Decolonizing Renaissance Humanism

1131 © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected]

Stuart Michael McManus

Decolonizing Renaissance Humanism

When we think of Renaissance humanism, it is unfortunate that Antonio Valeriano (ca. 1521–1605) does not come to mind. Indeed, not only did the life of this Nahua humanist from Azcapotzalco, in the Valley of Mexico, overlap with those of Erasmus, Giordano Bruno, and Isaac Casaubon, but Valeriano shared many of the preceding men’s scholarly interests and standards. To take just one example, he was a lover of Latin eloquence, one of the defining features of Renaissance humanism. As one Span- ish friar put it, he was “a great Latinist who could speak extemporaneously (even in the last years of his life) with such mastery and elegance that he brought to mind Cicero or Quintilian.” Valeriano has even left us a glimpse of this exquisite Latinity in action in a 1561 letter to Philip II, in which he argued for the hereditary privileges of his pueblo.1

Of course, there were also significant differences between Valeriano and the cast of European characters we normally associate with the early modern impulse to reform education, politics, and society as a whole on the model of an idealized “antiquity”— Greco-Roman in the first instance but capacious enough to include other connected and analogous pasts. Like Marsilio Ficino, Valeriano devoted much of his life to teach- ing Latin letters and Christian philosophy. Yet he did so not at a Medici-sponsored aca- demia in Florence but at a Franciscan colegio for indigenous nobles in Tlatelolco. Like Erasmus, he was a translator. This said, his focus was on translating not Greek into Latin but Latin into Nahuatl. Like the famous French legal humanist Jacques Cujas, he devoted himself to the study of law. However, he did not write commentaries on Justinian’s Digest. Rather, he was a cacique judge in Azcapotzalco and Tenochtitlan. Indeed, it is in this role as a judge (juez) that he is presented in the romanized Nahuatl, Spanish,

1 “Fue también hijo del dicho colegio de Sancta Cruz, y uno de los mejores latinos, y rethoricos que del salieron (aunque fueron muchos en los primeros años de su fundación) y fue tan gran latino, que hablava extempore (aun en los ultimos años de su vejez) con tanta propriedad y elegancia, que parecia un Ciceron, o Quintiliano.” Juan Bautista, A Iesu Christo S.N. ofrece este sermonario en lengua mexicana (Mexico City, 1606), “prólogo,” 3. On Valeriano, see Frances Karttunen, “From Courtyard to the Seat of Government: The Career of Antonio Valeriano, Nahua Colleague of Bernardino de Sahagún,” Amérindia 19/20 (1995): 113–20, and Andrew Laird, “Nahua Humanism and Ethnohistory Antonio Valeriano and a Letter from the Rulers of Azcapotzalco to Philip II, 1561,” Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl 52 (2016): 23–74.

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and pictograms of the Codex Aubin, complete with a xihuitzolli headdress and a Spanish staff of office, which together symbolized his ability to mete out justice to his fellow Nahuas (Figure 1).

In other words, the case of this indigenous humanist reminds us that the conven- tional narrative of a large-scale revival of interest in Mediterranean antiquity in late medieval Italy giving birth to new ideas that spread across a narrowly construed “West- ern world” is just a part, perhaps only a small part, of a larger story.2 The explanatory weaknesses of the traditional Eurocentric vision of Renaissance humanism becomes even clearer if we consider that Valeriano was just one among a host of other non- and extra-European humanists (indigenous, African, creole, missionary, and diasporic) whose lives and scholarship historians have only begun to reconstruct in the last gen- eration or so. This little-known wing in the humanist hall of fame includes figures who excelled in every humanist pursuit. For instance, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645–1700), a Mexico City–born polymath, reworked the humanist “mirror for princes” genre to create a “mirror for viceroys” that put forward Aztec gods and rulers as exempla of humanist virtues. It also features eloquent Latin orators like the Japanese humanist Hara (原) Martinho (ca. 1568–1629), who delivered a Latin oration in Goa in 1588, in which he displayed his preference for Ciceronian prose rhythm, or clausula—a trait he shared with the great French humanist orator Marc Antoine Muret (1526–85).

2 On “the West” as a metageographical category, see Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, CA, 1997), 49–55.

Figure 1. Antonio Valeriano seated in judgment. Codex Aubin, fol. 59v, British Museum. Reproduced under Cre- ative Commons License. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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We should also not forget Bartolomé Saguinsín (ca. 1694–1772), an indigenous Fili- pino priest whose Latin epigrams celebrating the end of the British occupation of Manila during the Seven Years’ War represent both the first extended work of poetry by a Filipino and the last significant humanist production in the Asia-Pacific region.3

This more obscure side of Renaissance humanism was the product of a network of educational institutions in Asia, Africa, and the Americas that cultivated its standards and methods, many of which grew up in the wake of Christian missions founded by the Jesuits, Dominicans, and some Protestant groups.4 These colleges, schools, and universities included not only the Colegio de la Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco and Kyushu’s trilingual Japanese-Portuguese-Latin Jesuit seminaries, where the aforementioned Hara Martinho began his training, but also Harvard Indian College and its feeder Latin schools in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Boston, where a small number of Wampanoag and other native students worked on their Latin, Greek, and declama- tion in North American echoes of the more famous humanist academies of Guarino da Verona in fifteenth-century Italy and John Colet in sixteenth-century England.5

Even within Europe, there was a greater diversity of origins among humanists than once thought, perhaps best exemplified by Juan Latino (1518–96), a man of African descent born into slavery in the household of the Spanish Duke of Sessa, who became a humanist teacher and Latin poet in his adopted hometown of Granada. Forced to serve the duke’s son, “against the will of those who controlled the age of minority of the Duke, he would accompany his master to his lessons any time he could defy their vigi- lance.” These secret studies of Latin and Greek meant that when Latino accompanied his master to the University of Granada in 1533, he was able to benefit vicariously from the educational environment, soon surpassing the duke while remaining his property.6

Of course, decolonization (in the fundamental sense in which it is usually employed of overturning a long-standing Eurocentric framework to reveal perspectives that have been overlooked) brings with it a period of instability, as familiar narratives and debates that were framed between the nineteenth century and the Cold War have to be either rejected or reframed to accommodate new insights and long-ignored voices.7 This is the moment in which historians of Renaissance humanism now find themselves. Thanks to a generation of scholarship by ethnohistorians of sixteenth-

3 See resources cited in notes 43, 73, 82 . Many of these themes are explored, with particular reference to the role of rhetoric and oratory, in Stuart M. McManus, Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World (Cambridge, 2021).

4 On the Jesuit college in Luanda, see Festo Mkenda, “Jesuit Involvement in Africa,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits, ed. Ines G. Županov (New York, 2019), 427–446 (429).

5 Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, vol. 1 of 2 (Cambridge, MA, 1936), 340–36; Wolfgang Hochbruck and Beatrix Dudensing-Reichel, “‘Honoratissimi Benefactores’: Native American Students and Two Seventeenth-Century Texts in the University Tradition,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 4, no. 2/3 (1992): 35–47; Thomas Keeline and Stuart M. McManus, “Benjamin Larnell, the Last Latin Poet at Harvard Indian College,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 108 (2015): 621–42.

6 Quotation translated in Elizabeth R. Wright, The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain (Toronto, 2016), 39. Eduardo Soler Fiérrez, Juan Latino: El Esclavo Catedrático (Madrid, 2014).

7 Foundational studies for understanding this impulse include Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993); Rosalind C. Morris, ed., Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an

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century Mexico, we know more than ever before about Antonio Valeriano, but we do not know how his life and learning fit into the larger history of humanism both within and beyond western Europe. The time is therefore ripe to examine the past, the pres- ent, and, most important, the future of Renaissance humanism and to articulate some of the most pressing questions that historians will have to tackle going forward. These center on a constellation of new humanisms, including imperial humanism (humanist ideas of empire, formulated both within and beyond Europe), Indo-humanism (syn- cretic humanisms, especially in Asia and the Americas), and posthumanism (Renais- sance humanism’s long shadow in the eighteenth century). These identifiable although sometimes overlapping trends were frequently brought about by, or in dialogue with, hitherto ignored actors, including humanists of non-European descent who have long been marginalized in the dominant Europeanist historiography, and whose intel- lectual networks still await reconstruction. Frequently the product of Reformation and Counter-Reformation projects and transoceanic ecclesiastical networks, these new humanisms also invite us to revisit perennial questions, such as the relationship between Renaissance humanism and Christianity, long debated in the case of the early Florentine humanists and Erasmus and, more recently, among Renaissance readers of Lucretius.8

In the end, this “decolonized” Renaissance humanism emerges as neither purely chauvinistically imperialist and statist nor graciously cosmopolitan and protoliberal, although it could at times be both. Rather, it represented a toolbox of ideas and schol- arly techniques that could be put to differing ends depending on the circumstances, while retaining certain common features. Humanism was also, in some circumstances, open to non-Mediterranean antiquities and other intellectual traditions, with which it created hybrid humanisms that can be usefully viewed from either a European or a non- European perspective. While the Latinate world of the Renaissance began to disintegrate after 1650, the long tail of these various locally self-reproducing humanisms reached well

Idea (New York, 2010); and Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality,” Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2007): 449–514. These are echoed in “Decolonizing the AHR,” American Historical Review 123, no. 1 (2018): xiv-xvii, and “From the Editor’s Desk: Year One of Decolonization,” American Historical Review 124, no. 1 (2019): xiv–xix. While this is the thrust of much historical work at the moment, it is not the only usage of this term, which embraces a number of related projects centered on “provincializing Europe,” to borrow the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty: Raymond F. Betts, “Decolonization: A Brief History of the Word,” in Beyond Empire and Nation: The Decolonization of African and Asian Societies, 1930s–1970s, ed. Els Bogaerts and Remco Raben (Leiden, 2012), 23–37; Amanda Behm, Christienna Fryar, Emma Hunter, Elisabeth Leake, Su Lin Lewis, and Sarah Miller-Davenport, “Decolonizing History: Enquiry and Practice,” History Workshop Journal 89, no. 1 (2020): 169–91; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ, 2009). For an innovative account of the unintended consequences of decolonization, see Vanessa Ogle, “‘Funk Money’: The End of Empires, the Expansion of Tax Havens, and Decolonization as an Economic and Financial Event,” Past and Present 249, no. 1 (2020): 213–49. Those who have lived through decolonization (both historical and contemporary) can tell their own stories.

8 Albert Rabil, Erasmus and the New Testament: The Mind of a Christian Humanist (San Antonio, TX, 1972); Ross Dealy, The Stoic Origins of Erasmus’ Philosophy of Christ (Toronto, 2017); Charles L. Stinger, Humanism and the Church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversari (1386–1439) and Christian Antiquity in the Italian Renaissance (Albany, 1977); Ada Palmer, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA, 2014).

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into the eighteenth century. Renaissance humanism therefore offers insights for those interested in decolonizing (again in the sense employed by recent AHR editorials) other historical fields, in that it is a putatively European phenomenon that, upon closer inspec- tion, is revealed to consist of a series of complex and highly context-specific interactions between peoples and cultures across time and space (both in Europe and beyond), with agency going in both directions. Methodologically, the study of this more extensive and diverse Renaissance humanism rewards the application of both long-standing philologi- cal methods and more innovative critical approaches. As such, it offers a model for com- bining the best of traditional approaches with contemporary insights.

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Tucked in between the entries for Malta and the Netherlands in the fourth volume of the Iter Italicum, a monumental series in which Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905–99) listed thousands of uncataloged or incompletely cataloged Renaissance manuscripts, there is a section titled “Iter Mexicanum” that did not attract much attention when the vol- ume was published in 1989.9 While regrettable, the lack of interest in this short entry that lists manuscripts mostly preserved in libraries in Mexico City is far from surpris- ing given the metageographical and chronological assumptions that had dominated the field since its inception in the nineteenth century. These defined Renaissance human- ism as a purely European phenomenon that lasted from the end of the thirteenth cen- tury to the beginning of the seventeenth at most. While this framework was already beginning to show some wear and tear when Kristeller wrote the “Iter Mexicanum” entry, its origins and pivotal role in almost all the twentieth-century scholarship on Renaissance humanism demand some explanation if they are to be overcome fully.

This Eurocentric view is visible at the very beginning of modern historical writ- ing on the Renaissance. From the time of Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97) and Georg Voigt (1827–91), the study of the revival of letters was part of a larger project to cre- ate a genealogy for a triumphant western Europe in the first flush of the Great Diver- gence. This included its liberal political thought, nascent nation-states, and the German-speaking world’s renewed classical educational program (Neuhumanis- mus). Voigt, for instance, saw the rediscovery of classical texts as analogous to (but wholly divorced from) the “Age of Discovery” in that it provided the “sustenance and raw material” (Nahrungs- und Bildungstoff) for the creation of Europe’s individualis- tic and freedom-loving modernity. For him, this first took place in Florence and then spread to the rest of western Europe.10 There was therefore no space for an extra-

9 Paul Oskar Kristeller, Iter Italicum: A Finding List of Uncatalogued or Incompletely Catalogued Humanistic Manuscripts of the Renaissance in Italian and Other Libraries, vol. 4 of 7 (Leiden, 1989), 331–34. Unlike many of the manuscripts in the Iter, those listed under “Iter Mexicanum” had not received Kristeller’s in- person attention. Rather, Kristeller had become aware of them accidentally through reading bibliographical works produced in Mexico and later by corresponding with local scholars. Kristeller Papers, box 130, 147, Columbia University.

10 Georg Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums oder das erste Jahrhundert des Humanismus (Berlin, 1859), iii–iv; Paul F. Grendler, “Georg Voigt: Historian of Humanism,” in Humanism and Creativity

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European history of the movement. Similarly, Burckhardt understood the Renaissance as freedom from the dogmatic scholasticism and restrictive corporatism of the pre- Petrarchan Middle Ages in the “West” (Abendland), a civilization “which is the mother of our own, and whose influence is still at work among us.” This is not to say that Burck- hardt was uncritical of Renaissance Italy, as his famous discussion of the peninsula’s petty princes demonstrates. However, he largely ignored or was dismissive of non-Western regions after the Middle Ages. For example, while he admitted that Frederick II of Sicily followed the patterns of “Mohammedan” administration and frequently fell short of the standards set by more tolerant Muslim rulers, he was happy to attribute some of the vio- lence perpetrated by Spanish troops in sixteenth-century Italy to their “oriental blood.”11

In the ensuing century, various historians and public intellectuals took to tracing the origins of their nationalist projects back to the humanists, although the Latinate nature of much of their production posed problems for those moderns wedded to the idea that the true spirit of a nation could be expressed only in its “native language.”12 Protestant scholars in Germany and England focused on the role of humanism as a driver of the Reformation, while also flirting with the idea that the Renaissance might have first arisen north of the Alps.13 The ideological excesses of the twentieth cen- tury naturally also affected historical debates, perhaps no more so than in Italy, where Renaissance humanism became an arena for the clash between the profascist Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944) and the more liberal Benedetto Croce (1866–1952).14 There was, however, no room for the idea that Renaissance humanism could have had an extra- European dimension. Such Eurocentric interpretations were in turn cemented by a very early choice of chronological boundaries that would go on to define all later schol- arship. Born in the mid to late fourteenth century, Renaissance humanism was almost universally considered to have been swept aside by the Reformation in the sixteenth century and permanently banished by the new science of the seventeenth.15 There was therefore no significant overlap with the flowering of colonial urban culture in the Americas and elsewhere from the mid to late sixteenth century onward.

Despite originating in the mid-nineteenth century, these combined metageo- graphical and chronological presuppositions went on to shape a series of interpreta- tions of Renaissance humanism that crystallized in the postwar period. These hinged on its nature as either an intrinsically philosophical movement, at the heart of which was a set of ideas (e.g., individualism, the dignity of man, traditional civic values, and

in the Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Ronald G. Witt, ed. Christopher S. Celenza and Kenneth Gouwens (Leiden, 2006), 295–326.

11 Jacob Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien: ein Versuch (Basel, 1860), 1, 3–4, 102. 12 James Hankins, “A Lost Continent of Literature,” Harvard Library Bulletin n.s. 1–2 (2001): 21–27;

Christopher S. Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy (Baltimore, 2004), 1–15.

13 Margaret Mann Phillips, Erasmus and the Northern Renaissance (London, 1949); Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven, CT, 1980); Peter G. Bietenholz, Encounters with a Radical Erasmus: Erasmus’ Work as a Source of Radical Thought in Early Modern Europe (Toronto, 2009); Gregory D. Dodds, Exploiting Erasmus: The Erasmian Legacy and Religious Change in Early Modern England (Toronto, 2009).

14 Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance, 18–28. 15 Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, 268–70.

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protodemocratic republicanism), or a set of scholarly practices that centered on the best way to collect information, read, write, and speak. In other words, was Erasmus’s main contribution as the originator of a pia philosophia or as a schoolmaster and the author of the Adagia?16 This latter view is most commonly associated with Paul Oskar Kristeller, Arnaldo Momigliano, and their students who have focused on the ways the humanists funneled a number of revived and reinterpreted ideas through the studia humanitatis, applied the tools of classical rhetoric to contemporary topics, and col- lectively constituted a buzzing scholarly beehive with each humanist idiosyncratically dipping into their shared honeycomb of learned practices to reconstruct the past (both sacred and secular) and understand nature in ever richer and more granular detail.17

Such debates dominated the Cold War era, although by the 1990s the scholarship’s metageographical myopia began to come under strain. While Byzantium’s important impetus to the revival of Greek letters had long been recognized, the Islamic origins of Renaissance humanism suddenly became a topic of interest, although the causal link is still unproven.18 Much more successful were efforts to show that humanism had a sig- nificant impact in the main urban centers of Iberian America, where it was cultivated by ethnically Spanish scholars. Here, the first defining intervention was made not by a historian but by a postcolonial literary scholar, Walter D. Mignolo, whose Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995) built on the pioneering bibliographical work of Igna- cio Osorio Romero (1941–91), librarian of the National Library of Mexico, and those scholars in Mexico and elsewhere who followed in Osorio’s footsteps. Here, Mignolo maintained that the imposition of humanist textual practices effectively silenced indig- enous traditions, which were later championed by criollo (i.e., American-born Spanish)

16 Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance, 28–57; James Hankins, “Garin and Paul Oskar Kristeller: Existentialism, Neo-Kantianism, and the Post-war Interpretation of Renaissance Humanism,” in Eugenio Garin: Dal Rinascimento all’Illuminismo, ed. Michele Ciliberto (Rome, 2011), 481–505; Mark Jurdjevic, “Hedgehogs and Foxes: The Present and Future of Italian Renaissance Intellectual History,” Past and Present 195, no. 1 (May 2007): 241–68.

17 Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Humanist Movement,” in Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (New York, 1961), 3–23; John Monfasani, “Toward the Genesis of the Kristeller Thesis of Renaissance Humanism: Four Bibliographical Notes,” Renaissance Quarterly 53, no. 4 (2000): 1156– 73; Vito R. Giustiniani, “Homo, Humanus, and the Meanings of ‘Humanism,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 46, no. 2 (1985): 167–95. Humanist education was the field on which the battle between humanism as philosophy and humanism as erudition was fought. See Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1986), and Robert Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, 2001). On rhetoric and eloquence, see Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden, 2000), 6, 338–91, 443–94; Hanna H. Gray, “Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24, no. 4 (1963): 497–514; and Francisco Rico, El sueño del humanismo: de Petrarca a Erasmo (Madrid, 1993). On Renaissance scholarship, see Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley, CA, 1990); Ann Blair and Anthony Grafton, “Reassessing Humanism and Science,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 4 (1992): 535–40; and Anthony Grafton, Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation (Cambridge, MA, 2001).

18 N. G. Wilson, From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance (London, 1992); George Makdisi, The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West: With Special Reference to Scholasticism (Edinburgh, 1990), 150. On cross-pollination in the Renaissance, see Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo (Oxford, 2002), and Jerry Brotton and Lisa Jardine, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (London, 2000).

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writers. This brought him into conflict with scholars in the tradition of Momigliano who preferred to marvel at the “astonishing flexibility and resilience” of Renaissance scholarship, rather than trying to poke postcolonial holes in it.19 Soon after, Andrew Laird and others began to uncover the richness of Mexico City’s humanist tradition.20 This has been paralleled by a growing interest in the pioneering contributions of humanistically inclined Iberian natural philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic, in addition to the role of the region’s African and Amerindian inhabitants in the devel- opment of modern science.21 Previously sidelined in favor of New Spain, Peru has also become a focus of interest, with the late Sabine MacCormack arguing persuasively that Greco-Roman antiquity, as revived in the Renaissance, provided nothing less than “a framework for the construal of historical experience” in the early modern Andes.22

While the aforementioned scholars generally had a background in ancient or mod- ern European history, in the same period, a number of notable historians of colonial Latin America in the United States and France were also building on foundational Hispanophone scholarship to draw analogous conclusions, without, however, engaging deeply with Renaissance humanism per se and almost entirely unbeknownst to their Europeanist colleagues. This included ethnohistorians in the New Philology tradi- tion of James Lockhart who argued that there was frequently enough overlap between Nahua and European institutions and practices to allow the creation of hybrid forms that through a process of “double mistaken identity” placated both sides. Notable among these was Matthew Restall, whose call to investigate colonial Mexico’s “real Renaissance” unfortunately remained unheeded.23 Although coming from a different

19 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor, MI, 1995), reviewed in Grafton, Bring Out Your Dead, 77–94; Anthony Grafton, introduction to New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA, 1992), here 10. Another line of critique came from scholars of transatlantic visual culture. See, for example, Byron Ellsworth Hamann, “How Maya Hieroglyphs Got Their Name: Egypt, Mexico, and China in Western Grammatology since the Fifteenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 152, no. 1 (2008): 1–68. Contemporary Hispanophone work in the same vein as Osorio includes the many publications of the Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, such as the journal Nova Tellus and the institute’s monograph series—for example, Vicente López, Diálogo de abril: Acerca de la bibliotheca del señor doctor Juan José de Eguiara y del ingenio de los mexicanos, ed. Silvia Vargas Alquicira (Mexico City, 1987), and Lia Coronati, Obras poéticas Latinas de Cayetano de Cabrera y Quintero: Catálogo (Mexico City, 1988).

20 Andrew Laird, “Nahuas and Caesars: Classical Learning and Bilingualism in Post-conquest Mexico; An Inventory of Latin Writings by Authors of the Native Nobility,” Classical Philology 109, no. 2 (2014): 150– 69; Stuart M. McManus, “The Art of Being a Colonial Letrado: Late Humanism, Learned Sociability and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City,” Estudios de Historia Novohispana 56 (2017): 40–64.

21 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA, 2001); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford, CA, 2006); Pablo F. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill, NC, 2017); Andrés I. Prieto, Missionary Scientists: Jesuit Science in Spanish South America, 1570–1810 (Nashville, 2011); Londa Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA, 2017).

22 Sabine MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (Princeton, NJ, 2007), xv. On books and intellectual life in Peru, see also Teodoro Hampe Martínez, Bibliotecas privadas en el mundo colonial: La difusión de libros e ideas en el virreinato del Perú, siglos XVI–XVII (Frankfurt, 1996).

23 Matthew Restall, “A History of the New Philology and the New Philology in History,” Latin American Research Review 38, no. 1 (2003): 113–34; Matthew Restall, “The Renaissance World from the West:

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scholarly tradition, Serge Gruzinski’s work on hybridity also resonated with these conclusions.24 In more recent times, “indigenous intellectuals,” although not neces- sarily “indigenous humanists,” have become a topic of considerable interest as Span- ish American echoes of Gramsci’s “organic intellectuals.”25 There is even a growing interest in the lives and scholarship of North American humanists (European and, to a much lesser extent, indigenous). These are often framed within a more capacious “Republic of Letters” metageography, an intellectual space defined by shared schol- arly practices and linked by correspondence networks of the sort reconstructed by Stanford’s Mapping the Republic of Letters project.26 Indeed, given the parallels and direct connections between intellectual currents in Europe and the Western Hemi- sphere (Anglophone, Iberian, etc.), it is a pity that there was not more cross-pollination across area-studies divides, although given the practical challenges of commanding multiple regional languages and historiographic traditions, it is understandable.

In addition to the Americas, other parts of the world have also slowly begun to emerge over the horizon, although extra-Atlantic humanism remains very poorly understood indeed. In the case of Asia, John W. O’Malley has argued that the humanist educations of (especially Italian) Jesuit missionaries like Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) and Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606) inspired their openness to framing Christianity in rhetorical terms that their Japanese and Chinese audiences would appreciate. This has given birth to a cottage industry of studies of Jesuit “accommodation,” although the emphasis on the foundational role of humanism has since fallen by the wayside.27 Sim- ilarly, the growing literature on the “early modern world” has yet to address the global

Spanish America and the ‘Real’ Renaissance,” in A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance, ed. Guido Ruggiero (Oxford, 2002), 70–87; Susan Schroeder, Chimalpahin and the Kingdoms of Chalco (Tucson, AZ, 1991); Camilla Townsend, Annals of Native America: How the Nahuas of Colonial Mexico Kept Their History Alive (New York, 2017). It bears underlining that when formulating their arguments, Anglophone historians of colonial Latin America frequently stand on the shoulders of scholars from the region itself who have produced a wealth of focused work on particular texts and topics written in Spanish. Indeed, if one were to come from the perspective of the Spanish-language scholarship, many of the trends discussed here would emerge even more clearly. See, for example, Ángela Helmer, El Latín en el Perú colonial: Diglosia e historia de una lengua viva (Lima, 2013).

24 Serge Gruzinski, La pensée métisse (Paris, 1999). Of course, the concept of hybridity is not without its critics. See Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1 (2003): 5–35. In his later work, Gruzinski employed a wider geographical lens, although this was generally less well received. See Serge Gruzinski, The Eagle and the Dragon: Globalization and European Dreams of Conquest in China and America in the Sixteenth Century (Malden, MA, 2014), and Felipe Fernández-Armesto, review of The Eagle and the Dragon: Globalization and European Dreams of Conquest in China and America in the Sixteenth Century, by Serge Gruzinski, Reviews in History, review no. 1761, accessed January 25, 2021, https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1761.

25 Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis, eds., Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes (Durham, NC, 2014); Peter B. Villella, Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 2016).

26 Caroline Winterer, “Where Is America in the Republic of Letters?,” Modern Intellectual History 9, no. 3 (2012): 597–623; Richard Calis, Frederic Clark, Christian Flow, Anthony Grafton, Madeline McMahon, and Jennifer M. Rampling, “Passing the Book: Cultures of Reading in the Winthrop Family, 1580–1730,” Past and Present 241, no. 1 (November 2018): 69–141.

27 John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA, 1993); Stephen Schloesser, “Accommodation as a Rhetorical Principle: Twenty Years after John O’Malley’s The First Jesuits (1993),” Journal of Jesuit Studies 1, no. 3 (2014): 347–72.

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significance of Renaissance humanism directly, while it bears underlining that, unfortu- nately, Africa remains a largely forgotten continent.28

This slowly expanding panorama has been facilitated by Renaissance humanism’s enlarged periodization, which now reaches well into the seventeenth century and in some cases even into the eighteenth. We can ultimately trace this back to prewar Ger- man scholarship, which introduced the term “late humanism” (Späthumanismus), popularized more recently in English by Anthony Grafton. The consensus now is that the humanist “Old” Republic of Letters only gradually gave way to the light-footed, vernacular, and enlightened “New” Republic of Letters, although the precise chronol- ogy and regional variations within this process remain poorly understood.29 This, then, is where the scholarship currently stands. There is an increasing realization that Renaissance humanism affected large parts of the world beyond Europe across several centuries. However, in this exciting but still piecemeal body of scholarship there is no agreement about how humanism’s extra-European face should be understood and ana- lyzed as a whole.

***

Since the beginning of modern scholarship on Renaissance humanism, its politics have been the subject of controversy. For Burckhardt, the humanists were creatures of the powerful, the chief cheerleaders of the “state as a work of art” who wrote grand Livian histories of parvenu dynasties and fly-by-night republics. Later, as the Cold War motivated scholars in the West to reexamine the intellectual origins of liberal democ- racy, debates centered on the humanist revival of republicanism in Italy and England. Since the Columbus Quincentenary, however, greater attention has also been paid to the ways Spanish, French, and, to some extent, British and Portuguese humanists in Europe used Roman precedents to articulate ideas about European and global empire. Thomas James Dandelet even gave this a name: “imperial humanism.”30 What is little

28 There has been a recent explosion in the scholarship on “global early modernity,” which is ably summarized in Alan Strathern, “Global Early Modernity and the Problem of What Came Before,” Past and Present 238, no. S13 (November 2018): 317–44. Although it focuses on art and architecture more than the scholarly side of the Renaissance project, the most suggestive work remains Peter Burke, Luke Clossey, and Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “The Global Renaissance,” Journal of World History 28, no. 1 (2017): 1–30. For a Southeast Asian perspective on global early modernity, see Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830 (Cambridge, 2003).

29 Notker Hammerstein, “Einleitung,” in Späthumanismus: Studien über das Ende einer Kulturhistorischen Epoche, ed. Notker Hammerstein and Gerrit Walther (Göttingen, 2000), 9–18; Anthony Grafton, “The World of the Polyhistors: Humanism and Encyclopedism,” Central European History 18, no. 1 (1985): 31– 47; Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit Online, s.v. “Späthumanismus,” by Gerrit Walther, accessed May 13, 2020, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2352-0248_edn_COM_352176. The scholarship on Späthumanismus is usually traced back to Erich Trunz, although the term was used as early as the second quarter of the nineteenth century. See Erich Trunz, “Der deutsche Späthumanismus um 1600 als Standeskultur,” Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Erziehung und des Unterrichts 21 (1931): 17–53. One of the few statements regarding the chronology of late humanism is April G. Shelford, Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650–1720 (Rochester, NY, 2007), 2–3.

30 Thomas James Dandelet, The Renaissance of Empire in Early Modern Europe (New York, 2014), 7. Anthony Pagden came to similar conclusions regarding neo-scholasticism. See Anthony Pagden, Spanish

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recognized, however, is that this neo-Roman tradition of imperial thought was not just produced in “Europe” and then exported to the “colonies” for consumption. Rather, throughout the Renaissance and afterward, classicizing political ideas were constantly being articulated and remade in both Europe and the extra-European territories of European monarchies. This is most apparent in the patchwork of territories, allied polities, and mission stations loosely tied to the monarchies of Spain and Portugal before, during, and after the Iberian Union (1580–1640), which is usually referred to collectively as the “Iberian world.”31 Because of the chance chronological concurrence of Iberian expansion and Renaissance humanism’s high point in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Iberian imperial humanism was channeled by Europeans, non-Europeans, and those who defy such categorizations to celebrate uniquely local visions of crown and Catholic expansionism. This is not to say that it was unique to the Iberian world. However, the particular form of Iberian expansion, which included extensive institution building (e.g., universities, town councils, courts, etc.) married to the closely related educational evangelization projects of both the regular and the secular clergy, meant that Renaissance humanism played an outsize role in the Iberian world. At the same time, to call Renaissance humanism in the Iberian world “Iberian” masks the ways that Spanish and Portuguese expansion provided a conduit for Italian, Flemish, German, and Polish missionaries, merchants, ideas, and practices to travel.32 In other words, Renaissance humanism, including imperial humanism, was a conglom- erate rather than a monolith and should be carefully mined to identify the different veins that it contains.

While almost entirely unknown to scholars of Renaissance humanism, one particu- larly illustrative example of imperial humanism in practice is the vernacular civic ora- tory of Diogo do Couto (1542–1616), the Jesuit missionary and onetime student of the famous Jesuit humanists Manuel Álvares (the author of a wildly popular Latin gram- mar) and Cipriano Soáres (the most influential of the Jesuit rhetoricians) at the College of St. Anthony in Lisbon, who became the official royal chronicler, archivist, and de facto public orator in Goa, the viceregal capital of Portuguese India.33 In this final role, Do Couto saw himself walking in the footsteps of Cicero, whose name, even in this city on the Konkan coast, was a byword for eloquent public speaking, as Do Couto made clear in the opening of an oration delivered at the 1587 unveiling of a new statue of Vasco da Gama at the entrance to the city.

When that prince of all Latin eloquence Marcus Tullius Cicero began his most stirring oration in defense of Milo [i.e., Pro Milone] in the public theater in front of

Imperialism and the Political Imagination: Studies in European and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory 1513–1830 (New Haven, CT, 1990).

31 Gary W. McDonogh, Iberian Worlds (New York, 2009). 32 Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (New York, 2008); Brian Brege,

Tuscany in the Age of Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2021). 33 Charles R. Boxer, “Diogo do Couto: Controversial Chronicler of Portuguese Asia,” in Iberia: Literary and

Historical Issues; Studies in Honour of Harold V. Livermore, ed. R. O. W. Goertz (Calgary, 1985), 57– 66, here 57, 62; Manoel Severim de Faria, Discursos vários políticos (Évora, 1624), 251–68. On Couto’s erudition, see Rui Manuel Loureiro, A biblioteca de Diogo do Couto (Macao, 1998), 385–412.

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the grave Roman Senate, everything was momentarily swept from his memory as if he had never studied it. Some presumed that it was a rhetorical ploy, since he was not defending the cause of justice, and others thought this was due to the military legions which surrounded him … Although I lack the eloquence that abounded in him, I have justice and truth in abundance, with which I hope to defend the noble Captain, Dom Vasco da Gama, and so I fear neither that suitable words will fail me, nor the threat of all the armies of the world.34

Although likely not surrounded by a violently hostile crowd, Do Couto probably encountered a tense atmosphere at the ceremony, as the previous statue of Vasco da Gama had been smashed by jealous descendants of the city’s conqueror, Afonso de Albuquerque (ca. 1453–1515), who wanted their ancestor to occupy pride of place.35 This he tried to diffuse by reference to Cicero, a choice probably motivated by the fact that his name carried some weight among Goa’s humanistically educated leading citizens.

Such vernacular humanist traditions permeate all of Do Couto’s surviving orations, the majority of which were performed for the installation of Portuguese viceroys and therefore offer the perfect window on the ritual contexts and ideological workings of imperial humanism.36 Sometimes in Latin, more often in Portuguese, but always con- structed according to the precepts of epideictic rhetoric (i.e., praise or blame leading to exhortation to better conduct), Do Couto’s surviving orations modeled the type of behavior expected by the city’s elite of their viceroy, thereby helping tie Portuguese India to the larger imperial polity.37 This behavior included typical humanist virtues, such as justice, prudence, and moderation.38 In other words, these were Goan “mirrors

34 “Aquelle principe de toda a helloquencia Latina Marco Tullio Cicerão, querendo defender a causa de Milone em publico theatro, diante daquelle gravissimo Senado Romano, comessando aquella hellegantissima oração, se lhe varreo toda da memoria, como se nunca a estudára, alguns presumírão que fôra arteficio, por não ter justiça no que queria defender, e outros, que de temor das Legiões millitares, de que estava rodeado, mas eu neste auto tão solene e de concuro não menos grave que aquelle, posto que me falte a helloquencia ciceronica, que a outro sobejava, sobeja-me a justiçia, e verdade, com que espero defender a causa deste insigne Capitão D. Vasco da Gama.” Cod. CXV/2-8 n. 1, fol. 3r., Biblioteca Pública de Évora, recently edited in Maria Augusta Lima Cruz, Rui Manuel Loureiro, and Nuno Vila-Santa, eds., Diogo do Couto Orador: Discursos oficiais proferidos na Câmara de Goa (Portimão, 2016), 75.

35 On the smashing of the statue, see “Treslado da devaça que tirou o lecenciado Silcarte Caeiro de grā ouvidor geral do crime, a respeito do motim que se fizera pera quebrar a estátua de D. Vasco da Gama,” in As Gavetas do Torre do Tombo, ed. Antonio da Silva Rego, vol. 6 of 12 (Lisbon, 1967), 370–98; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (New York, 1997), 17–18; and Jorge Flores and Giuseppe Marcocci, “Killing Images: Iconoclasm and the Art of Political Insult in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Portuguese India,” Itinerario 42, no. 3 (2018): 461–89.

36 Instructions for civic orations in Goa from the sixteenth century can be found in Archivo Portuguez- Oriental, fasc. 2 of 6 (New Goa, 1857), 221–26. For instructions from the eighteenth century, see “Catalogo dos Vice-reis e governadores do Estado da India e varios documentos,” vol. 650, fols. 34r–54v, Historical Archives of Goa. Anthony Disney, “The Ceremonial Induction of Incoming Viceroys at Goa in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Indo-Portuguese History: Global Trends, ed. Fatima da Silva Gracias, Celsa Pinto, and Charles Borges (Panjim, 2005), 81–94.

37 Fernando Bouza, “Cultures and Communication across the Iberian World (Fifteenth-Seventeenth Centuries),” in The Iberian World: 1450–1820, ed. Fernando Bouza, Pedro Cardim, and Antonio Feros (London, 2020), 211–44.

38 Cod. CXV/2-8 n. 1, fols. 7r–8v, Biblioteca Pública de Évora.

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for viceroys,” just like the civic orations and humanist treatises of Renaissance Italy that so irked Machiavelli that he composed his Prince as a rejection of this tradition.39

Of course, the political context of a Portuguese viceroy in Goa was different in sig- nificant ways from that of an Italian prince or even that of a European viceroy (e.g., of Valencia, Naples, etc.), and Do Couto’s imperial humanism reflected this. For instance, since Goa was an increasingly beleaguered outpost of Iberian Catholicism in the Indian Ocean, he was forced to rework common humanist patterns of rhetoric, such as careful panegyrics of the city and its leaders, to put forward an idealized image of the viceroy as the archetypal Portuguese Christian soldier prepared to face the increasing chal- lenges from the region’s rising powers. Do Couto’s orations quickly became exhor- tations to defend and expand the borders of Christendom under the banner of the Portuguese crown; in his way, De Couto was following in the footsteps of the first vice- roys of the estado da ndia who inaugurated a “golden age” of Portuguese expansion and Christian missions. Admittedly, his stance was not entirely without precedents. For instance, early Florentine humanists like Leonardo Bruni recast medieval chivalric ideals in a Greco-Roman mold. Similarly, the humanist crusading orations delivered in Italy in the wake of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 put forward a militaristic vision of Christian virtue that linked the ongoing struggle between Christendom and the Ottoman Empire with ancient and more recent exempla of pious valor.40 Of course, in contrast to contemporary Iberian power in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, Por- tuguese India was in relative decline, and Do Couto knew it.41 In one of his orations, he attributed this weakness to the recent rejection of the good examples set by Venice and China. These states had remained strong for so many centuries by remaining true to their military traditions and refusing to employ foreign mercenaries. In contrast, the Portuguese in India had abandoned their neo-Roman martial virtues, with the sort of results that Machiavelli had predicted.42

39 Emilio Santini, “La protestatio de iustitia nella Firenze medicea del sec. XV,” Rinascimento 10, no. 1 (1959): 33–46; Stephen J. Milner, “‘Le Sottili Cose non si Possono Bene Aprire in Volgare’: Vernacular Oratory and the Transmission of Classical Rhetorical Theory in the Late Medieval Italian Communes,” Italian Studies 64, no. 2 (2009): 221–44; James Hankins, “Machiavelli, Civic Humanism, and the Humanist Politics of Virtue,” Italian Culture 32, no. 2 (2014): 98–109; Quentin Skinner, “Machiavelli on Misunderstanding Princely Virtù,” chap. 3 in From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge, 2018).

40 James Hankins, “Civic Knighthood in the Early Renaissance: Leonardo Bruni’s De militia (ca. 1420),” Noctua 1, no. 2 (2014): 260–82; James Hankins, “Renaissance Crusaders: Humanist Crusade Literature in the Age of Mehmed II,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 49 (1995): 111–207.

41 “Vamos a primeira que he a verdade qual foi esta com que este estado se conquistou, e que ja não vem de Portugal por certo senhor que nenhuma outra se não viso-reys embarcados no mar em potentes armadas armas vestidas, fazendos guerra aos inimigos, acresentando o patrimonio Real emrequecendo o estado e os vassallos. Mas depois que se perdeo esta verdade e que os visos-reys despirão as armas, lhe aconteceo aquillo que a Anibal, que em que as trare vestidas e andou pellos exercitos conquistando toda a Espanha, Italia e inda podera ser senhor de Roma, e do mundo, se seguira sua fortuna. Mas depois que despio as armas e se racolheo as dellicias de Capua, logo em pouco tempo tornou a perder que em tantos annos tinha ganhado.” Cod. CXV/2-8 n. 1, fol. 6v, Biblioteca Pública de Évora, transcribed in Cruz, Loureiro, and Vila- Santa, Diogo do Couto Orador, 42–43.

42 “E assim depois que na India entrarão verdugos compridos, se trabos estrangeiros logo ella começou adeclinar, e se não rede, senhor, aquelle grande imperio da China e formosa republica Venesiana, que porque nunca consentirão cousas perigrinas, nem mundanças de trajos, se sostentão ha tantas centenas de annos em sua potencia.” Cod. CXV/2-8 n. 1, fol. 6v, Biblioteca Pública de Évora, transcribed in Cruz, Loureiro,

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In applying the humanist toolbox to the particular circumstances of Portuguese India, Do Couto and other humanist orators in Goa frequently fell back on ancient Mediterranean models of virtue, in particular Alexander the Great, whose campaigns in the Northwest of India understandably loomed large. Indeed, in his 1605 oration, Do Couto overtly compared the arrival of the viceroy to Alexander’s visit to Troy to hear the lyre of Achilles played.43 This Alexandrian theme also inspired another pan- egyric, delivered in Goa in 1588 by the young Japanese seminarian Hara Martinho, a leading member of the Tenshō embassy to Rome, who used his sojourn at the Jesuit college in Goa during the long return journey as an opportunity to thank the head of the Jesuit mission in Japan, Alexander the Great’s namesake, the towering Neapolitan Jesuit Alessandro Valignano.44 Like Do Couto’s oration, however, Hara’s panegyric quickly became a call to action for the European, Japanese, and South Asian Catholics congregated in the chapel of St. Paul’s College in Goa.

That Alexander, who was given the epithet “the Great” due his power, after he subdued a part of India, admiring the areas he had conquered by force of arms, that great general of noble bent is said to have wept, for Anaxagoras asserted that there was another world that no warrior could ever reach, a task for which even Alexander felt himself inadequate. Yet you, Alessandro, not merely “great” but far greater than the great one, have conquered and subdued almost all of India with the arms of Christ. Now Japan stands before you; it will not be easily brought to heel except by an Alexander. So now advance into Japan with a great army of almost heavenly warriors, which you command; take the province by divine force; lay it low with virtue; rip our oppressed homeland from the hands of the savage enemy and restore it to true liberty! The Japanese call out to you and long for you, the wind is at your back, the seas are calm, the doors are open; see, beloved father! Do not delay! Advance!45

and Vila-Santa, Diogo do Couto Orador, 43. James Hankins, Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, MA, 2019), 446.

43 “Da quelle grande Alexandre Monarcha do mundo se conta, que entrando hum dia na cidade de Ilion andando vendo as grandezas dela, perguntando-lhe hum se queria ver a cithera de Paris (que alí estava tida em grande veneração) lhe repondera, que antes tomara ver a de Achilles, o que dise, porque a som desta se cantavão façanhas de muitos e fortes varões, e ao da outra dillicias e branduras de Venus, cousa aborrecida a todo o peito valeroso. Assim vos, illustrissimo senhor e viso-rey nosso, que qual outro Alexandre entrais oje nesta cidade de Goa, não menos famosa por feitos heroicos de seus cidadões, que a de Ilion, não vos offereço de sua parte a cithera de Paris, mas oferece vos outro canto mais alevantado que o de Virgilio, outra cithera mais sonora, que a de Homero, na qual (em quanto me não dais materia para encher meus volumes de grandezas e feitos maravilhosos que todos esperamos façais neste estado), ourireis cantar, não patranhas, nem fabulas, sonhadas de Eneas, nem de Ulisses, mas verdades sabidas por todo o mundo, de feitos heroicos, e altas cavallarias, da quales antigos governadores, que este estado descubrirão, conquistarão, defenderão e conservarão.” Cod. CXV/2-8 n. 1, fol. 6r, Biblioteca Pública de Évora, recently transcribed in Cruz, Loureiro, and Vila-Santa, Diogo do Couto Orador, 41. Alexander was a well-known figure throughout early modern Eurasia. Su Fang Ng, Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia: Peripheral Empires in the Global Renaissance (Oxford, 2019).

44 On the Tenshō embassy, see J. F. Moran, The Japanese and the Jesuits (New York, 1993). 45 “Alexander ille, cui cognomen ex potentia magnus fuit, posteaquam partem aliquam Indiae subegit,

cum cetera suis armis pacata circumspiceret, asserente Anaxagora [rectius Anaxarchus: Plutarch, De tranquillitate animi, 4], mundum esse alium, ad quem penetrare armatus nequaquam posset, illachrymasse

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Initially trained by the Jesuits in Kyushu following the curriculum designed by Valig- nano and later tutored by a Portuguese Jesuit, Diogo de Mesquita (1553–1614), Hara later applied his Ciceronian skills to exhort his audience to push back the boundaries of Christendom in Japan.

Ultimately, however, Hara would have to flee his homeland to the relative safety of Macao following the 1614 proscription of Christianity, showing that humanist learning was far from sufficient to achieve his ultimate aim.46 Nonetheless, Hara’s case is a reminder that expansionist imperial humanism was clearly not restricted to those of European descent or those in the direct service of the crown. Rather, it extended through the web of port cities and mission stations that grew up in the wake of Iberian expansion into Asia and spilled out into the closely linked ecclesi- astical projects of the Jesuits and other Catholic missionary orders. While it is com- mon to follow John W. O’Malley in emphasizing the role of Renaissance humanism in providing Jesuit missionaries with the rhetorical flexibility and cultural cosmo- politanism necessary to accommodate Catholicism to non-European contexts, it was clearly also a means to celebrate the expansionist religious projects of Portu- gal’s “commercial and maritime empire cast in a military and ecclesiastical mold,” as Charles R. Boxer put it.47 In other words, it produced an identifiable but multifac- eted imperial humanism.

Branching out from humanist oratory in Goa, we find that there were analogous applications of the humanist tool kit to glorify military and missionary endeavors across Iberian Asia and beyond. These ran the gamut from the Livian histories of Portuguese Asia by Do Couto and his European-based predecessor, João de Barros, to the vast unpublished Latin epic poem on the conquest of India, Lusias Leonina by Ignazio Arcamone (1615–83), an Italian Jesuit and Latin teacher to the Goan apos- tle to Sri Lanka, St. Joseph Vaz (1651–1711).48 Similarly, the Latin textbooks written for Jesuit seminaries in Asia put forward an image of a triumphant Christianity. The best example of this is the extensive humanist dialogue printed in Macao in 1588 as an introduction to Christian Europe and its main classical language for students in Japan and China. Renaissance humanism was therefore clearly a useful tool for advanc- ing intertwined expansionist missionary and territorial projects outside Europe, such

dicitur, generosae mentis imperator, quod imparem se illo mundo opugnando sentiret. Indiam tu quidem fere totam o Alexander non iam magne, sed illo magno longe maior, Christi armis victam et pacatam habes. Nunc orbis ille Iaponius tibi restat; non facile expugnabitur, nisi ab uno Alexandro; transiens ergo in Iaponem magno cum exercitu tantorum ac paene caelestium militum quibus divinitus praees, expugna Provinciam divinis armis, vince beneficiis, assere ex atrocissimi inimici manibus in veram libertatem oppressam patriam nostram. Iaponii te vocant ac desiderant, arrident venti, maria tranquilla sunt, patent portus, eia Pater amatissime, rumpe moras omnes, proficiscamur.” Hara Martinho, Oratio habita a Fara D. Martino Iaponio, suo et sociorum nomine, cum ab Europa redirent ad Patrem Alexandrum Valignanum Visitatorem Societatis IESU, Goae in D. Pauli Collegio pridie Non. Iunii Anno Domini 1587 (Goa, 1587; repr., Tokyo, 1978), fol. 17v.

46 Diego Pacheco, “Los cuatro legados japoneses de los Daimyos de Kyushu después de regresar a Japón,” Boletín de la Asociación Española de Orientalistas 10 (1973): 19–58.

47 Charles R. Boxer, Four Centuries of Portuguese Expansion, 1415–1825: A Succinct Survey (Johannesburg, 1961), 18.

48 Roberto Barchiesi, “Poesia latina su Enrico il Navigatore: Ignazio Arcamone e Timoteo de Oliveira,” Estudos Italianos em Portugal 19 (1960): 15–40.

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that imperial humanism should remain an important topic of investigation for years to come.

This said, it would be wrong to conclude that the humanism of “colonial” and “met- ropolitan” contexts were entirely separate phenomena, one “imperial” and the other somehow “national.” In both, the same scholarly texts and tools were harnessed in support of the uneven process of early modern state building, often by humanists who had received the same basic educations in (frequently Jesuit) colleges that served up a context-specific but recognizable humanist curriculum whether it was in Nagasaki or in Évora. While each humanist oration, history, or translation project was linguistically and thematically calibrated to the individual context, Iberian sovereignty was also gen- erally defended in very similar terms, blending the role of imperator and defensor fidei regardless of whether the audience was located on the edge of the Atlantic or Indian Ocean. For instance, although they varied considerably according to time and place, the numerous surviving funeral orations for Iberian monarchs, queen consorts, and other members of the royal family delivered in urban contexts across the Iberian world combined the same basic humanist elements to build up an image of the Habsburgs as the heirs to Rome’s Christian emperors. Here, the figure of Constantine the Great (widely considered the first Christian emperor during the Renaissance) was of most use, alongside Theodosius, Valentinian II, and other late antique Christian rulers, whose praises had first been sung by eloquent and pious Latin and Greek orators like Ambrose and Gregory of Nazianzus.49

In addition, it would be misleading to suggest that imperial humanism and the mul- tifaceted imperial-religious project that it expressed faced resistance only outside Europe. Indeed, the ongoing Catalan revolts and the collapse of the Iberian Union in the seventeenth century suggest that the Hapsburg superstate and its centralizing policies were far from universally loved even in the Iberian Peninsula.50 This dynamic is echoed in contemporary humanist works, such as the funeral oration for Philip III delivered in Lisbon in 1621, which sought to placate listeners by stressing that the king was far more virtuous than the ministers (válidos) who were unfortunately actually tasked with implementing his wishes.51 The diversity of the internal dynamics at play

49 On Constantinian imperial humanism, see Marie Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor (New Haven, CT, 1993), 3–4, and Zoltán Biedermann, (Dis) connected Empires: Imperial Portugal, Sri Lankan Diplomacy, and the Making of a Habsburg Conquest in Asia (Oxford, 2018), 104. On the civic festivals and funeral oratory of Habsburg monarchs and others, see Rosa María Acosta de Arias Schreiber, Fiestas Coloniales Urbanas: Lima, Cuzco, Potosí (Lima, 1997); Francisco Javier Campos y Fernández de Sevilla, Fiestas barrocas en el mundo hispánico: Toledo y Lima (Madrid, 2012); Félix Herrero Salgado, La oratoria sagrada española de los siglos XVI y XVII, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1996–98); and Francis Cerdan, “La oración fúnebre del Siglo de Oro, entre sermón evangélico y panegírico poético sobre fondo de teatro,” Criticón, no. 30 (1985): 79–102.

50 J. H. Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans, a Study in the Decline of Spain, 1598–1640 (Cambridge, 1963). 51 “Em razão disto, não faltou quem se atrevesse a notar neste nosso grande Monarcha os defeitos, faltas e

queixas que houve de seus Validos, e ainda dos mayores ministros seus … Nesta calumnia e nota imposta ao Nosso Rey e com que os criticos pretendem deslustrar suas grandes, e reays virtudes entendo, que nenhũa razão tem, antes me parece que a mayor prova da bondade, e virtude de sua magestade, he a maldade de seus validos, e ministros … Não ha gente mais facil de enganar, que mais sancta, porque como jugaõ aos outros por sua virtude, e por sua verdade, não entendem, que os podem enganar, porque nem elles o sabem fazer.” Baltezar Páez, Sermão que fez o Doutor Fr. Baltezar Páez provincial da orden da santissima trinidade no

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in specific contexts within such sprawling premodern imperial states therefore resists easy dichotomies like “center” and “periphery.”

Such a simultaneously universalizing yet highly localized phenomenon as imperial humanism is therefore perhaps best described using the terminology developed by legal and political historians of the Spanish and Portuguese empires who have argued that the Iberian world (both European and extra-European) was “polycentric,” with “many different interlinked centers … actively participating in forging the polity.” Here, they argue, the crown and European kingdoms played an outsize but not necessarily fully hegemonic role among the many “aggressively modern” and “baroque” centers of power, although it is questionable whether the rather dated art-historical chronologi- cal marker “baroque” is the most appropriate choice given the weight of the historio- graphical baggage the term now carries and the degree to which it masks continuities with earlier trends, like Renaissance humanism.52 In any case, it was within such a complex and far-from-static “polycentric” context that imperial humanism operated. While the fundamental principles and techniques of imperial humanism originated in Europe (and in the Italian Peninsula in particular), they were rearticulated and remade in each context in which they became imbedded, meaning that the “empire as a world of art” (to rephrase Burckhardt) was a canvas that sprawled across multiple continents and that must be closely examined to appreciate both its overall unity and the flashes of idiosyncrasy that are apparent in every brushstroke.

***

While Renaissance humanism was regularly used to bolster expansionist religious and territorial projects, at times it also interacted with other traditions on more equal terms as part of scholarly and missionary projects with an ostensibly more cosmo- politan flavor. This more pluralistic and frequently syncretic mode might usefully be placed under the rubric of Indo-humanism, borrowing the metageographical cate- gory of the “Indies” (both East and West) and using the hyphen to represent cultural contact. While some of these interactions took place in the wake of large-scale wars of conquest, Renaissance humanism rarely totally subsumed well-established local learned traditions, since, unlike Sebastian Conrad’s “global Enlightenment,” Renais- sance humanism was in many ways unexceptional among the early modern world’s

convento da mesma orden desta cidade de Lisboa (Lisbon, 1621), fol. 8r–v. On the political thought of the funeral oratory delivered during the Iberian Union, see João Francisco Marques, A parenética portuguesa e a dominação filipina (Porto, 1986), 255–57.

52 Pedro Cardim, Tamar Herzog, José Javier Ruiz Ibáñez, and Gaetano Sabatini, eds., Polycentric Monarchies: How Did Early Modern Spain and Portugal Achieve and Maintain a Global Hegemony? (Brighton, 2012); José Javier Ruiz Ibáñez, “Les acteurs de l’hégémonie hispanique, du monde à la péninsule Ibérique,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 69, no. 4 (2014): 927–54. Some scholars have tried to revive the baroque with concepts such as “baroque modernity”; see Alejandra B. Osorio, “Of National Boundaries and Imperial Geographies: Geographies: A New Radical History of the Spanish Habsburg Empire,” Radical History Review 2018, no. 130 (2018): 100–130. However, the term “baroque” conceals significant continuities with “Renaissance” culture and carries with it unnecessary twentieth-century historiographical baggage, best exemplified by the long shadow of the work of José Antonio Maravall—for example, La cultura del barroco: Análisis de una estructura histórica (Barcelona, 1975).

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humanistic traditions.53 Syncretism was therefore facilitated primarily by similari- ty.54 It was sometimes also an explicit strategy on the part of many missionaries who couched Christendom and its culture in terms that would be appreciated by potential converts.

At the most basic level, Indo-humanist scholarship could take the form of classi- cizing ethnographies that filtered knowledge of local societies through a framework inherited from Herodotus, Tacitus, and Caesar, thereby creating a bicultural prod- uct. For instance, the aforementioned Jesuit missionary Ignazio Arcamone wrote a Commentarius on Salcete (the area just south of Goa in Portuguese India) modeled on Caesar’s account of the Gallic Wars, in which he described the landscape, crops, and people of the area, including the social hierarchy usually called today the “caste system.”55 Arcamone’s desire to use his humanist training to understand the world in which he found himself also extended to the study of the structure of local languages. This led him to produce a guide to the two main languages that missionaries might encounter in Salcete, Konkani and Marathi.56 In so doing, Arcamone inadvertently composed the first comparative grammar of two Indian vernaculars, which in turn he codified with reference to Latin and Greek, following the pattern of Jesuit humanists across the early modern world who applied this technique to numerous languages, including Kimbundu, Guarani, Huron, Aymara, and a Bolivian language that is still today called Ignaciano, after the founder of the Jesuits, St. Ignatius Loyola.

In this way, humanism—and Jesuit humanism in particular—became what has been called a “world philology” (borrowing the turn of phrase employed by the Indologist Sheldon Pollock and his collaborators), not in its universality but insofar as it succeeded in linking textual traditions from across the world. This Indo-humanism was polycen- tric and reflexive, with multiple important centers of learning (e.g., Lisbon, Mexico City, Amsterdam, Goa, etc.) and developments in Europe influencing other contexts and vice versa, most notably in the case of Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro (1735–1809), whose reading of the grammars produced by Jesuit missionaries led to the realization that the languages of Europe and India were related, anticipating the work of the better-known British orientalist William Jones (1746–94). Certain local lingua francas like Guarani and Nahuatl also shaped the approaches to other languages, sometimes even overshad- owing the normative role of Latin and Greek.57 This dynamic is mirrored in the spread

53 Sebastian Conrad, “Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique,” American Historical Review 117, no. 4 (October 2012): 999–1027.

54 Peter Burke, “Jack Goody and the Comparative History of Renaissances,” Theory, Culture and Society 26, nos. 7–8 (2009): 16–31.

55 Lagrange Fernandes, “Uma Descrição E Relação ‘De Sasatana Peninsula’ (1664) Do Padre Inácio Arcamone,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 50 (1981): 76–120. On the contemporary Renaissance ethnography, see Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250– 1625 (Cambridge, 2000), and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India: Words, People, Empires, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 2017), 45–102.

56 Arcamone’s grammar survives in at least two copies: MS I.F.60, Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples, and cod. 3049, Biblioteca National de Portugal.

57 Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, and Ku-ming Kevin Chang, World Philology (Cambridge, MA, 2015); Stuart M. McManus, “Jesuit Humanism and Indigenous-Language Philology in the Americas and Asia,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits, ed. Ines G. Županov (New York, 2019), 737–58; Byron Ellsworth

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of other European currents, like Catholicism itself, which, as recent scholarship has shown, was recalibrated in Europe as it spread to other parts of the world, while import- ant extra-European centers exerted influence in their own right.58

Alongside ethnography and grammar, other features of Renaissance humanism con- tributed to this cosmopolitan trend. In particular, the humanist drive to study classical texts and rhetorical conventions influenced missionaries eager to master the world’s languages and humanistic traditions, spurring them to collect, read, and excerpt works considered analogous to those of Cicero, Virgil, and Livy, in that they stood at the apex of local cultural hierarchies of prestige, with or without being of great antiquity.59 In sixteenth-century Mexico, for instance, Bernardino de Sahagún (ca. 1499–1590) col- lected Nahuatl speeches (huehuetlatolli).60 In Goa, Jesuit missionaries (or their aman- uenses) transcribed Brahmin Christians’ Konkani recitations of the Rāmāyann.a and the Mahābhārata and left extensive notes in the margins in Latin and Portuguese, creating an Indo-humanist version of the annotated manuscripts of Livy and other Greco-Roman authors that historians of reading have long mined (fig. 2).61 These included reflections on gender variance in Hindu mythology, which one unknown annotator compared to the Greek concept of “hermaphroditism,” and also showed his deep reading of the corpus by including a cross-reference to the Marathi text of the Bhīs.maparva, which mentions the warrior Shikhandi, who was born female but became male.62 Such notes were probably then collected in rhetorical treasure troves known as “commonplace books,” notebooks arranged under relevant headings that allowed the easy storage and retrieval of information gained from reading, which unfortunately do not survive.63

This is not to say that every humanist who left Europe became an Indo-humanist, or that the engagement with non-European classical traditions was always wholly sin- cere and meaningful, especially among non-Jesuits.64 However, the overall trend is

Hamann, The Translations of Nebrija: Language, Culture, and Circulation in the Early Modern World (Amherst, MA, 2015).

58 Simon Richard Ditchfield, “The ‘Making’ of Roman Catholicism as a ‘World Religion,’” in Multiple Modernities? Confessional Cultures and the Many Legacies of the Reformation Age, ed. Jan Stievermann and Randall Zachman (Tübingen, 2018), 189–203.

59 Of course, the degree to which they were indeed analogous is a question of judgment and has been challenged. See Byron Ellsworth Hamann, “The Higa and the Tlachialoni: Material Cultures of Seeing in the Mediterratlantic,” Art History 41, no. 4 (2018): 624–49.

60 Thelma D. Sullivan, “The Rhetorical Orations, or Huehuetlatolli, Collected by Sahagun,” in Sixteenth- Century Mexico: The Work of Sahagún, ed. Munro S. Edmundson (Albuquerque, NM, 1974), 83–89; José Jorge Klor de Alva, “Sahagun and the Birth of Modern Ethnography: Representing, Confessing, and Inscribing the Native Other,” in The Work of Bernardino de Sahagun: Pioneer Ethnographer of Sixteenth-Century Aztec Mexico, ed. Eloise Quiñones Keber, José Jorge Klor de Alva, and H. B. Nicholson (Albany, 1988), 31–53.

61 Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present 129, no. 1 (November 1990): 30–78.

62 “Napushɑncu, neuter, hoc est nec mas nec faemina. Greci Hermaphrodites sive androgynus, alio nomine marastice dicitur Xiqhanddio, a. Dadulo nhoe anny balai nhoe. Vide Bhismaparva cap. 19.” Cod. 771, fol. 21r., Biblioteca Pública de Braga.

63 On European commonplace books, see Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford, 1996), 186–207.

64 For a Chinese example of the conflicting approaches of the Jesuits and the Franciscans, see Niecai Wang, “Revelation or Reason? Two Opposing Interpretations of the Confucian Classics during the Chinese Rites Controversy,” Frontiers of Philosophy in China 14, no. 2 (2019): 284–302.

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clear. The analogies between textual traditions were also naturally imperfect, given the diverse origins and social functions of the “classical” texts to which they applied the humanist reading method. Although no direct evidence has yet emerged, this may have been accompanied by similar confusions on the part of non-Europeans encountering Cicero and Virgil, resulting once again in what Lockhart called “double mistaken identity.” In any case, however, this humanist heuristic driven by the exigen- cies of evangelization frequently resulted in hitherto-unknown interactions between scholarly and textual traditions that might usefully be grouped under the moniker of Indo-humanism.

In some instances, humanist and non-European traditions could even be integrated into a truly bicultural curriculum. This is most apparent in the short-lived Jesuit col- leges of southern Japan, where the aforementioned Valignano mandated a course of study for both European and Japanese students that combined canonical Latin texts with Sino-Japanese humanities. Such a unique project also entailed the production of unique textbooks. These were printed on a press brought from Europe by the Ten- shō embassy, and included popular Japanese folktales, Japanese translations of Chris- tian works (including one produced by Hara Martinho), a Latin-Portuguese-Japanese dictionary modeled on the work of the famous Italian lexicographer Ambrogio Calepino (ca. 1440–1510), and an edition of Manuel Álvares’s popular Latin gram- mar with Japanese glosses, as well as editions of Cicero’s orations and an unknown

Figure 2. Marginal annotation to the Bhīs.maparva on Shikhandi. Cod. 771 [PT/UM-ADB/COL/M/771], fol. 21r., Biblioteca Pública, Braga, Portugal. Direitos da imagem: © Universidade do Minho/Arquivo Distrital de Braga.

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work of Virgil.65 As vast libraries of Western books were not available, in 1610, the Jesuits also printed a ready-made commonplace book in Nagasaki that contained extracts from a vast array of classical, patristic, and contemporary Latin and Greek authors.66

Such cross-cultural educational programs were ultimately designed to facilitate the production of texts and oral performances that could spread the Christian message in locally acceptable forms. In the case of sermons, these might be more or less influenced by the rhetorical conventions of humanist rhetoric depending on the context and pro- clivities of the particular missionary, be they European or non-European. Nonetheless, one feature that many of these had in common was the use of epideictic rhetoric, a genre originally theorized by Aristotle as ceremonial courtly oratory that was repur- posed in late antique Christian Rome for extolling the saints as models for imitation.67 Indeed, epideictic rhetoric found its way into Jesuit sermons in Chinese, such as the homily delivered for the feast day of the founder of the Society of Jesus by Italian Jesuit Giulio Aleni (1582–1649), in which he declared,

“In general, rites held in commemoration of a saint have three most important functions. First, we praise and thank the Lord of Heaven for having produced the saint as a compass [指南, zhinan] for later generations. Second, we gratefully admire the good works and virtues displayed by the saint during his life. Thirdly, we imitate [仿效, fangxiao] his virtuous conduct and try to make it our own.”68

Some preachers in China even took their Indo-humanism one stage further, combin- ing epideictic rhetoric and Chinese literary-philosophical traditions. For instance, the sermons of an anonymous seventeenth-century Chinese Jesuit quote Confucius exten- sively, including in attacks on Buddhist and Taoist “false prophets” whom the author condemns, reworking a passage from the Analects: “As Confucius says, good people sometimes do wrong, but they repent immediately; bad people sometimes do good, but they do not persist in it.”69 Such Confucian commonplaces could be understood

65 On the Jesuit missionary press and its books, see Moran, The Japanese and the Jesuits, 12; Hubert Cieslik, “The Training of a Japanese Clergy in the Seventeenth Century,” in Studies in Japanese Culture, ed. Joseph Roggendorf (Tokyo, 1963), 41–78, here 44–45; and Tadao Doi, “Das Sprachstudium der Gesellschaft Jesu in Japan im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” Monumenta Nipponica 2, no. 2 (1939): 437–65.

66 Manuel Barreto, Flosculi ex veteris ac novi testamenti, S. Doctorum et insignium philosophorum floribus selecti (Nagasaki, 1610) (Tokyo, 1978).

67 George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999).

68 Adapted from the translation in Erik Zürcher, ed., Kouduo richao: Li Jiubiao’s Diary of Oral Admonitions; A Late Ming Christian Journal, vol. 2 of 2 (Nettetal, 2007), 589–90 (VIII.12). On Aleni’s Kouduo, see Song Gang, Giulio Aleni, “Kouduo richao,” and Christian-Confucian Dialogism in Late Ming Fujian (Nettetal, 2018).

69 “孔子曰：觀過知仁善, 人苟有惡, 惡不甚而即悔, 惡人偶有善, 善不恆而不繼.” Faguo guojia tushu guan mingqing tianzhujiao wenxian 法國國家圖書館明清天主教文 = Chinese christian texts from the national library of France = Textes chrétiens chinois dela bibliothèque nationale de France, ed. Nicolas Standaert, Adrianus Dudink, and Nathalie Monnet, vol. 10 of 26 (Taipei, 2009), 383. Here, he is reversing the order of Confucius’s words in Analects 4.7.

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from both a Christian humanist and a Chinese perspective, since Indo-humanism was by its very nature bidirectional.

Indo-humanism (or, here, perhaps more specifically Sino-humanism) therefore overlaps in significant ways with what is usually described as the Jesuit “accommoda- tion” strategy, and was in turn not limited to sermons. Matteo Ricci famously mixed the epigrammatic traditions of China and the ancient Mediterranean to create his pop- ular treatise on friendship.70 An English Jesuit, Thomas Stephens (ca. 1549–1619), similarly combined the bhakti tradition of South India with Christian humanist epic poetry to compose a life of Christ, entitled Kristapurān.a, a vast poem in ovi verse modeled on the life of Krishna by sixteenth-century Marathi scholar-saint Eknath.71 Likewise, at the Mughal court, the “mirror for princes” genre mocked by Machi- avelli found its way into syncretic texts, such as Jerome Xavier’s Persian Ādāb al- salt.anat (1609).72 The same pattern is visible in the design for the 1680 triumphal arch erected for the arrival of the new viceroy in Mexico City by Carlos de Sigüenza y Gón- gora (1645–1700), who leveraged his studies of Nahuatl codices to put forward pre- Columbian gods and monarchs like Huitzilopochtli, Acamapichtli, and Moctezuma II as models of Christian humanist virtue for imitation.73 This echoes the approach taken by Nahua playwrights who appealed to examples of Roman imperial Christianity like Constantine as a way to carve out places and identities for themselves in the Catholic world of New Spain.74

Behind such meetings of long-standing intellectual traditions were physical meet- ings. Indeed, without collaborations between missionaries and local scholars (fre- quently converts), none of these Indo-humanisms would have been possible. These encounters took place across the early modern world. For instance, the Guarani epi- deictic sermons of Paolo Restivo (1658–1740) in Paraguay were produced thanks to the work of a Guarani amanuensis named Nicolás Yapuguay, who transcribed each and every one of Restivo’s sermons, polishing the missionary’s less-than-elegant Guarani.75

70 Matteo Ricci, On Friendship: One Hundred Maxims for a Chinese Prince, trans. Timothy Billings (New York, 2009); Andrew Hui, A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter (Princeton, NJ, 2019).

71 Hugh van Skyhawk, “‘… In This Bushy Land of Salsette …’: Father Thomas Stephens and the Kristapurāṇa,” in Studies in Early Modern Indo-Aryan Languages, Literature and Culture, ed. Alan W. Entwistle, Carol Salomon, Heidi Pauwels, and Michael C. Shapiro (Delhi, 1999), 363–78; Ananya Chakravarti, The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Accommodatio, and the Imagination of Empire in Early Modern Brazil and India (Delhi, 2018), 178–227.

72 Jorge Flores, The Mughal Padshah: A Jesuit Treatise on Emperor Jahangir’s Court and Household (Leiden, 2015), 44–46; Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Mediterranean Exemplars: Jesuit Political Lessons for a Mughal Emperor,” in Machiavelli, Islam and the East: Reorienting the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. Lucio Biasiori and Giuseppe Marcocci (Cham, 2018), 105–29.

73 Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, “Theatro de virtudes políticas que constituyen a un príncipe,” in Seis obras, ed. William G. Bryant (Caracas, 1984), 167–240; Peter Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince (Cambridge, 2007); Alejandro Cañeque, “Imaging the Spanish Empire: The Visual Construction of Imperial Authority in Habsburg New Spain,” Colonial Latin American Review 19, no. 1 (2010): 29–68.

74 Louise M. Burkhart, “2014 Presidential Address: Christian Salvation as Ethno-ethnohistory: Two Views from 1714,” Ethnohistory 63, no. 2 (2016): 215–35.

75 Nicolás Yapuguay, Sermones y exemplos en lengua Guarani, ed. Guillermo Furlong (Buenos Aires, 1953), v–ix. On life in the Guarani missions, see Julia J. S. Sarreal, The Guaraní and Their Missions: A Socioeconomic History (Stanford, CA, 2014). On Yapuguay, see Bartomeu Meliá, La Lengua guaraní del Paraguay: Historia, sociedad y literatura (Madrid, 1992), 140.

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Even Sigüenza y Góngora’s mixing of antiquities would not have been possible with- out his close friendship with members of the onetime ruling family of Texcoco who allowed him unparalleled access to their archives.76

Despite the significant overlap in terms of the evangelization mission, Indo- humanism therefore appears to represent the more conciliatory face of the humanist tradition beyond Europe vis-à-vis many examples of imperial humanism. Nonethe- less, it is important to recognize its many manifestations that took place within the context of painfully visible hierarchical relationships. For instance, the evangelization and ethnographic work of Alonso de Sandoval (1576–1652), a Jesuit missionary to the enslaved Africans arriving in Cartagena de Indias and author of the ethnographic trea- tise De instauranda Aethiopum salute (1627), relied on African interpreters and col- laborators, generally slaves belonging to the city’s Jesuit college. This included a slave whom they named Calepino, after Ambrogio Calepino (1410–1510), the author of the famous and much-translated Renaissance dictionary.77 Similarly, the grammar of the Kahenda-Mbaka dialect of Kimbundu produced by the Portuguese Jesuit Pedro Dias (1622–1700), with the assistance of a Kongo-born Portuguese Jesuit named Miguel Cardoso (1659–1721), printed in Lisbon as Arte da lingua de Angola (1697) relied on a framework borrowed from Manuel Álvares’s famous Latin grammar, conversations with enslaved and free Africans in Salvador da Bahia, and texts produced in the Cabi- nda mission located near a Portuguese slave trading station at the mouth of the Congo River.78 Despite its cosmopolitan appearance, therefore, Indo-humanism was not always a meeting of traditions on equal terms. Far from it.

This said, raw power could also work the other way. Matteo Ricci and Alessandro Valignano were, to a large extent, simply forced to compromise by the sheer eco- nomic and military might of the Qing and rising Edo states and their populations, which dwarfed anything Europeans could muster in the region. Indeed, as Mexican “New Conquest History” and its equivalents for colonial Asia have taught us, Euro- pean expansion was an uneven process of large-scale violence and close collaboration with native allies, in which Europeans did not always have the upper hand.79 In this sea of complicity, what ultimately emerges, therefore, is that Renaissance human- ism was not one thing. Rather, it was a toolbox of scholarly techniques that could be put to any number of purposes depending on the circumstances and inclination of the individual humanist operating within a world that featured multiple asymmet- ric power relations. While this is not a new insight per se, the diverse contexts and

76 Villella, Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800, 173–74; Amber Brian, Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico (Nashville, 2016).

77 Larissa Brewer-García, Beyond Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada (Cambridge, 2020), 123–32; Chloe L. Ireton, “Black Africans’ Freedom Litigation Suits to Define Just War and Just Slavery in the Early Spanish Empire,” Renaissance Quarterly 73, no. 4 (2020): 1277–319.

78 Emilio Bonvini, “Repères pour une histoire des connaissances linguistiques des langues africaines [I. Du XVIe siècle au XVIIIe siècle: Dans le sillage des explorations],” Histoire, Épistémologie, Langage 18, no. 2 (1996): 127–48; Otto Zwartjes, Portuguese Missionary Grammars in Asia, Africa and Brazil, 1550–1800 (Amsterdam, 2011), 234–49.

79 Matthew Restall, “The New Conquest History,” History Compass 10, no. 2 (2012): 151–60; Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “The Stranger-Effect in Early Modern Asia,” Itinerario 24, no. 2 (2000): 80–103.

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languages in which it played out, and especially its manifestations in Asia and among the African diaspora, have not been fully explored and integrated into the larger picture.80

***

In 1766, a collection of Latin epigrams by a Tagalog priest named Bartolomé Saguinsín came off the press in the convent of Our Lady of Loreto in the Sampaloc district of Manila. These Virgilian verses commemorated the occupation of the city by the Brit- ish East India Company during the Seven Years’ War, which had seen Saguinsín’s cap- ture by British troops, the violent destruction of his parish church in Quiapo, and the eventual withdrawal of the invaders following the Treaty of Paris. Born into a family of Tagalog leaders (principales) in the final decade of the seventeenth century and educated by the Jesuits in the early decades of the eighteenth, Saguinsín dedicated his account of these traumatic events to the Spanish lieutenant governor, Simón de Anda y Salazar (1709–76), whom he entreated to show favor to the archipelago’s indio inhabitants and to punish the rebellious Chinese population, many of whom had sided with the British. Although published in the first full flush of the Hispanic Enlighten- ment, because of Saguinsín’s advanced years, his epigrams reflect the world of the late Renaissance.81 As such, they present the story of indigenous allegiance and Chi- nese treachery in a typical humanist genre, the epigram.82 They also reflect the long tradition—stretching back to the Black Latin poet Juan Latino and beyond—of giv- ing humanist verses as gifts to curry favor with important personages. In other words, not only do Saguinsín’s epigrams highlight the little-recognized fact that among the early modern world’s humanists there was a self-declared “indigenous Tagalog” (indus Tagalus), as is clear from the title page (fig. 3), but they also underscore the serious flaws in the conventional Europeanist chronology that portrays humanism as a trend that developed in the late fourteenth century, reached its peak in the sixteenth century, and declined precipitously in the early seventeenth century with the rise of a rationalist new science.

Of course, questions remain: Just how “late” did the late humanism of Saguinsín and his contemporaries last, and what superseded it? Is it like late antiquity in the words of Peter Brown—“always later than you think”?83 To these there are probably no neat answers given the dizzying diversity within a tradition that by 1650 stretched from

80 Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts, 9–10. 81 On the Enlightenment in the Philippines, see Miguel Luque Talaván, “Descubriendo las luces de un rico

diamante: El progreso de las Filipinas en el pensamiento económico del siglo ilustrado,” in Historia del pensamiento económico: Del mercantilismo al liberalismo, ed. Martínez Lopez-Cano, María del Pilar, and Leonor Ludlow (Mexico City, 2007), 169–209.

82 Luciano P. R. Santiago, The Hidden Light: The First Filipino Priests (Quezon City, 1987), 145–50; Resil B. Mojares, Isabelo’s Archive (Mandaluyong City, 2013); Dana Leibsohn and Stuart M. McManus, “Eloquence and Ethnohistory: Indigenous Loyalty and the Making of a Tagalog Letrado,” Colonial Latin American Review 27, no. 4 (2018): 522–74.

83 Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, “Preface: On the Uniqueness of Late Antiquity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, ed. Scott Fitzgerald Johnson (Oxford, 2012), xi–xxix, here xvi.

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Milan to Manila. Indeed, the humanist tradition had effectively already disappeared in some places before it had even arisen in others. This is perhaps best exemplified by the case of czarist Russia, where Renaissance humanism only really took root in the first decades of the eighteenth century as part of the reforms of Peter the Great

Figure 3. Title page of Bartolomé Saguinsín, Epigrammata (Sampaloc, 1766). Courtesy of Miguel de Benavides Library, University of Santo Tomás, Manila.

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(r. 1682–1725).84 Nonetheless, while the downward trend is identifiable from the mid-seventeenth century, the most significant generational shift really took place between those born in the decades around 1700, whose formative years were spent in a world where important elements of the humanist tradition were still culturally prom- inent, and those born after approximately 1715, who generally betray significantly less influence. For instance, the Mexico City–born bishop of the Yucatan Juan José Eguiara y Eguren (1696–1763) was educated at the turn of the eighteenth century. This meant that although he learned to read French and reveled in the works of the Enlightenment critic Benito Jerónimo Feijóo (1676–1764), when at midcentury he came to defend the honor of Mexican scholarship against the attacks of the Italianizing antiquarian Manuel Martí (1663–1737), he did so in a vast Latin biobibliographical encyclopedia filled with late Renaissance erudition, titled the Bibliotheca Mexicana (1755). In fact, he was encouraged in this vein by his adversary Martí, whose extensive scholarship momentarily reinvigorated Hispanic humanism just as it was on its last legs.85 In con- trast, the renowned Spanish sacred orator and later archbishop of Manila, Basilio San- cho de Santa Justa y Rufina (1728–87), who was born a generation or so later, exhibited few humanist tendencies. Indeed, he may have referred extensively to ancient Mediter- ranean antiquity in his 1783 oration delivered at the Manila Patriotic Society and even cited the occasional line of late humanist poetry here and there as he tried to sell Charles III’s Enlightenment economic reforms to Manila’s monopolistic elite, but vernacular eloquence and new ideas were his almost exclusive focus. For him, Latin was the sacred but fossilized bureaucratic language of the Catholic Church, while the humanist writers of the Renaissance were mostly of antiquarian, rather than immediate, interest.86

This changing of the guard in the decades around 1700 was echoed throughout the Republic of Letters. This was no less the case even in British North America, where Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), whose life spanned the period of transition, described the final shift away from late humanism and its archetypal language in this way:

“The Latin Language, long the Vehicle used in distributing Knowledge among the different Nations of Europe, is daily more and more neglected; and one of the modern Tongues, viz. the French, seems in Point of Universality to have supplied its Place; it is spoken in all the Courts of Europe, and most of the Literati, those even who do not speak it, have acquired Knowledge enough of it, to enable them easily to read the Books that are written in it.”87

84 Max J. Okenfuss, The Rise and Fall of Latin Humanism in Early-Modern Russia: Pagan Authors, Ukrainians, and the Resiliency of Muscovy (New York, 1995).

85 Andrew Laird, “Patriotism and the Rise of Latin in Eighteenth-Century New Spain: Disputes of the New World and the Jesuit Constructions of a Mexican Legacy,” Renaessanceforum 8 (2012): 163–93; Antonio Mestre Sanchis, Manuel Martí, el Deán de Alicante (Alicante, 2003).

86 Basilio Sancho de Santa Justa y Rufina, Alocución que en el día veinte de Enero del año mil setecientos ochenta y tres, cumpleaños del Rey nuestro señor D. Carlos III […] (Manila, 1783); Marta M. Manchado López, Conflictos iglesia-estado en el Extremo Oriente Ibérico Filipinas (1767–1787) (Murcia, 1994), 29– 52.

87 Benjamin Franklin to Noah Webster, December 26, 1789, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree, vol. 46 of 47 (New Haven, CT, forthcoming), 378 [available through www.franklinpapers.org].

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That is to say, by the second half of the eighteenth century, Latin and the humanist world that it had united had become what Franklin would so pithily call the “chapeau bras of modern literature,” little more than an odd accessory that had long outlived its purpose.88

This transformation did not happen at the same pace throughout the Republic of Letters, a fact that is thrown into stark relief when two of its “microclimates” (to bor- row Anthony Grafton’s turn of phrase) clashed.89 For instance, an illuminating spat occurred between Sebastian Râle (1657–1724), the onetime teacher of Greek and rhetoric at Nîmes who became the leader of the French and Indian resistance to Brit- ish expansion into Maine, and Joseph Baxter (1676–1745), a missionary and pastor of Medfield Congregational Church in Massachusetts.90 During the initial peaceful struggle for souls and territory between the British and the French in Maine in the late 1710s, Râle wrote to Samuel Shute, the governor of New England and New Hampshire, to complain that Baxter was not qualified to preach to the Indians as he was unlearned, a fact betrayed by his mediocre Latin. In his harsh response, Shute revealed just how contemporary cultural standards in the Anglophone world had already departed from the humanist model that was still very much alive among the French Jesuits and the Society of Jesus more broadly:

But as to your charge of Mr. Baxter’s want of scholarship; I have never seen either your Latin letters to him or his answers to you, and so cannot judge which of you may have the better, as to the Latinist. But certainly you cannot suppose the main or principle qualification of a gospel minister, or missionary among a barbarous nation, as the Indians are, to be an exact scholar as to the Latin tongue. I say with respect to the Indians, for I am perfectly of opinion that a man cannot be accomplished for the work of the ministry without good [i.e., Latin] literature— and that next to the zeal for the glory of God, a love to souls, learning is not only an ornament but even necessary to an able minister of the New Testament—and yet after all a man may be well skilled in the learned languages and not capable ex improviso, to write a correct Latin letter.91

Although Shute was obviously eager to counteract Râle’s claims, the mere suggestion that a learned minister might not necessarily have an active command of the Renais- sance’s archetypal language of scholarship and diplomatic exchange is telling of the serious divergences taking place within the Republic of Letters of the early eighteenth century.

88 “Observations Relative to the Intentions of the Original Founders of the Academy in Philadelphia, June 1789,” in The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert Henry Smyth, vol. 10 of 10 (New York, 1907), 9–31, here 31.

89 Anthony Grafton, “The Republic of Letters in the American Colonies: Francis Daniel Pastorius Makes a Notebook,” American Historical Review 117, no. 1 (2012): 1–39, here 39.

90 Clifford Kenyon Shipton, ed., Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University, vol. 4 (Cambridge, MA, 1933), 146–53. The letter is edited in James Phinney Baxter, The Pioneers of New France in New England (Bowie, MD, 1980), 397–404.

91 James Phinney Baxter, A Documentary History of Maine, vol. 9 of 24 (Portland, 1907), 374–79.

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As a result of this multiplicity of subcultures as well as the glacial pace of genera- tional change, the transition away from the still identifiably late humanist contexts of Franklin’s and Saguinsín’s earliest youth was understandably neither sudden nor clear cut.92 The long tail to Renaissance trends, in turn, meant that many in the eigh- teenth-century Republic of Letters still lived in the shadow of late humanism even if they did not actively engage in any of its scholarly practices. To make sense of the shades of gray in this gradual paradigm shift, a useful heuristic might be to speak of a culture of “posthumanism” hazily spanning the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century. This was finally replaced by an identifiably neoclassical Enlightenment mode of education, scholarship, and literary expression that would characterize the late eigh- teenth and nineteenth centuries.93

Whereas the classicizing form and content of “vernacular humanism” in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries had been constantly nourished by a rich culture of humanist eloquence and erudition (usually in Latin, or dependent on a Latin scholarly core), posthumanism was the result of continuities in humanist education models and institutional rituals that outlived the Latinate world of the late humanists by at least a generation.94 In the case of classicizing public speaking, one of the archetypal civic and scholarly practices of the earlier humanists, Latin declamation and late humanist handbooks continued to play their traditional role as the primary gymnasium in which speakers were trained well into the eighteenth century, while the years around 1700 saw the crystallization of a long transition period. At this time, declamation in Latin became progressively more irrelevant and students increasingly studied rhetoric from an array of new vernacular handbooks that were nonetheless essentially translations of earlier humanist rhetorical textbooks.95

Oratorical practice, too, changed profoundly, as rhetoric shifted focus, evolved, and merged unperceptively into a new neoclassical form that in the 1760s and 1770s would become the trumpet for Enlightenment ideas in the speeches delivered at the Hispanic Patriotic Societies, during the American Revolution, and elsewhere (although some older orators still exhibited some identifiably posthumanist traits).96 In the midst of this late humanist to posthumanist and then to neoclassical shift, Latin

92 Grafton, “The Republic of Letters in the American Colonies,” 39. 93 This is a separate usage of “posthumanism” from that employed in literary criticism. See Kenneth Gouwens,

“What Posthumanism Isn’t: On Humanism and Human Exceptionalism in the Renaissance,” in Renaissance Posthumanism, ed. Joseph Campana and Scott Maisano (New York, 2016), 37–63. The existing literature that stresses continuity in the classical tradition tends to skirt around the issue of what did in fact change. See, for example, Bas van Bommel, Classical Humanism and the Challenge of Modernity: Debates on Classical Education in 19th-Century Germany (Berlin, 2015). Conversely, the literature focused on change tends to ignore all continuities. See, for example, William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550–1640 (New Haven, CT, 2000).

94 Andrew Galloway, “John Lydgate and the Origins of Vernacular Humanism,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 107, no. 4 (2008): 445–71, here 445–50.

95 This stress on continuity owes much to the insights of Grafton, “The Republic of Letters in the American Colonies.” On eighteenth-century rhetorical handbooks in Spain, as an example, see Rosa María Aradra Sánchez, De la retórica a la teoría de la literatura: Siglos XVIII y XIX (Murcia, 1997), 55–75.

96 William Norwood Brigance and Marie Hochmuth, eds., A History and Criticism of American Public Address, vol. 1 of 3 (New York, 1943), 48.

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oratory went from being a common feature of civic life and diplomacy to being an irrelevant pursuit, relegated to fossilized occasions in universities, colleges, and funer- als for the odd Mexican bishop.97 Such echoes of the Renaissance could nevertheless still produce striking results, such as the ornate 1770 presentation copy of Latin the- ses on rhetorical maxims from Quintilian produced in Goa with their decidedly South Asian–looking mermaids (fig. 4).98 These were presented to the Portuguese viceroy by students at the College of St. Roch, the diocesan institution that superseded the Jesuit college of St. Paul in Goa, where Hara Martinho had delivered his 1588 pane- gyric oration. Another holdout was the papal court, where in 1775 the famous Brah- min hypnotist José Custódio de Faria (1756–1819) delivered a Latin oration for Pope Clement XIV.99 Even so, the overall direction of travel was clear and unstoppable, although not so immediate that there was not an identifiable transition stage, when students continued to declaim in Latin, use late humanist handbooks (either in the original or in vernacular translations), and occasionally read the odd humanist Latin oration for inspiration, if nothing more contemporary was available. This was the world of posthumanism.

***

Renaissance humanism was geographically not just a European movement. If west- ern Europe had been wiped off the map sometime in the early seventeenth century, humanist culture would have continued to flourish in colleges, convents, and civic rit- uals in the Americas and Asia. Yet, as one perceptive reviewer of this article noted, this is still far from the normal interpretation. Indeed, even the Manuscript Central portal used by the AHR to receive article manuscripts includes the “Renaissance” in its options for users’ “geographical region” of interest. Clearly, the Renaissance and its intellectual core, Renaissance humanism, remain a place for many, by definition a European one. In addition, it is usually considered a European movement ethnically. However, while the majority of those who cultivated the studia humanitatis were of European descent (although not all born in Europe by any means), figures like Juan Latino, Hara Martinho, and Bartolomé Saguinsín remind us that it crossed lines that were far from impermeable in the early modern period. At the same time, this is not to say that Renaissance humanism was internally homogenous. While Eguiara y Eguren and other extra-European humanists declared themselves to be members of a “Republic of Letters” (respublica litteraria), being a humanist in Mexico was not the same as being a humanist in Manila, Japan, or Goa.100 Similarly, Antonio Valeriano and Hara Martinho put the same basic set of humanist skills to subtly different ends vis-à-vis Ficino and Erasmus, who themselves had different priorities, as Europe was

97 Latin funeral oratory continued in Mexico well into the nineteenth century, although in a much-reduced state. See Ignacio Osorio Romero, Tópicos sobre Cicerón en México (Mexico City, 1976), 212–16.

98 “THESES de rhetorica defendidas em Goa,” cod. CX/2-20 n. 14, Biblioteca Pública de Évora. 99 José Custódio de Faria, De adventu Spiritus Sancti oratio (Rome, 1775). 100 Juan José Eguiara y Eguren, Bibliotheca Mexicana (Mexico City, 1755), fol. 34ar.

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Figure 4. Title page of “THESES de rhetorica defendidas em Goa, presidendo o professor de rhetorica Vic- torino Pereira.” Cod. CX/2-20, n. 14, Biblioteca Pública de Évora. Reproduced with permission of Biblioteca Pública de Évora according to the Código dos Direitos de Autor e Direitos Conexos.

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itself hardly culturally uniform. Renaissance humanism was therefore an internally diverse but coherent movement with a transcontinental impact that has not been fully charted.

In sum, it is only by applying both traditional philological methods and more mod- ern critical approaches to the multiple and varied manifestations of imperial human- ism, Indo-humanism, and the Renaissance’s long shadow in posthumanism that we can begin to do justice to the lives and scholarship of figures like Antonio Valeriano, for whom teaching a Christian humanist curriculum at the Franciscan college in Tlatelolco and defending the rights of his indigenous pueblo did not produce any cognitive dis- sonance. Fundamentally, this was because Renaissance humanism was not one thing. Rather, it was a versatile toolbox of ideas, linguistic techniques, and scholarly practices that could be put to multiple ends by humanists trained in its methods, whatever their background and wherever they found themselves in the shifting hierarchies of a con- stantly changing early modern world.

Stuart M. McManus (PhD Harvard) is a humanist and legal historian. He is currently Assistant Professor of World History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and an Affiliated Scholar of the Faculty of Law’s Center for Transnational and Comparative Law.

I wish to thank James Hankins, David Armitage, Tamar Herzog, Ann Blair, James Morton, Noah Shusterman, and Puk Wing-kin; my research assistant, Terence Chan Tze-wai; and the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their invaluable advice and assistance. The research for this article was supported by a Direct Grant for Research, Faculty of Arts, Chinese University of Hong Kong.

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