Andrew Laird’s long awaited Aztec Latin is here. It has certainly been hotly anticipated within the community of scholars concerned with Greco-Roman legacies across the transatlantic world, of which L. has been a leading figure for the past two decades. Indeed, I had already acquired and eagerly devoured the book before being invited to review it: what a rare pleasure to be asked to report on something that one has already read cover to cover. My original copy accompanied me in 2024 to the Universidade Federal do Paraná and was subsequently donated to the library there. (Such typos — few, as I recall — as I noted can be found pencilled into it.) The vivid experience of reading Aztec Latin in southern Brazil, my mind sliding palimpsestically across centuries and continents, speaks to the rich textures of this landmark contribution.
L.’s erudite volume is in many senses a colossal work of corrective. At the macro level, it argues for nothing less than a wholescale re-evaluation of the literary culture that arose in the crucible of post-contact Central Mexico when Europeans — more specifically, at least at first, the Franciscans — and indigenous individuals were forced together in unprecedented ways and faced with unprecedented tasks of intercultural and interlingual mediation. L.’s contention is that the core intellectual labour took place at the interface not so much between Spanish and Nahuatl but, as his title suggests, between Latin and Nahuatl (an indigenous Mexican language that was both vehicular and prestigious: itself an ‘Aztec Latin’, 3). The volume emphatically reinscribes Latin into that context, arguing that colonial Mexican intellectual culture — including, crucially, Nahuatl-language literature itself — cannot be properly interpreted without it.
While versions of this point have been made before by scholars who stress that Latin too was imposed as a colonial language across the Iberian imperial world, L.’s take differs in two fundamental regards. The first is the highly original focus on Nahuatl-language material. As noted, L. locates the origins of modern Nahuatl literature in this context, arguing that its development cannot be dissociated from its contact with Latinate textual culture, not to mention with the Roman alphabet itself. Refreshingly, Latin–Nahuatl translation is understood as a primary mechanism in this osmotic process. The second and in its own way no less novel point concerns the type of Latin in question: not the Latin of Mediterranean antiquity, but rather that of early modern European contemporaneity. What L. detects time and again are the currents (confessional, paedagogical, philosophical, etc.) of Renaissance humanism and the Latin that was its idiom. L. thus manages not simply to centre Latin in the colonial Mexican space in a way that corrects certain ongoing postcolonial tendencies to ignore it, but even to centre a different Latin from the one most usually ignored. It is an inspired move.
At the micro level, each chapter offers multiple further correctives to numerous points of historiography, textual transmission, authorial identification, etc. To pick only a few: L. re-reads the iconography of the Mexican national flag; interrogates the founding mission of the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco; reconceptualises the role of Erasmus; and troubles received wisdom regarding key texts including the Rhetorica Christiana and the Florentine Codex. Most of these debates will be unfamiliar to JRS readers, but they are some of the central dilemmas of colonial Mexican studies — and bringing Latinate culture into the picture can, L. contends, elucidate them. A compelling example is the case of the Nican ompehua y çaçanillatolli yn quitlali ce tlamatini ytoca Esopo, an anonymous sixteenth/seventeenth-century Nahuatl translation of Aesop’s fables. Here, scholars keen to discern indigenous sensibilities have credited the unknown translator with acts of editorialisation consonant with a characteristically Nahua worldview, attentive to the natural and animal realms. In fact, as L. shows, all these supposedly creative translation ‘choices’ correspond to textual variants in the hitherto misidentified edition from which the translator was working. In a world where the tools of the Latinist are so often criticised as Eurocentric and patronising, it is those who have speculated about the Nahuatl translator without due reference to the Latin textual tradition who have been the more patronising and exoticising in their assumptions. Indeed, L.’s greatest contribution is undoubtedly to demonstrate how the careful work of classical-style philology can actually advance, rather than distort or detract from, the interpretation of the indigenous world. These are multidisciplinary moments at their finest.
While the bid to reinterpret Latin — and global European humanism — through the lens of Nahuatl is undeniably on-point, there are also some key opportunities missed in terms of decolonial theory and its wider ethics of practice. Many of the book’s assertions rely on fine-grained interpretations of Nahuatl-language material which most JRS readers (myself included) will be in no position to corroborate: a sense that its claims had been reality-checked with today’s Nahua scholarly communities would have been reassuring and illuminating alike. As it is, while L. stresses that intellectual endeavour in colonial Mexico was most frequently collaborative (249), Aztec Latin is itself irreducibly monographic. That said, the sheer quantity and quality of research involved in producing a monograph of this calibre is precisely what makes it so remarkable, while the fact that it will draw interest from a range of scholars is likewise to its credit, slicing across the structures of academic siloisation that L. rightly identifies as antithetical to remaking research in this endlessly entangled area. If heeded, it will be paradigm-shifting.
