Search results for ""Author Andrew Laird""

In 1536, only fifteen years after the fall of the Aztec empire, Franciscan missionaries began teaching Latin, classical rhetoric, and Aristotelian philosophy to native youths in central Mexico. The remarkable linguistic and cultural exchanges that would result from that initiative are the subject of this book. Aztec Latin highlights the importance of Renaissance humanist education for early colonial indigenous history, showing how practices central to humanism the cultivation of eloquence, the training of leaders, scholarly translation, and antiquarian research were transformed in New Spain to serve Indian elites as well as the Spanish authorities and religious orders.While Franciscan friars, inspired by Erasmus'' ideal of a common tongue, applied principles of Latin grammar to Amerindian languages, native scholars translated the Gospels, a range of devotional literature, and even Aesop''s fables into the Mexican language of Nahuatl. They also produced significant new writings in Lat

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This collection is the first concerted attempt to explore the significance of classical legacies for Latin American history – from the uses of antiquarian learning in colonial institutions to the currents of Romantic Hellenism which inspired liberators and nation-builders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Discusses how the model of Roman imperialism, challenges to Aristotle’s theories of geography and natural slavery, and Cicero’s notion of the patria have had a pervasive influence on thought and politics throughout the Latin American region Brings together essays by specialists in art history, cultural anthropology and literary studies, as well as Americanists and scholars of the classical tradition Shows that appropriations of the Greco-Roman past are a recurrent catalyst for change in the Americas Calls attention to ideas and developments which have been overlooked in standard narratives of intellectual history

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