Structures of Belonging and Nonbelonging: On Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s “Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons”

By Joseph RezekFebruary 1, 2023

Structures of Belonging and Nonbelonging: On Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s “Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons”

Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas by Kirsten Silva Gruesz

COTTON MATHER LIES at rest with other Puritans at Copp’s Hill Burying Ground in Boston’s North End. He had much to vex him during his life, including the devil himself, who rose up in Salem at the end of the 17th century with a “Hellish Design of Bewitching, and Ruining our Land,” as he put it in The Wonders of the Invisible World (1693). Mather was among the most articulate defenders of the Salem witch trials, an unfortunate choice that has largely defined his place in American history. But in her revolutionary new book, Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas, Kirsten Silva Gruesz sets aside Mather the witch hunter to center him instead in a fascinating new story about race.

It is a surprising move, but her book begins with compelling material evidence. Known for his writings on Salem and for patriotic epics like Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), Mather was also the author of the first Spanish-language book printed in the geographic area that later became the United States: La Fe del Christiano, or The Faith of the Christian, a small pamphlet that appeared in Boston in 1699. With this book, Mather wanted to distill Protestant teachings in order to convert Catholics further south in the Americas. With Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons, Gruesz uses the insights of Latinx Studies to explode the Black-versus-white binary that dominates most discussions of race in our time.

Gruesz, a renowned scholar of early American and Latinx literature, asks a series of provocative questions that Mather’s almost entirely forgotten book inspires: What does it mean that Mather cared about Spanish America? How did he even learn Spanish in Massachusetts, a provincial English colony? What intellectual, material, and interpersonal circumstances surrounded the writing and printing of a book in that language? Gruesz is at the forefront of comparative methodologies in early American literary study and is well positioned to answer these questions.

The existence of La Fe del Christiano and the conditions that shaped its production and legibility help situate early New England intellectual life as deeply embedded within a transnational American hemisphere. Gruesz is not alone in making this general point: historians and literary scholars have largely stopped framing the Puritans as pioneers in an imagined national epic grounded in the English language. But her method, archive, and conclusions are wholly original.

The “micronarrative” that Gruesz offers about La Fe del Christiano is accompanied by “an important macronarrative,” she writes: namely,

the geopolitical and religious struggles between and among European-American settler cultures, Indigenous, Black, and mixed-race peoples throughout the hemisphere that set in place structures of belonging and nonbelonging […] crucial for understanding latinidad in the United States today.


These structures of belonging and nonbelonging defined Mather’s own place in society and nurtured the environment that made La Fe del Christiano even possible. In the streets or houses of Boston, Mather might have met fellow Protestant settlers; Indigenous people, including the Wampanoag and Nipmuc; Jewish traders and merchants; people of African descent, enslaved or free; sailors and workers from around the Atlantic world; and mixed-raced servants with origins elsewhere in the Americas.

This is a complicated picture that recent bestselling histories and accounts of racism in the United States have sidelined. As a mainstream example, Gruesz points to Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award in 2017. Kendi has centered anti-Black racism as the defining feature of American history; he singles out Mather as one of the first in a long line of racist thinkers. Works like Kendi’s have provided helpful correctives to popular triumphalist narratives of American exceptionalism. But it is an “oversimplification,” Gruesz writes, to understand “questions of race and slavery during the colonial period according to a black-white definition of racism such as Kendi’s.”

Referring to such scholarship, Gruesz asks, “[W]here do Latinos, the largest minoritized population in the United States today, fit into this racial reckoning?” Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons answers this question by exploring the intimate domestic relationships and wide-ranging transnational contexts that shaped Mather’s interest in the Spanish language. For example, Mather may have honed his language skills by talking with a servant, perhaps of Caribbean origin, whom he called a “Spanish Indian” and who lived in his household for several years.

With his little book, Mather really did aim to convert all of Spanish America. La Fe del Christiano consists of two parts: 24 brief “articles” of Christ’s teachings, mostly general Christian principles, followed by 12 “maxims” of the “pure religion” (i.e., Calvinism), such as “The Pope in Rome is the Antichrist.” At the end of the 17th century, Spain was a more dominant presence in the Atlantic world than Britain. Mather thirsted for power, as he wrote in his diary in 1696:

I find in myself, a strong Inclination to learn the Spanish Language, and in that Language transmitt Catechisms, and Confessions, and other vehicles of the Protestant-Religion, into the Spanish Indies. Who can tell whether the Time for our Lord’s taking Possession of these Countreyes, even the sett Time for it, bee not come?


He thoroughly set his mind to work, reading the history of Spanish colonialism and Spaniards’ accounts of converting “Barbarians” in America, especially the work of the Jesuit missionary José de Acosta. With a rigorous, meticulous analysis of available books and Mather’s Spanish diction, Gruesz demonstrates that the Spanish grammars and dictionaries he used were likely outdated texts from 100 years earlier, the time of Cervantes. She also shows that he used two Spanish translations of the Bible from Cipriano de Valera: a relatively rare 1602 edition as well as the more definitive text of 1625 (known as the Reina-Valera Antigua). Both books were printed in Amsterdam to avoid Catholic censors in Spain who prohibited printing the Bible in the vernacular.

Gruesz is “not interested in judging Mather but [rather] in drawing lessons from the profound conflict of interpretation that he represents.” Doing so admittedly requires reckoning with several faults even more damning than a belief in witches. “The New-Englanders are a People of God settled in those, which were once the Devil’s Territories,” Mather wrote in 1693, justifying Native American dispossession. Mather also defended slavery. Referring to Africans held in bondage, he encouraged enslavers to be “Happy Instruments, of Converting, the Blackest Instances of Blindness and Baseness, into admirable Candidates of Eternal Blessedness.”

A slaveholder himself, and an unashamed colonizer, Mather unites many of the repulsive qualities we recognize in elite, white, early American men. However, it is Gruesz’s thrillingly literary focus on a single text — spinning out as much significance as she has convincingly shown it deserves — that makes her new consideration of him so rewarding.

At only 16 pages, La Fe del Christiano is quite small (in size, about four by six inches) — hardly a book at all, just one sheet of paper cut into quarters with the resulting pieces folded in half and sewn at one edge. I was able to view one of three surviving copies at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. To make it, Mather’s printer had to improvise. In 1699, type cases in Boston did not contain Spanish characters such as the cedilla (ç) or the enye (ñ), even though Greek and Hebrew characters were plentiful. Diacritics (é, á, í) were fairly common in the region, but the printer of La Fe either didn’t have them or decided not to use them. Gruesz says the lack of diacritics would not have been confusing for Spanish readers. But the more special characters were another story, so the printer decided to flip a z in blackletter type upside down to approximate the cedilla. Gruesz speculates that the printer fashioned the tilde of the ñ by breaking apart the long s, which looks like a cursive f, and filing down the top curvy bit in order to shove it above the roman n.

The result of these improvisations is a messy pamphlet. The words are set clumsily on the page; the line and letter spacing is uneven and the paper thin. An ephemeral object clearly meant to be passed around and discarded, it lacks the gravity and weight of Mather’s more serious publications. Perhaps this is why the printer didn’t put his own name on it, an unusual choice for the period. Instead, the pamphlet is identified as a book from Boston and the author attributed with a Spanglish version of his name: “C. Mathero.”

The clumsiness of Mather’s translation, and the broken type in the print shop, get exactly at Gruesz’s point about race. The printer didn’t have the right letters; we don’t have the right categories. Gruesz hopes to provide us with some new ones.

As an appendix, Gruesz provides a new, experimental translation of La Fe that aims to reflect how Mather’s “intermediate” and “antiquated” Spanish might have seemed “a little off, a little foreign-sounding” to readers in 1699. This is how Gruesz renders Mather’s description of the Creation: “In the buh-ginning God created the Heavens and the Earth.” On the promise and gift of redemption, Gruesz translates Mather’s words as “lovemaster God has given his only begotten son.”

There is no evidence that La Fe del Christiano ever reached its intended audience outside New England. I think this is what allows Gruesz to make so much of it. We can consider it dispassionately as a specimen of the period, not in any way as an agent of destruction. In so much of what Mather and the Puritans did, we see destruction, insufferable vanity, and unpardonable arrogance. Gruesz shows that there is more about them yet to uncover.

¤


Joseph Rezek (Twitter: @RezekJoe) is an associate professor of English and director of the American & New England Studies Program at Boston University. His research and teaching focus on early American literature, the history of books, and the history of race and racism.

LARB Contributor

Joseph Rezek is an associate professor of English and director of the American & New England Studies Program at Boston University. He is the author of London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800–1850 (2015). His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His second book, The Racialization of Print, is under contract with the Omohundro Institute for Early American History & Culture and the University of North Carolina Press.

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