Osvaldo Pardo’s Honor and Personhood in Early Modern Mexico details the critical role mendicants had in upholding European values and institutions once they assumed the duties of diocesan clergy in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Mexico. As the colony’s spiritual and social guardians, Pardo shows how friars used catechisms, sermons, and sacramental rituals to teach indigenous people how to “obey the pope, their priests, and the laws of the church, but also the king, his representatives, and his laws” (7). Blurring lines between secular and religious control, and despite the Spanish crown’s efforts to assert jurisdictional control in the region, many friars presented themselves as the ultimate sources of authority to indigenous parishioners, a conceit buttressed by their own theological and political machinations. Attempting in vain to defend their position before the crown, many of the most influential friars (particularly the Franciscans and Dominicans) appealed to a European audience already embroiled in issues of reform. Their letters, dictionaries, confession manuals, and corpus of printed legal and religious works are among the well-worn sources that Pardo thumbs.

The religious orders aimed to expel the Devil from the New World and recreate the Primitive Church in Mexico, likening indigenous communities to the great ancient civilizations ready to take up Christianity and hasten the millenarian second coming. To carry out their mission, Pardo argues that friars needed to protect the honour and stability of indigenous communities in the face of predatory encomenderos and a state that had little understanding of the perilousness or potential of the evangelical project. To reach indigenous communities, friars first needed to overcome linguistic and cultural barriers by adopting an indigenous lexicon and relating it principally to lessons found in the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins. Pardo shows how Friars took on the task of formulating and conveying religious concepts alongside Hispanic ideas of honour, reputation, social estate, oath-swearing, and punishment. Far from being static concepts, Pardo shows how the instability of these ideas was directly tied to the shifting social and political discourses of the times: honour and personhood were always moving targets and subjects of much debate.

Many friars, like the Dominican Pedro de Feria, found translation difficult, and despite a long tradition of dividing things spiritual and material, they began to equate intangible Christian concepts with the corporeal world. To the “unabashedly materialistic” indigenous converts, corporeality was one of the few mechanisms with which to explain the sacraments, the Spanish tributary system, and the value of “intangible goods” such as honour and personhood. (34). Other friars, like Molina, successfully translated intangible concepts like honour through effective use of catechisms and the confessional, but they continued to employ indigenous linguistics to convey “fleshy” notions of the material world in their teachings—a process that led later generations of theologians to question the overall effectiveness of early evangelization. Sixteenth-century friars accepted indigenous rituals into the pantheon of Christian practice, such as the kissing or tasting of the earth during oath-swearing ceremonies, and this process of syncretism eventually gave mendicant discourse new meaning. Molina’s Confessionario Mayor, Sahagún’s Historia General, and Florencia’s Summa de Confession, Pardo points out, all talked about striking the seventh sin of pride from Nahuas by appealing to a distinctly indigenous sense of personhood and corporeality—admonishing those who claimed to be of the “hair, nails, and part” of indigenous nobility—and glossing mendicant teachings with a veneer of indigenous rhetoric that strayed from the message of the Primitive Church (109).

Pardo looks at material culture to effectively show how friars sought to teach indigenous communities how to engage in the new colonial economy. To explain European concepts of ownership and church estates, friars drew upon pre-Hispanic rituals that saw indigenous merchants as carriers of precious metals, feathers, and other luxury items traditionally considered property of the religious domain. Despite the long Christian tradition of eschewing usury, mercantilism could be an honourable endeavour in central Mexico, and artisans and merchants were often awarded favour in the material and spiritual economies of the region. For the masses who were uninvolved in the manufacture and trade of luxury items, friars like Motolinía found little trouble translating Franciscan messages of poverty and humility in practical and pedagogical terms. To be poor was to be Christ-like. Linking the Christian ideal of poverty to honour appealed to poor communities in the Americas just as it had for centuries on the other side of the Atlantic. Regardless of individual wealth or profession, honour and social prestige were always conferred through ritual acts, and in many cases, it was up to friars in Mexico to present the proper ritual form. By participating in the religious and litigious rituals of baptism, confession, testimony, and oath-swearing, among other things, indigenous people slowly gained persona status in the eyes of many sixteenth-century Spaniards. But from the very outset, Pardo shows how some missionaries, encomenderos, and secular officials questioned the efficacy of indigenous participation in such rituals, leading to an ad-hoc process of evangelization and acculturation. Many of the orders (and friars within those orders) held very different ideas about which secular and religious rituals were appropriate for indigenous converts to participate in, particularly rituals that friars thought asked too much of new converts, activities that put them at legal risk, or rituals that seemed pre-Hispanic by nature. By the seventeenth century, the very discourse that missionaries like Motolinía, Molina, and Sahagún found so effective would come under scrutiny as a new generation of friars sought to explain heterodoxy in local practices of religion, veneration, oath-swearing, and modes of punishment.

Honor and Personhood in Early Modern Mexico masterfully blends a body of secondary literature produced in Mexico and the U.S. (drawing heavily from the so-called school of “New Philology”), and it offers plenty of opportunities for supplemental reading and source materials. There are few missteps or misprints, most of which are obvious (the date of Moya de Contreras’ appointment to archbishop is given as 1984, for example). The work stands as a reminder that one need not scour the ends of the Earth in search for new material to re-draw the contours of what we know about European expansionism and global interaction. Pardo successfully draws new meanings from classic sources. Still, generalizations endemic to colonial historiographies slosh uneasily against his subtle analysis of mendicants: encomenderos are cast as a greedy, self-interested bunch; the steady hand of the crown is portrayed as advancing the prerogatives of the state over all others; and “Mexican Indians” often emerge as a homogenized cluster, eager to learn from Europeans and quite submissive to the glaciating forces of colonialism. How exactly did indigenous communities feel about honour and personhood? Pardo’s work should stimulate some intriguing archival work. Other cross-sections of society are omitted altogether from Honor and Personhood, leaving us to question how these friars dealt comparatively with women, children, slaves, creoles, mestizos, Afro-descendants, and many others in their flocks. One begs to wonder what portrait would emerge were Pardo’s nuanced analysis of the messy, contingent nature of mendicant evangelization extended in all directions to all groups. Still, his work remains essential reading for anyone interested in the religious orders, colonial pedagogy, material culture, and the many discursive trajectories of honour and personhood in early modern Mexico.