Classical Reception Seminar Series

Prof. Andrew Laird (John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities, Brown University, USA)

Aztec Latinists: Classical learning and native legacies in post-conquest Mexico

Abstract:

Soon after the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1521, missionaries began teaching Latin, classical rhetoric and Aristotelian philosophy to youths from the native Nahua or Aztec nobility. Andrew Laird's talk will explain the nature and purpose of that training, and show some unexpected ways in which indigenous scholars used and connected their knowledge of Greco-Roman literature and history to Mexico’s pre-Hispanic world as well as to the colonial environment in which they lived. This subject also raises some important (and possibly threatening) questions about the study of classical reception in general.