Boturini, Vico, Mexico, and How Non-Anglo American Historiography Evaporates

Lorenzo Boturini is best known for having assembled one of the largest collections of Mexican colonial indigenous codices ever in the mid-eighteenth century. As he struggled to recover the collection from the Mexican authorities, Boturini printed in 1746 a catalogue, along with a historiographical proposal on how to write a new history of ancient Mexico.

The proposal drew on new forms of evidence, primarily Nahua vocabularies. Idea of a New General History of North America is a fine translation by Stafford Poole of Boturini’s original eighteenth-century Spanish publication, Idea de una nueva historia general.

Boturini’s printed catalogue of codices is confusing and garbled, for the Italian relied on memory to reconstruct it. It took John B. Glass over thirty years to locate the titles and whereabouts of Boturini’s original collection. As for Boturini’s new ideas on how to rewrite the ancient history of “North America,” they belong in a cultural world that is long gone. Why translate today an utterly alien text? The introduction fails to explain why. The critical apparatus in the translation is not very helpful either.

Boturini was a peculiar disciple of Vico who believed that after the Noachian flood societies fragmented into roaming individuals who had to rebuild communities from the ground up, one mute couple and bumbling extended family at a time. Boturini’s proposal relied on Euhemerist ideas, very popular among early-eighteenth-century French antiquarians like Nicolas Fréret: Heroes in classical mythology and therefore in Ovid’s Metamorphosis were archives to document the past of ancient “poetic” peoples.

In 1746, Boturini did not yet have an archive for the Indies; he offered to assemble one after returning to Mexico. Boturini’s Idea is, therefore, more of a Viconian reading of Ovid than a Euhemerist analysis of actual Mesoamerican ancient oral traditions. The Idea is largely the history of the Indies’ scared, orally inarticulate individuals who slowly begin to speak to each other using “poetic” shorthand: symbols, objects, names. In Boturini’s hands, for example, the names of thirteen deities in Mexican ritual calendars become the archive of Mexico’s turbulent post-Noachian struggle to create a social contract. We learn that Tlaloc, the deity of lighting, stands for the fear of Nahua promiscuous individuals to the higher powers manifested in thunder. “Tlaloc” reveals the origin of the first families in caves. Methodologically and historiographically, Boturini has little to offer us today. Yet his Idea is an extraordinary political, cultural, and intellectual testament to the complexities of mid-eighteenth-century Mexico and Spain.

Historians like Ivan Escamilla (not cited by Poole) have used the origins of Boturini’s archive of codices to reconstruct networks of Church patronage in the cathedrals of Puebla and Mexico, where Boturini enjoyed unprecedented backing. Nahua nuns, for example, offered Boturini contacts to Nahua elites in indigenous barrios in Mexico and Tlaxcala. Boturini also enjoyed the support of key merchant families in Mexico’s consulado (merchant guild). Boturini obtained his archive of codices while acting as representative of merchant-corregidores while the Nahua were struck by the matlazáhuatl epidemic in Tlaxcala. The epidemic forced many Tlaxcalans to part with family heirlooms, along with property and lands, to pay their debts.

Poole did not do his homework on the historiography on Boturini and dismisses as unreliable Georgio Antei’s 2007 biography of Boturini.

Antei maintained that Boturini was not a noble but a commoner born in a village in the Italian Alps without offering clear documentation. Poole argues that Antei’s conclusions are speculative and untrustworthy. The problem is that Antei draws on Italian publications of Pío Rajna and Enrico Besta, dating back to the 1930s, both very solidly footnoted.

Finally, Poole dismisses my own reading of Boturni’s Idea as the beginning of a historiographical conflict between a feuding “Aragonés” party at court and the supporters of the Italian scholar in Madrid. The debate, I argued in 2001, was over the perceived technical incompetence of the Italian regarding Mexican calendrics.

It was also over the sonnets and epigrams that accompanied the Idea. The para-text dismissed all previous “Spanish” historians, such as Garcilaso Inca de la Vega and José de Acosta, as unreliable. The Italian, his supporters alleged, was the modern equivalent of Columbus and Vespucci, a discoverer of new worlds of knowledge. The “Aragones” clique (clustered around the royal librarian Blas Antonio Nasarre) laughed and presented Boturini as a plagiarist of Vico. Poole argues that this is unlikely because the Aragonese did not participate in the conquest and administration of the Indies. This is a striking statement. Not only did conquistadors come from every town in Aragon, Corsica, Sicily, Naples, Minorca, and Mallorca (among others) but there were also literally dozens of oidores and even a few Aragonese and Catalan viceroys in America (e.g., Melchor Navarro i Rocafull, Manuel Oms i Santa Pau, Gabriel de Avilés Itúrbide y del Fierro, Manuel Amat i Junyent; Pedro Cebrián i Agustín). Two of Boturini’s most important supporters in Mexico City, were themselves Aragonese: José and Joaquín Codallos.