Classical Letters and Millenarian Madness in Post-Conquest Mexico: The Ecstasis of Fray Cristóbal Cabrera (1548)

Abstract

The present article incorporates an edition and translation of an extraordinary Latin poem by Fray Cristóbal Cabrera, a humanist scholar and Franciscan missionary who worked in New Spain from the early 1530s until 1546-1547. The Ecstasis, the longest acrostic composition in western literature, is a first-person fiction, reminiscent of Erasmus's Praise of Folly, in which the poet describes an apocalyptic vision of judgement and his slide into madness after an earlier premonition that God's wrath would fall upon Mexico City. The poet professes to reject pagan literature but his sustained engagement with several classical authors, especially Catullus, Virgil and Cicero, provides a key to the interpretation of this enigmatic work.