Within fifteen years of the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1521, missionaries were teaching Latin and classical rhetoric to youths from the indigenous ‘Aztec’ nobility. This lecture will explain the circumstances which led to native students receiving such a training, and describe what and how they were taught, before turning to the consequences of that education. Some scholars have compared classical humanist rhetoric to the art of speaking practised by the Aztecs before the Spanish incursion: these comparisons will also be assessed. A closing discussion will consider implications the topic of this lecture may have for the history of scholarship and for ethnohistory today.
Andrew Laird is the John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities at Brown University in Rhode Island. Awards and honours he has received include a Fellowship by Examination at Magdalen College Oxford, a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship and a Loeb Classical Library Fellowship. He has held visiting lectureships and fellowships at the University of Salamanca, Stanford University, the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM), and St Anne’s College, Oxford. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in the UK in 2022.
Moderation: Dr. Nicoletta Bruno