In 1570, the Franciscan friar Jerónimo de Mendieta bestowed a rare gift on Juan de Ovando, then president of the Council of Indies. Mendieta placed in Ovando's hands a small manuscript volume in superb Gothic script with illuminated initials and color illustrations, one of several important manuscripts he had brought to Spain for various prominent recipients. Were it not for its contents, one could have thought it a meticulous version of a breviary or a book of hours, but its contents were unprecedented. This tome contained a scholarly Nahuatl translation of the most popular devotional work in Western Europe in the previous century. It was Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ, which caught Iberian Christians under its spell between the 1460s and the early sixteenth century by means of multiple Latin editions and translations into Portuguese, Catalan, and Spanish, including a version in aljamiado (Spanish in Arabic characters). Indeed, a decisive turning point in the Iberian reception of this work had taken place three decades earlier, through the 1536 publication of Juan de Ávila's influential Spanish-language adaptation.
This paper translates and analyzes references to eclipses in two seventeenth-century Zapotec calendrical booklets.1These booklets are part of a corpus of 106 separate calendrical texts and four collections of ritual songs that were turned over to ecclesiastical authorities in 1704 and 1705 as part of an ambitious campaign against traditional indigenous ritual practices conducted in the province of Villa Alta in northern Oaxaca. Both of these booklets contain a complete day-by-day representation of the Zapotec 260-day divinatory calendar, with annotations in Zapotec alongside many of these entries. Two such annotations in Booklet 81 explicitly record the occurrences of solar and lunar eclipses visible in the Sierra Zapoteca in 1691 and 1693. Annotations in Booklet 63 do not mention eclipses but allude to them by recording the names and Gregorian dates of Christian feasts celebrated on the dates of eclipses in 1686 and 1690; such allusions are otherwise found mainly with the Zapotec dates of the beginnings or ends of significant Zapotec calendrical cycles—the 260-day calendar itself or its 65-day subdivisions, and the start of the Zapotec 365-day year—and so reflect a systematic pattern of engagement by at least one Zapotec calendar specialist with indigenous ritual knowledge and practices. Our analysis suggests that colonial Zapotec calendar specialists monitored and perhaps also anticipated the occurrence of eclipses in terms of the patterns of eclipse recurrence in particular parts of the divinatory calendar.
Sometime after the summer of 1703, a strange traveler journeyed to several Zapotec-speaking communities nestled in the rugged geography of Villa Alta—an alcaldía mayor northeast of Oaxaca City in New Spain. He wore a pectoral ornament around his neck—a gift from the Benedictine friar Ángel Maldonado, a newly appointed bishop who had arrived in Oaxaca in July 1702—and was received throughout Villa Alta with “great noise and expressions of joy.” Upon his arrival in each locality, he would gather the townspeople and proclaim an offer of amnesty from the bishop: in exchange for registering a collective confession about traditional ritual practices at the administrative seat of San Ildefonso, and turning in their ritual implements—such as alphabetic ritual texts and wooden cylindrical drums—each Zapotec community would receive a general amnesty from ecclesiastical prosecution for idolatry.
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