The Iberian expansion in the Americas was as much a political and military affair as it was an effort to come to terms with how to deal with the indigenous populations from a legal and moral point of view. Considerable theoretical efforts by sixteenth-century scholars were made in order to articulate a proper normative theory in this regard, yet those academic treatises, mostly written in Latin, lacked the practical approach that would allow priests to respond to the reality they faced in colonial Mexico or Peru. The purpose of this volume, which is the first of a series initiated by the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, is to put into a sharper focus the so-called pragmatic literature that helped mostly religious actors to translate abstract normative notions into a more accessible language, generally not into Latin, such as the one needed by priests in their communication with indigenous parishioners. The 11 articles gathered in this volume have a broad temporal and geographical scope, ranging from approximately 1530 to the eighteenth century and focusing on parts of Ibero-America as diverse as New Spain, New Granada, Peru and Brazil.
One co-editor of the volume, Thomas Duve, establishes the conceptual framework which identifies the characteristic features of the pragmatic genre. He shows that it is part of a wider effort of introducing new corpora of normative texts that ultimately translate mere normative information into normative knowledge, in the sense that it allows for moral advice showing guidelines in all sorts of religious matters. Christoph Meyer offers in his chapter the general context of how in late Antiquity and in the early modern period legal texts were adapted to the short format of epitomes, which is important to understanding the development of pragmatic texts. Otto Danwerth puts the emphasis on the material aspect of pragmatic texts, outlining how they circulated within Spanish America and thus showing how the intellectual exchange of normative ideas physically worked.
The pragmatic literature in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonial Peru is discussed by Renzo Honores, who points to the pivotal role it played in constituting the legal and political narratives of that viceroyalty. Gustavo Machado Cabral's paper also has a regional approach in that it highlights the impact of Jesuit pragmatic literature in sixteenth-to-eighteenth-century colonial Brazil showing that it was essential in providing solutions in cases of conscience. Probably the centerpiece of the pragmatic genre is Martín de Azpilcueta's Manual de Confessores, discussed by Manuela Bragagnolo, the Portuguese and Spanish versions of which were central to the attempt to epitomize the abstract normative framework, making it accessible to regular clerics.
José Luis Egío shows that in early colonial Mexico, around 1540, there were already attempts to achieve something similar through the works of Juan de Zumárraga. Further deepening the Mexican perspective is Osvaldo Moutin's work on the Third Mexican Provincial Council in 1585, and David Galindo further expands on the role the Franciscan order played in formulating a normative framework in colonial Mexico from 1530 to 1640. Efficiently transmitting the Catholic normative language to the indigenous populations in their own languages was probably one of the salient results of that effort.
The inquisition in Cartagena de Indias in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the subject of Pilar Mejía's paper, while the final contribution by Agustín Casagrande offers a theoretical assessment that pairs with Duve's initial piece, yet focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and pragmatic texts on criminal practices. Superbly documented, this volume is a valuable addition to the ever-increasing literature on the use and implementation of normative languages in Spanish and Portuguese colonial America.
