certain ideological patterns. As far as the historical literature, the cartas annuas offer abundant information concerning what today we might call the editorial policy of the order during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This fascinating topic is not sufficiently explored by the contributors. The third problem is careless editing: numerous spelling errors, badly written passages, and errors of fact stemming from insufficient knowledge of church history. For example, one author writes that fray Blas de Atienza was the “head of the Mercedarian Order” (p. 128) and that the archbishop of Lima, Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo, convened a “committee of bishops” (p. 133). All these weaknesses, unfortunately, limit the usefulness of this book within the field of colonial historiography in general and of the history of the Jesuits in particular

Ancient history · Art · Brother · Censorship · CONQUEST · Humanities · Political science · Theology · Classics · Early Modern Spanish Literature · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American history and culture · Law · Philosophy