foRgeTTing TenochTiTLan • 119could and would be rewired. To this end, Gante took elite
children into his school in San Francisco and then held
them like captives, cutting them off from contact with their
elders, “so that they would forget their bloody idolatries
and excessive sacrifices.” 16 The process of forgetting began
with Gante himself. In a letter that he wrote to his fellow
Franciscans in the province of Flanders in June 1529, only
some six years after disembarking from Europe, he makes a
startling admission: “I have forgotten my native tongue,” he
writes, “and thus I write to you in my new learned tongue
of Spanish.” He ends the letter with a closing in Nahuatl,
his newest learned language: “Ca ye ixquich ma motenehua
in tote[ou]h in totlatocauh in Jesu Cristo” (That is all. May
he be mentioned, our God, our Lord, Jesus Christ), and
adds a request that the letter be translated into Flemish
and sent to his parents. 17 In forgetting Flemish after a six-
year residence in Mexico-Tenochtitlan, Gante thus became
like his native charges, who he believed would likewise
“forget” the idolatrous history and the pagan city that was
their birthright. Putting aside the question of whether one
can forget a native tongue in six years, or a lifetime of reli-
gious practices over a few months, we can see that Gante’s
concern with memory and forgetting was not singular, as
other Franciscans also wrote about how their evangeli-
zation efforts would cause indigenous people to “forget”
their old practices. In place of these memories of idolatry,
Franciscan evangelizers would retrain the native memory
to retain Christian doctrine, using carefully constructed
mnemonic techniques.
It is Gante who, along with Huanitzin, is named on the
edge of the featherwork Mass of Saint Gregory (figure 5.3),
discussed in the previous chapter. The main figure of the
central field of that work, Pope Gregory the Great, may
have had a particular appeal to Gante for his writings
on evangelization; his work was certainly well known to
Gante’s disciple Valadés. 18 During his tenure as pope in
the sixth century, Gregory spearheaded the evangeliza-
tion of pagan Anglo-Saxon England, and in the letters he
wrote to Mellitus, who was en route to England, Gregory
sketched out a framework for pagan conversion that was
at the forefront of the minds of church intellectuals as
they faced the immense task of evangelization in the New
World. The principles that he laid down offered much-
needed guidance to the Franciscans a millennium later.
Most compellingly, Gregory supported the reuse of shrines
of a pagan religion, writing, “It is clear that the shrines of
idols [fana idolorum] in the land should not be destroyed,
but rather that the idols that are in them should be. Let
holy water be prepared and sprinkled in these shrines, and
altars constructed, and relics deposited, because, as long as
these shrines are well built, it is necessary that they should
be transformed from the cult of demons to the service of
the true God.” 19 In the same letter, Gregory argued that if
the shrines were not destroyed, just the idols, the former
pagans would “flock with more familiarity to the places
to which they are accustomed.” Thus, Pedro de Gante
may have been thinking about the lessons and guidance
that Gregory offered in a land of novice Christians and
perhaps the possibility of exchange between indigenous
sacred categories and Catholic ones in sixteenth-century
New Spain.The rHeTOrica cHriSTiana
and memoRy
We know more about Gante’s pedagogy, and the theory
of mind that lay behind it, than that of any other priest in
sixteenth-century New Spain because its principles were
set down in a book written by his pupil and secretary, the
Franciscan Diego Valadés. Born in 1533 in New Spain in
the city of Tlaxcala, Valadés had obscure origins. 20 At
about age ten, he was entrusted into Gante’s care and lived
in San Francisco from 1543 to 1555. Valadés learned to draw
and paint there; in addition, he seems to have had a facility
for language, and knew Spanish, Latin, Nahuatl, Tarascan,
and Otomí. Indigenous languages were particularly useful
to him after he was ordained at the age of twenty-two;
he was the guardian of the Franciscan monastery in Tlax-
cala, a Nahuatl-speaking region, and also worked on the
northern frontier of New Spain evangelizing the Otomí-
speaking Chichimecs. After some sixteen years as a Fran-
ciscan, Valadés left New Spain for the first time in his life
to cross the Atlantic in 1571, when he traveled in Franciscan
circles in Spain and France. By May of 1575, Valadés was in
Rome, a member of the papal court, having been elected
the General Solicitor of the Order. 21
While in Rome, Valadés decided to write a book, the
Rhetorica christiana, part instructional manual, part his-
tory, with the stated aim of making accessible the large
body of work that existed on both rhetoric and mnemonic
techniques for preachers, who might be prevented from
acquiring the necessary books themselves due to their pov-
erty. 22 In the work, he synthesized ideas about rhetoric and
memory drawn from both classical (Cicero, Diomedes)