Happy Hispanic Heritage Month! To celebrate, we have curated a new exhibit, Colonial Mexico & Early Print, that draws from our collection of rare books featuring the cultures, geography, flora and fauna of Mexico. Many of these books were collected by the Franciscans in Santa Clara’s mission era, although some were acquired after the founding of the college by the Jesuits or collected more recently. The majority of the exhibit consists of early printed books that were written to study the language, history and natural world of Mexico. There is also a selection of books that were printed in Mexico and have traditional religious engravings.
Christ holding a child, woodcut from Augustín de Vetancurt’s Manual de administrar los santos sacramentos, published by doña Maria de Benavides, Mexico (1700). Mission Santa Clara Book Collection.
Sister Sebastiana Josepha with baby Jesus, frontispiece of Joseph Eugenio Valdés’s Vida admirable, y penitente de la V.U. sor Sebastiana Josepha de la SS. Trinidad, imprint of Bibliotheca Mexicano, Mexico (1765). Recent gift of Bertha Lewis in memory of her uncle Excmo. Sr. Don Fernando Ruiz Salorzano, Archbishop of Yucatan from 1943 to 1969.
The materials selected document the encounter between the Spanish colonists with the peoples of Mexico, and were chosen to highlight the presence of indigenous culture and languages in different types of texts. The base of the exhibit includes two facsimiles of Mesoamerican manuscripts created by the Nahuas, the indigenous people of the Aztec civilization, documenting their culture as it existed before the Spanish conquest of Mexico. The Codex Ixtlilxochitl and the Còdice Borgia are replicas of the richly illustrated manuscripts depicting calendars and temple rituals in pictographs. However, the majority of the display reflects the assimilation of indigenous culture into Spanish and European written culture and modes of understanding, including studies of natural history that document indigenous words for animals and plants, as well as vocabularies and translations for Spanish missionaries that were used for communication and conversion.
The exhibit documents examples of Nahuatl and Purépecha (the language of Michoacán) woven into texts written primarily in European languages (Latin, Spanish and Italian). The oldest text on display is Juan Eusebio Nieremberg’s Historia naturae, printed in Antwerp in 1635, a natural history of Mexico that has woodcuts of plants and animals with labels in Latin as well as in Nahuatl, Quechua and other indigenous languages that have since become threatened or endangered through colonialism. There are also two volumes of Francesco Saverio Clavigero’s Storia antica del Messico, the first comprehensive study of the history of ancient Mexico. Although Clavigero was from Mexico, he went to Italy when the Jesuits were expelled from Spanish territories in 1767. Published in Italian from 1780 to 1781, his work describes Aztec history, religion and civilization, such as the calendar on display, with extensive maps, plates and engravings. Although not included in the exhibit, A&SC also holds copies of the two volume English translation published in London only a few years later.
Many of the religious books in the display were printed in Mexico, including Angel Serra’s pastoral handbook for priests with text in Latin, Spanish and Purépecha. Serra was a parish priest in Charapan (in the Mexican state of Michoacán), and later lived in the Franciscan mission of Santiago de Querétaro. Mexico City was one of the earliest and largest centers for printing in the Americas, beginning in the 16th century. Several of the books were printed in the shop of María Candelaria Rivera Calderón y Benavides, one of several widows who ran family print shops in Mexico City from the late 17th to 18th centuries. These particular imprints all have religious subjects, especially women religious and apparitions of the Virgin Mary such as Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (Our Lady of Guadalupe) and Nuestra Señora del Pueblito (Our Lady of Pueblito). The Franciscans incorporated woodcut engravings into their religious teaching, and much of the earliest printing in Mexico tends to have sacred themes and images. Woodcut prints were circulated broadly within Mexico and also created by native artists, leading to the development of a Mexican iconographic style that is also reflected in other types of engravings seen in the exhibit.
National Hispanic Heritage Month runs from Sept. 15 to October 15, but we are planning to keep the exhibit up through the fall quarter. We welcome questions and are happy to supply more information about the items on display or related materials in our collections.
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