In 1567, Philip II banned the Moriscos of Granada from speaking or writing in Arabic. Moriscos were descendants of Muslims converted to Catholicism under coercion decades earlier, and this prohibition of their own language aimed to eradicate Morisco customs in order to achieve their full religious conversion. Yet, at the same time, the king did not ban Mesoamerican peoples from speaking their native languages as part of their evangelization by Catholic priests. In both cases, the Spanish monarchy and clergy understood there to be a strong connection between language and religious conversion. How can we make sense of their broad and sometimes contradictory range of opinions and strategies on these matters? In Truth in Many Tongues, Daniel I. Wasserman-Soler argues that the sixteenth-century Spanish Crown and church had no single, comprehensive policy to manage the use of languages throughout the peninsular kingdoms and overseas territories. He demonstrates how religious and secular authorities responded on a case-by-case basis to questions about which languages could be used, how, and by whom.
A remarkable level of linguistic diversity characterized Spanish-ruled territories in Iberia and around the globe in the sixteenth century, and religious conversion was central to Spanish imperial expansion. This book does not attempt to tell a complete history of language or conversion in the early modern Spanish context. It claims and achieves something much more specific: to illustrate the diversity of ecclesiastical opinions and royal directives pertaining to languages in relation to religious conversion in sixteenth-century Spain and New Spain. Wasserman-Soler uses reports and correspondence produced by officials of the Spanish Inquisition, clergy, and monarchy, including records of church councils, as well as various types of books and printed materials published during this era, to demonstrate this range of opinions and how they operated.
Truth in Many Tongues features many known debates, events, and figures, but reevaluates how their stories have been told. It dismantles assumptions about how sixteenth-century leaders in religion and government thought about language by explaining that there was rarely a clear-cut, two-way dispute between those for and against any particular linguistic approach. Language policies and debates reflected particular circumstances. Vernaculars—including Castilian, Valencian, and Arabic in Iberia, and Nahuatl, Otomi, and other Indigenous languages in New Spain—were often used temporarily by churchmen in order to provide religious education. The book's first chapter examines controversies over Castilian-language books censored by the Spanish Inquisition. The second and third chapters address the Morisco question, first in an examination of debates surrounding the Arabic language in Granada and then considering the push to teach Valencian to Moriscos. Chapters 4 and 5 investigate questions surrounding Indigenous languages and multilingualism in New Spain.
In paying close attention to sixteenth-century language strategies, this book sometimes loses sight of the broader histories of conversion—for example, the violence inherent in both coerced conversion and in attempts to stop people from speaking their own languages. This book could also do more to interrogate the limitations of the perspectives of the men at the center of this study—for instance, in their understanding of Indigenous religious beliefs and practices. While a major contribution of this study is its side-by-side assessment of Iberian and American contexts, most of the comparative analysis takes place in the book's conclusion; this section, however, at times underestimates how Spaniards drew connections between Moriscos and Indigenous peoples.
Multilingualism was common throughout the sixteenth-century Spanish world. People expected to hear and use different languages at home, in church, and in encounters with others; these included Arabic, Basque, Castilian, Catalan, Galician, Ladino, Latin, Nahuatl, and numerous other Indigenous languages in the Americas. Wasserman-Soler's fascinating book illustrates this polyglot world, even while his focus remains on debates between men in positions of power. It includes clear historiographic signposting and thought-provoking examples that will benefit students at all levels of research; this study and the vital connections it makes will also be of great interest to specialists in all related fields. Truth in Many Tongues will be necessary reading for any study of language and religious conversion in premodern European and colonial contexts.
