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Chapter 3: The Renaissance(s) of the \Companion to Empire\
[...]while Gil Fernández has suggested that the eighteenth century reception of Nebrija's best known work, his Latin grammar, the Introductiones Latinae ('El Antonio'), had secured that work's immortality and a mythical quality in Spain's history no less than that of El Cid because it had become \"una irrenunciable gloria de nuestro patrimonio cultural\" (Gil Fernández 1981: 186), I would argue that the compañera del imperio cliché has been exclusively responsible for Nebrija's continued notoriety amongst modern scholars of Hispanic imperialism. Nowadays, particularly for those interested in colonial discourse analysis, the enduring resonance of the phrase lies in its motto-like capacity for quite summarily reflecting contemporary truisms like knowledge is power, that writing is 'violent' and the fact that political power cannot be maintained without the manipulation and control of self-legitimating discursive formations. Furthermore, for contemporary historians, Nebrija's mythical status (and, needless to say, convenient usefulness) owes much simply to his timing: for, by uttering the phrase in 1492, he synthesized, albeit unwittingly, the intimate relationship between the rise of national vernaculars and the inauguration of early-modern transatlantic expansion that characterized the period in which he lived.1 I am particularly interested in the phrase, however, not simply because it serves as a pithy adage which encapsulates the theoretical premise of this whole book, but because the phrase is also of course a quotation. [...]whether imperio simply meant 'power' in Nebrija's 1492 pronouncement or not, we cannot overlook the fact that that same pronouncement comes couched in a rhetoric designed to promote Castilian rule in terms of the old universality, and hence, the old idea of imperium as the right to world rule.
Journal Article
Introduction
[...]Warren's persistent reminder that post-philology be concerned not with a search for origins, but on the contrary, with a dispersal and displacement of supposed origins, is reflected by the fact that I have chosen to approach this history as a genealogy of the written word in pre-modern and early-modern Hispanic culture rather than as an excavation of the 'birth' of the Spanish language in medieval Cantabria. [...]the fact that alphabetic letters, in both Latin and Spanish, rather than the spoken Castilian vernacular, would emerge as the earliest linguistic tool of empire, serves to symbolize that colonial expansion was carried out by a fledgling nation-state that had not yet become totally identified with a single national language, which might also represent imperial aspirations. [...]it also makes sense to trace the history of Hispanic Imperium from its Late Imperial roots to the early modern era of transatlantic expansion simply because Renaissance colonial expansion would (initially) be depicted in terms of a medieval universal Christian empire derived (ultimately) from the imperial imagery of ancient Rome. [...]while this book excavates the history of the relationship between the evolution of textual cultures and early manifestations of a specifically Hispanic imperium, it can also be read as an invitation to dwell upon germane relationships in our own contemporary world. [...]the 'unreality', badly concealed by monumental (linear) history, would provide a stark contrast to the past revealed by genealogy: \"Taking up these masks, revitalizing the buffoonery of history, we adopt an identity whose unreality surpasses that of God who started the charade\" (Foucault 1971: 161).
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Chapter 5: The Task of Translators Past and Present
While each of the three inscriptions presents an epic depiction of the pre-Hispanic city which Cortés encountered prior to the overthrow of Moctezuma, and are hence intended to celebrate the grandeur of pre-Hispanic civilization as well as to underscore the alterity of Nahua religion, it is nevertheless rather conspicuous that that same celebration should be undertaken solely by three representatives of the invading culture (Cortés - the military leader, Motolinía - the paradigmatic symbol of the 'spiritual conquest', and Bernal Díaz - the 'awestruck' common soldier), and more importantly, in a language and writing system alien to the scribal culture of the pre-conquest Nahua peoples. [...]those same imposing quotations etched in stone symbolize, by their form as much as by their content, the conception of conquest as the (attempted) substitution of one cultural logic for another, and, simultaneously, the nationalistic use of pre-Hispanic ruins to assert the contemporary culture's transition to a modernity dependent on Castilian literacy. [...]we might note that one block southeast of the Templo Mayor, at the intersection of Moneda and Calle Lie. [...]the close proximity of the printing-press museum and the three enormous stone inscriptions on either side of the Templo Mayor cannot but remind us of the fundamental role that alphabetic writing was intended to play in the colonial process. Bearing this premise in mind, in this chapter I concern myself with gauging the extent to which any early colonial mystification of alphabetic writing was either enhanced or, on the other hand, compromised by the Christians' encounter with pre-Hispanic writing systems, and also by the indigenous adoption of alphabetic writing during the post-conquest period.
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Bibliography
'Introduction: Instructions for Sainthood and Other Feminine Wiles in the Historiography of Isabel G. In: David Boruchoff (ed.), Isabel la Cat - ólica, Queen of Castile: critical essays. 'Force of Law: The \"Mystical Foundation of Authority.'\" In: Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. [...]Thoughts on The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Afterword to the Second Edition' In: The Darker Side of the Renaissance. 2d ed.
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Chapter 6: The Violence of the letrados
[...]as a semi-literate conquistador, but certainly not a letrado, the use of written communication by a renegade like Lope de Aguirre allows us to problematize the notion that 'letterless' soldiers, like 'letterless Indians', were to be identified with a pre-literate state of nature where only a savage violence could possibly co-exist with the lack of writing, laws and orthodox Christianity. For if violence is the origin of the law, in the sense that the primordial foundation of any social taboo cannot be divorced from an inaugurating act of force (since it obviously depends on the threat of force for its authority), it stands to reason that \"where the highest violence, that over life and death, occurs in the legal system, the origins of law jut manifestly and fearsomely into existence\" (Benjamin 1986: 286). [...]rather than serving to simply punish an infringement of the law, the death penalty, as the most extreme form of legal violence against an individual life, serves to \"establish new law\" since each implementation of the death penalty enables the law to \"reaffirm itself as a transcendental institution (ibid.). [...]if, as González Echevarría (1990) has argued: \"Law and history are the two predominant modes of discourse in the colonial period\" (55), then it is in the sense that the law regulated the form and content of official historiography: \"In the sixteenth century writing was subservient to the law. On the contrary, according to Vázquez, Aguirre himself had predicted quite glibly that, should he be overthrown by forces loyal to the Crown, the public display of his severed head would serve merely to preserve his memory in the popular imaginary forever rather than serving as a deterrent to other acts of rebellion (Vázquez 1986: 145 -6). [...]Vázquez proceeds to describe how in fact Aguirre's prediction would not only be fulfilled, but exceeded: after his body had been quartered, his head was indeed severed and placed in an iron cage for public display while each one of his severed hands was sent to respective neighboring towns to complete the spectacular dissection.
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Chapter 4: Age of Iron, Age of Writing
[...]while Martyr D'Anghiera's employment of the Golden Age trope appears to present an idealized conception of the Amerindian as a virtuous 'nature dweller' who contrasts dramatically with the corrupt and decadent inhabitants of early modern Europe's Iron Age, the Golden Age 'simpleton', is also an illiterate rustic, bereft of reason, and lacking knowledge of God in such a way that his conflation with more sinister 'outsiders' - the raving heretic and the wildman - becomes more than inevitable. Christ was thus identified with cosmological totality even if Greek atomistic conceptions of the universe ultimately ceded to a Christian image of wholeness in the universe (Drucker 1995: 87). [...]since the doctrine of the Incarnation combined the notions of human flesh and temporal language as likenesses of God and his eternal Word, the Bible itself became identified with the body of Christ. (Leinhard 1992: 41) The zeal for book-burning must be seen in the context of a Christian scriptural tradition predicated upon an indispensable link between textuality and access to divine illumination or demoniac error. [...]when this identification of culturally-specific writing systems with the presence or absence of divine favor is considered within the context of the recent development of the printing press, the fundamental role of textual scrutiny and translation in calls for religious reform, and the humanists' so-called 're-discovery' of ancient textual worlds, we might not be surprised by the fact that the same period would witness a more generalized tendency to equate the possession of letters in a culture simply with the 'human' condition. The earlier allusions in this chapter to Christian 'letter mysticism' and the centrality of sacred textuality to Christian belief would suggest, at the very least, a certain mystification of the alphabetic written word as a receptacle of divine illumination and bearer of a divine presence. [...]the traditional identification of the possession or lack of writing in a culture with corresponding levels of civilization or barbarity again indicates a hyperbolic privileging of alphabetic writing as a symbol of a universal Christian culture.
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Chapter 1: Generating the Origins of Letters and Kingdoms
The supporters of Roman imperialism, however, stressed the legislative nature of the office of 'emperor' and the association of empire with universal law. [...]it was the conception of Roman law as universal law, which was a primum mobile in establishing a merger between imperium and juridical rule over the entire known world. [...]scholars have argued that there was a deliberate policy on the parts of the Visigothic monarchy and the Iberian Bishops to imitate the ancient empire so as to demonstrate that the Goths were the legitimate heirs to Roman imperial jurisdiction over the Peninsula and that they were in effect the equals of the emperors of the Eastern Empire who made the same claim (Valverde 2000: 1 84). (1975: 170) [Thus rightly did golden Rome, the head of all peoples, once desire you, and although the same Romulaean virtue, first victorious, betrothed you to itself, at last, nevertheless, the most flourishing nation of the Goths after many victories in the world eagerly captured and loved you, and enjoys you up to the present amid regal insignia and abundant treasures, secure in the felicity of empire.] This eulogy, which has patristic and classical sources, demonstrates a feminization of a desirable Hispania, seduced and sequestered by the conquering Goths (an image to be repeated in Castilian historiography centuries later) (Rodríguez Alonso 1975; Wolf 1990). [...]not only is Hispania depicted as abounding in natural resources, but it has also produced, as Isidore of Seville proceeds to remind us, several Roman emperors from amongst its own population: \"alumnis igitur et gemmis dives, et purpuris rectoribusque pariter et dotibus imperiorum fertilis sic opulenta es principibus ornandis ut beata pariendis\" [You are as rich in native gems as you are in purple-clad leaders, and, abundant in imperial gifts, you are as wealthy in adorning your princes as you are happy in producing them] (1975: 170). [...]here the word appears to connotate territorial subjugation or 'dominion' (in contrast to the 'peace' of Reccared); and there is certainly no connotation of the imperial grandeur formerly equated with the ancient Roman Empire or even of the justice generally associated with supreme authority.
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