Truth in Many Tongues

Truth in Many Tongues examines how the Spanish monarchy managed an empire of unprecedented linguistic diversity. Considering policies and strategies exerted within the Iberian Peninsula and the New World during the sixteenth century, this book challenges the assumption that the pervasiveness of the Spanish language resulted from deliberate linguistic colonization.Daniel I. Wasserman-Soler investigates the subtle and surprising ways that Spanish monarchs and churchmen thought about language. Drawing from inquisition reports and letters; royal and ecclesiastical correspondence; records of church assemblies, councils, and synods; and printed books in a variety of genres and languages, he shows that Church and Crown officials had no single, unified policy either for Castilian or for other languages. They restricted Arabic in some contexts but not in others. They advocated using Amerindian languages, though not in all cases. And they thought about language in ways that modern categories cannot explain: they were neither liberal nor conservative, neither tolerant nor intolerant. In fact, Wasserman-Soler argues, they did not think predominantly in terms of accommodation or assimilation, categories that are common in contemporary scholarship on religious missions. Rather, their actions reveal a highly practical mentality, as they considered each context carefully before deciding what would bring more souls into the Catholic Church.Based upon original sources from more than thirty libraries and archives in Spain, Italy, the United States, England, and Mexico, Truth in Many Tongues will fascinate students and scholars who specialize in early modern Spain, colonial Latin America, Christian-Muslim relations, and early modern Catholicism.

“This book offers an exciting glimpse into the development of Spanish linguistic policy regarding conquered peoples in the early modern period on both sides of the Atlantic. It is a courageous undertaking, confronting the Spanish efforts to evangelize first the Arabic speakers devoted to Islam on the Iberian Peninsula and then come to grips with the multifaceted linguistic challenge of converting indigenous peoples in the Americas to Christianity.”—John Schwaller, author of The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America, “This book will no doubt encourage scholars to test further the bird’s eye view of changing norms against the social history of Spanish in the Iberian and colonial overseas contexts, where multiple languages and cultures coexisted and transformed, and the hierarchies among them endured.”—John Charles, Colonial Latin American Review, “Wasserman-Soler’s book is a meaningful contribution to the religious history of the Spanish Habsburg Empire that works across the fields of early modern and Reformation studies, colonial Latin American history, and early modern transatlantic studies. His work suggests far greater continuity between Spain prior to 1492 and during the sixteenth century than previously postulated and argues against the dominant view that sixteenth-century officials dogmatically sought to spread Castilian as the language of the empire.”—Allison Caplan, H-LatAm, “Truth in Many Tongues is an important contribution to mission history because it situates Catholic missionary approaches to language and religious conversion in both Atlantic and local contexts. The book is another reminder that Spanish approaches to colonization were always shaped and transformed by the local peoples they encountered across the empire.”—Jason Dyck, Canadian Journal of History / Annales canadiennes d'histoire, “Truth in Many Tongues will be necessary reading for any study of language and religious conversion in premodern European and colonial contexts.”—Stephanie M. Cavanaugh, Renaissance Quarterly

Daniel I. Wasserman-Soler is Associate Professor of History at Alma College.