The greatest curiosities ever to appear in the 17th-century press of the global Hispanic Empire of the Indies were not the Canary Island ‘lupine dwarfs’ featured as pages in every Spanish Habsburg court. Nor were ‘wandering hermaphrodites’ the top attraction, although Catalina de Erauso surely captured the fancy of Seville. After running away as a nun in the 1580s to Chile, Catalina had fought as a squire in the wars of Arauco. She became a newspaper sensation in Seville at the moment Pope Urban VII granted her legal rights to act as a man when the inquisitive bishop of Huamanga (Peru) found the soldier out to be a woman. Catalina ended this life as a storied muleteer in Mexico. No, the real sensation and sweetheart of the Indies press was the Mexican Fray Francisco Gutiérrez Naranjo, whose remarkable feats of memory astounded readers in Mexico and beyond. As we shall see, these feats were based on a sophisticated mestizo memory palace based in part on native signs and developed in Mexico (Figure 1).

His feats were so incredible to readers that large numbers of those who attended the events gave notarised testimonies confirming their validity. In 1632, Fray Gutiérrez Naranjo showed up unannounced at a contest for a vacant chair in theology at the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico, founded in 1551. When the judging tribunal asked Gutiérrez Naranjo to elaborate on a passage of Aquinas’s Summa, he did one better. He had the complete works of Aquinas brought to the stage and asked the tribunal to randomly pick a sentence within any paragraph. Gutiérrez Naranjo would recite the rest of the page. He repeated the trick for hours as faculty gathered around the spectacle (Figure 2). Although he did not get the job because candidates were also required to offer personal learned glosses on Aquinas, Gutiérrez Naranjo showed that he could recite not only Aquinas verbatim but also any available printed commentary on the Dominican. To the amazement of everyone, he repeated the show in a new faculty search in 1636 (Figure 3).

The secret of Gutiérrez Naranjo lay in his ability to traverse the cities and palaces of memory he had learned in treatises of ars memoriae that had long been circulating in Tenochtitlan. The first treatise on city-palaces of memory written by a Mexican was Diego de Valadés’ Rhetorica christiana, printed in Perugia in 1579 (Figure 4). Valadés was typical of his age: the mestizo son of a Spanish conquistador and a Tlaxcalan noblewoman. He entered the Franciscan order in Mexico and then moved to Rome, where he became a powerful member of the curia and a friend of Pope Gregory XIII, to whom he dedicated his Rhetorica. Although Valadés lifted his mnemonics of cities and palaces of memory from Joannes Romberch’s Congestorius artificisiose memoriae (1533)¹ without attributions, he did introduce readers to striking novelties.

Rhetorica christiana included a detailed account of the techniques and images used by Franciscan friars in Mexico to convert and catechise natives, including not only Nahuas but also Chichimecas, Otomís and Tarascans. Valadés offered countless illustrations devised by Flemish friars like Peter of Ghent and Juan Focher to secure the conversion of both Nahua elites in central Mexico and stateless Chichimec polities in the northern frontiers.

Valades appended to Renaissance memory palaces mnemonic alphabets in the Tarascan, Otomi and Nahuatl languages. (Figure 1). Valadés also included illustrations of Aztec calendrical wheels of 52-year, 20-month cycles that he argued worked as mnemonic aids (Figure 5).

Finally, he included an image of Tenochtitlan as a mnemonic device of all the sacred objects in the Aztec urban landscape (Figure 6). The plate included not only the Templo Mayor or central pyramid of Tenochtitlan but also waterworks (fountains, dikes, aqueducts, pisciculture) and materia medica (cocoa, dragon’s blood, guava, balsam, maguey, tuna, acacia and ahuehuete).

Franciscans thus mustered Aztec mnemonic technologies for purposes of conversion and invented catechisms based on the rebus-like nature of Nahuatl logograms. Named after their Flemish-friar inventor, Jacob of Tester, Testerian catechisms that deployed these technologies began to appear only three years after the conquest of Tenochtitlan (Figure 7).

For the Franciscans and their trained native vicars cum scribes, images became the most powerful mnemonic device to secure recollection of Catholic principles among the natives. Franciscans created huge canvases to explain to the natives such abstract ideas as the dual temporal and spiritual hierarchies of state power, including the panoply of lay and ecclesiastical bureaucracies. To illustrate complex theological ideas, Franciscans mixed Aztec symbols in hybrid mnemonics. Take for example Valadés’ mnemonics for hell and Satan. Valadés depicted Satan as running an Aztec tributary state, with demons delivering guinea pigs, birds, jewellery and sacrificial captives. Then, Valadés turned sinners into Satan’s slaves (Figure 8).

Valadés’ image of captivity resembled Nahua depictions of slaves, such as those introduced in the ‘Huexotzinco Codex’ in 1531 (Figure 9). The codex was a written testimony kept by one of the altepetls or native lords of the Triple Alliance in litigation against the former president of the Audiencia of Mexico, Nuño de Guzman, for overtaxing the natives.

Valadés’ mnemonic synthesis of ancient and medieval cosmography, Aristotelian physics and Neoplatonic hierarchies introduced natives to the concepts of the Great Chain of Being, the Genesis creation and original sin (Figure 10). This synthesis, however, had Mexico at the centre of a hierarchical cosmos. Valadés located Mexican crops (prickly pear and corn), fishes, animals, birds and natives along the central ascending axis of his global natural and preternatural hierarchies. Chichimecas and Nahua appeared closer to the church than did Ottomans and Asians.

Valadés understood the nearly 400 missions and monasteries of the Dominicans, Augustinians and Franciscans built in central Mexico, which were heavily plastered with murals and paintings, all to be palaces of memory. Building on Romberch’s Congestorius artificisiose memoriae, Valadés himself built a palace full of rooms and statues to remember every book of the Old and New Testaments. To recall the Book of Numbers, Valadés chose the image of a seraph next to a column of amethyst. Valadés’ entrance to the room of historical books of the Old Testament had a knight on a horse at the doorway. To remember the Book of Judith, Valadés placed a column with a sword and the head of Holofernes. The mnemonic room for the Book of Ruth was made of crystal; it featured the sun atop an Aztec pyramid.

In short, Valadés’ mestizo memory palace was half-Aztec in much the same way as that in which the Franciscan monasteries in Mexico were half-Aztec theatres of memory designed for native Christian contemplation and conversion. The secret of Gutiérrez Naranjo’s brilliant performances of memory lay precisely in Valadés’ ars memoriae. This early modern mestizo art of memory created a magnificent archive of the making of knowledge in translation, one that historians continue to learn from.

FURTHER READING

Carruthers, M. (1990) The Book of Memory (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press).

de la Maza, F. (1945) Fray Diego Valadés: escritor y grabador franciscano del siglo XVI (Mexico City: UNAM Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas).

Palomera, E.J. (1988) Fray Diego Valadés, OFM, evangelizador humanista de la Nueva España: el hombre, su época y su obra (Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana).

Spence, J.D. (1984) The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York, NY: Viking Penguin).

Yates, F.A. (1966) The Art of Memory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).

¹ Romberch, J. H. V., Sessa, M. & Crawford, W. H. (1533) Congestorium Artificiose Memorie. (Venice: Melchiorem Sessam).