Early American Literature

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...