Reviewed by:

• Cotton Mather's Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas by Kirsten Silva Gruesz
• Kristina Bross (bio)

I've been looking forward to reading Cotton Mather's Spanish Lessons since last June, when I heard Kirsten Silva Gruesz on NPR, weighing in on the pronunciation of Uvalde in the wake of the horrific school shooting there ("How We Pronounce Uvalde Says a Lot," https://www.npr.org/2022/06/03/1102860709/uvalde-pronunciation). As national reporters descended on the border town, they encountered multiple ways to say the town's name, even among the townspeople themselves, leaning into or away from the Spanish, English, or mixed pronunciation. The report caught my attention because it seemed at first like an odd journalistic choice, a distraction from more pressing facts, from the unimaginable loss that the people of Uvalde—however it was pronounced—were suffering. [End Page 754] Yet Gruesz, at that terrible time, in news coverage about that horrific event, was able to sound a note of hope about the complicated colonial legacy of language, which, like gun ownership, mental health care, and policing in the United States, is shaped by regimes of power and oppression but which unlike them is also something "living" and thus registers peoples' persistence and resilience, even in the face of great tragedy.

In Cotton Mather's Spanish Lessons, Gruesz wrestles with the American history of "language, race, and belonging," as her subtitle indicates, balancing her many analyses, insights, speculations, and projections on what seems a very small fulcrum: the New England minister Cotton Mather's book, La fe del Christiano (The Faith of the Christian), published in Boston in 1699. This slim book bound together two religious tracts of Mather's Spanish-language composition and was part of his effort to circulate the essentials of his faith to those whom he felt needed it most—for this book in particular, that meant European and Creole Catholics and the Native peoples within their colonial orbit. Gruesz calls La Fe, like the other "small books" Mather had printed, "both product and example of a way of thinking about how to condense and distill knowledge into portable forms that a reader could later expand on their own" (141). The book offered basic theological tenets of the Reformed faith, included the commandments, the Lord's Prayer, and a description of Protestant sacraments, and it made arguments against Catholic practices such as the institution of a pope and priestly celibacy.

However valuable Mather may have hoped this Spanish-language rendition of the faith would prove as a tool for proselytizing, in Gruesz's hands his book works very differently. As she suggests in her introduction, "For most US Americans … the competition among different sects of Christianity long ago ceded its importance to a different kind of struggle, one waged over the way the nation remembers its collective past, its distribution of rights and opportunities in the present, and its openness to making new citizens through immigration in the future" (3).

Gruesz makes the structure of her book parallel to Mather's. Like him, she gives us a twelve-part work, in which the introduction and concluding section that offers Mather's La fe del Christiano in the original Spanish along with her own translation of the book into English bracket ten short chapters in which she deploys the methodologies of book history, microhistory, [End Page 755] linguistics, language acquisition and translation, family biography, and critical fabulation. The result is a valuable work of scholarship that demonstrates the gnarled complexity of early/colonial American studies and the field's imbrication within present concerns. Perhaps in recognition of the challenges to the reader in keeping hold of all the threads of her analysis at once, the book is further segmented into a series of clearly (sometimes wittily) subtitled, bite-sized explications of content and of analysis—a structure that pulls the reader right along. If not quite "milk for babes," as the catechistical tract for new...

审阅者：

• 科顿·马瑟的西班牙语课：早期美洲语言、种族和归属感的故事 作者：克尔斯滕·席尔瓦·格鲁兹 (Kirsten Silva Gruesz)
• 克里斯蒂娜·布罗斯（个人简介）

自去年 6 月起，我就一直期待着阅读 Cotton Mather 的西班牙语课程，当时我在 NPR 上听到 Kirsten Silva Gruesz 在可怕的校园枪击事件发生后对 Uvalde 的发音进行了权衡（“我们如何发音 Uvalde 说了很多” ），”https://www.npr.org/2022/06/03/1102860709/uvalde-pronunciation）。当国家记者来到这个边境城镇时，他们遇到了多种说出该城镇名称的方式，甚至在城镇居民自己中，也有倾向于或远离西班牙语、英语或混合发音的方式。这份报告引起了我的注意，因为它乍一看似乎是一个奇怪的新闻选择，分散了人们对更紧迫事实的注意力，分散了人们对尤瓦尔迪人民（无论怎么说）所遭受的难以想象的损失的注意力。[完第 754 页]然而，格鲁兹在那个可怕的时刻，在有关这一可怕事件的新闻报道中，能够对语言的复杂殖民遗产发出希望的声音，就像枪支所有权、心理健康保健和治安一样，美国是由权力和压迫政权塑造的，但与它们不同的是，它也是“有生命的”，因此记录了人民的坚持和韧性，即使面对巨大的悲剧。

在科顿·马瑟的《西班牙语课》中，正如她的副标题所示，格鲁兹与“语言、种族和归属感”的美国历史进行了斗争，平衡了她对看似非常小的支点的许多分析、见解、推测和预测：新英格兰部长科顿·马瑟 (Cotton Mather) 的书《La fe del Christiano 》 （《基督徒的信仰》）于 1699 年在波士顿出版。这本薄薄的书将马瑟用西班牙语撰写的两本宗教小册子装订在一起，是他向全世界传播其信仰要点的努力的一部分。他认为最需要的人——特别是对于这本书来说，这意味着欧洲和克里奥尔天主教徒以及他们殖民轨道上的土著人民。格鲁兹称《La Fe》就像马瑟印刷的其他“小书”一样，“既是思考如何将知识浓缩和提炼成可移植形式的思考方式的产物，也是读者随后可以自行扩展的形式”（141）。该书提供了改革宗信仰的基本神学原则，包括诫命、主祷文和对新教圣礼的描述，并反对天主教的做法，例如教皇制度和牧师独身主义。

无论马瑟多么希望这种用西班牙语表达的信仰能够成为一种传教工具，但在格鲁兹手中，他的书的作用却大不相同。正如她在介绍中所言，“对于大多数美国人来说……基督教不同教派之间的竞争很久以前就将其重要性让给了另一种斗争，一场关于国家记住其集体过去、权利和机会分配的方式的斗争”目前，以及未来对通过移民成为新公民的开放态度”（3）。

格鲁兹使她的书的结构与马瑟的书平行。和他一样，她为我们提供了一部由十二部分组成的作品，其中引言和结论部分提供了马瑟的西班牙文原著《La fe del Christiano》，以及她自己将该书翻译成英文的十个简短章节，其中她部署了方法论书籍史、微观史、[结束页755]语言学、语言习得和翻译、家族传记和批判性虚构。其结果是一部有价值的学术著作，它展示了早期/殖民地美国研究的复杂性以及该领域与当前关注点的交织。也许是认识到读者在同时掌握分析的所有线索方面面临的挑战，这本书被进一步细分为一系列清晰（有时是诙谐的）副标题、内容和分析的简短说明——一种结构这会吸引读者。如果不完全是“婴儿牛奶”，作为新的教义问答小册子......