Historians of early modern Spain have often been struck by Antonio de Nebrija’s prophetic proclamation on the relationship of language and empire, but we have not fully understood how debates about the history and science of language informed that interlock. In five well-organized chapters Valeria López Fadul addresses that gap by showing how the emerging field of philology (filología) shaped Spanish imperial thought and laid the groundwork for nineteenth-century Latin American republics to claim Castilian Spanish “as a de facto national language” to rewrite their own contested histories of language contact (197).

Chapters are organized chronologically and thematically, often structured around a node of scholars, such as royal chronicler Juan Páez de Castro (d. 1570), whose reading of published and manuscript sources such as Oviedo, López de Gómara, and Cieza de León, inspired his pitch for the Crown to build an imperial library of universal knowledge, collecting as much data as possible to improve systems of governance. Although the library was never fully realized, its vision of language as an archive charted a new course in scholarly interpretations of Spanish and Latin American antiquity, as etymologists began to employ two main tools to support politically loaded claims of ancestry: linguistic analysis of toponymic changes and language contact with the Biblical tongues of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin (57). To support arguments about connections with the Lost Tribes of Israel, scholars such as Luis de León (1527–91) documented phonetic similarities through onomatopoeia (59) and connected placenames such as Yucatán to Hebrew roots such as Joktan (61, 70). In contrast, Spanish Hebraists such as Miguel Cabello Valboa rejected these claims, arguing that too much time had passed since Babel to permit language reconstruction. Theorists aligned with de León responded by explaining differences in historical and present data as natural products of change over time, language contact, and climatic determinism (62). Both sides used language for political purposes, even invoking persistence of placenames in Nahuatl to support arguments in favor of Spain’s Basque origins, not more recent Hebrew or Arabic histories, but they disagreed about the definition and interpretation of evidence (72–3, 77).

Etymological scholarship fell out of favor in the late colonial era, but for sixteenth-century scholars, it was a hallmark of intellectual rigor and, by the 1560s, a matter of state policy. One of the book’s productive throughlines is the role of the state, whether Crown, empire, or independent nation, in structuring scientific inquiry. Using questionnaires prepared by the Crown, local officials scoured the Spanish countryside and American viceroyalties asking residents to share information about their towns’ geographic features, plant and mineral use, and placenames. Spanish scholars juxtaposed Indigenous informants’ interviews with legal sources and local refrains to convert them into conventional evidentiary standards. Such scholars’ uneasy relationship to Indigenous oral history related not only to the privileging of the written Spanish word over spoken Native tradition but also to a wider humanist interpretation of language change as a process of corruption, wherein eloquence was associated with political stability and “the decline of the Roman Empire had corrupted Latin” (118).

Despite such corruptions, though, humanists who prioritized nitty-gritty details over general patterns continued to publish in Latin, as did the physician Francisco Hernández (1515–87), whose monumental Latin-language study of Mexican materia medica was sent to Spain in 1576 and published in 1651. Following the model of Pliny, for whom the “compilation” of information was “the fundamental activity of knowledge production” (159), Hernández “examined the chains of information implicit in Spanish, French, and German words” and used a similar approach with Nahuatl-speaking collaborators in central Mexico (138). As a scholar, he was deeply aware of the politics of citation, even mentioning in a note that, although he had found an idea in one source, he would cite another, since it was not banned by the Crown (139). Hernández’s scientific efforts were supported by networks of Franciscan, Augustinian, and Dominican missionaries (147), although he ultimately “adopted the Franciscans’ understanding of the Nahuatl language” (157). Historians of science and religion might see future opportunities to distinguish Franciscan science from that of other orders, such as more widely studied networks of Jesuit scientists. The Cradle of Words will be of great value to historians of ideas, early modern Spain, and language ideologies in colonial and nineteenth-century Latin America.