Introduction
As Saint Augustine says against Faustus: the person who does not lead an ordered life must perforce fall into great sin. – Francesc Eiximeinis, translated by Hernando de TalaveraFootnote 1
On January 1, 1567, seventy-five years after the conquest by Spanish queen and king Isabella and Ferdinand of the Emirate of Granada (the event known as the Reconquista), a royal edict was proclaimed throughout the city. The pragmática, ratified by King Philip II and put into practice by the Royal Audiencia, the name for the council governing the recently (re)conquered territory, sought to eradicate the culture of Muslim converts to Christianity, or Moriscos. (They were also known as “New Christians,” a term distinguishing them from “Old Christians,” the native-born Christian population of Spain.) The edict ordered Moriscos to stop speaking, reading, or writing in Arabic, adopt Castilian as their language, and abandon traditional dances, clothing, food, and naming conventions.Footnote 2 The pragmática sought to do away with the Treaty of Granada of 1491, which purported to preserve some degree of Morisco bureaucratic, linguistic, and cultural autonomy.Footnote 3
Shocked by such a threat to their culture, the Morisco community requested Francisco Núñez Muley (ca. 1490-ca. 1570), who came from a “lineage of kings,” to act as a spokesman before the Spanish authorities.Footnote 4 A fully Hispanized son of the former Arab aristocracy (that is, a mawlā—or lord—in Arabic, adapted as muley in Spanish), Núñez Muley held a major position in Spanish society because of this cultural hybridity: his allegiance lay with his Morisco peers, but he spoke Castilian as his only language and embodied the customs of the Old Christians. In 1567, Núñez Muley put forward a Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audiencia, a detailed report presenting Morisco cultural practices as being compatible with Spanish Catholicism.
One of Núñez Muley’s arguments against the pragmática was that, back in the 1490s, the first archbishop of Granada, Hernando de Talavera (ca. 1430-1507), had promoted the Christianization, not eradication, of Morisco culture. According to Núñez Muley, the archbishop understood that, while some Morisco practices were closely linked to Islam, others “were outside of it” and could be incorporated within a Catholic context.Footnote 5
To establish his Catholic credentials, Núñez Muley invoked the roots of his cultural hybridity. As a muley child during the Reconquista, he had a deep connection to the history of the young Granadan Church. Núñez served “for over three years as a page to the holy archbishop and accompanied him on a visit that he made to the Alpujarras … in the year 1502,” followed by other visits between 1506 and 1507, the year of Talavera’s death.Footnote 6 The Alpujarras is a region near Granada and the site of a Morisco rebellion between 1499 and 1501; Talavera visited the region to help pacify it. The presence of muleys in his retinue helped Talavera gain legitimacy among the local population. One of the muley boys chosen to leave their families and live at the archepiscopal palace, Núñez Muley was about ten years old at the time. Talavera ran the school for the entirety of his tenure, from 1493 to 1507.
Núñez Muley’s audience was aware of the goals behind Talavera’s residential school: the deployment of humanist pedagogy and schooling to assimilate Morisco boys into Spanish Catholicism and culture. For Talavera, Catholicism was a complete way of life, one where religion, language, behavior, food, dress, and social expectations responded to the exigencies of Spanish orthodoxy (correct beliefs) and orthopraxy (correct practice). Spanish humanists called Catholic orthopraxy the cultivation of “good manners” (buenas costumbres) within the context of “an ordered life” (una vida ordenada).Footnote 7 Talavera envisioned a Spanish society that was homogenized on the basis of beliefs and cultural practices.Footnote 8 Despite his opposition to the pragmática, Núñez Muley embodied the ideal of the assimilated Morisco that the royal edict aimed to create. The muley was so “ordered” in the Hispanic ways that he forgot his Arabic, wore Spanish clothes, and knew Spanish etiquette so well that he represented his community before Kings Ferdinand and Charles V in his youth. His Memorandum, written fully in Spanish and some poor Arabic, is the only extant firsthand testimony from a Morisco who self-identifies as one of Talavera’s pages.
In forming Núñez Muley, Talavera’s residential school for Morisco boys was successful. After their education in all things Spanish, noble boys like Núñez Muley worked in their communities as cultural and linguistic intermediaries, helping the Spanish bureaucratic and ecclesiastical machine better manage the newly conquered people.Footnote 9 Some previous scholarship views the Reconquista and contemporaneous Spanish humanism as the immediate precursors to Spanish and European colonialism in the Americas and beyond. Thus, Talavera’s school and its humanist pedagogy led to what would become a staple of future Spanish (and afterward, all European) colonial projects: massive programs of evangelical assimilation and the establishment of boarding or residential schools for non-European children, particularly boys of the conquered nobilities.Footnote 10
Previous scholarship on colonial residential schooling has largely focused on its eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century developments in English-speaking countries, with some notable exceptions.Footnote 11 Some scholars, however, have acknowledged that residential schools for European cultural assimilation have early Spanish colonialism as their common historical precedent.Footnote 12 Thus, this article seeks to expand the historiography of residential schools by analyzing Talavera’s school and humanist pedagogy as a project of cultural assimilation that inspired future colonial residential schooling. To accomplish that, this article will (1) compare Talavera’s pedagogy with humanist theories and practices of children’s education and residential schooling, (2) investigate whether humanist pedagogy informed the methods and goals of the archbishop’s residential school, and (3) establish a historical link to early residential schools in the colonial Americas.
The first section will describe Talavera’s spirituality, as presented in his devotional literature written before the Reconquista, as a pedagogy of good manners, daily habits, and control of the body (that is, a spirituality centered on orthopraxy). This section also argues that Talavera’s focus on bodily orthopraxy is inspired by Italian and Spanish humanist pedagogy and fourteenth-century residential schooling in Europe. After establishing Talavera’s humanist credentials, the second section will reconstruct the lives of Talavera’s students using the archbishop’s regulations for his archepiscopal house and the earliest biography of Talavera. This reconstruction will allow us to determine whether Talavera’s school was indeed aimed at cultural assimilation through humanist pedagogy. Finally, the conclusion will briefly argue that colonial residential schools in the Americas, particularly in the island of Hispaniola as early as 1511, were informed by the model of Talavera’s school and humanist pedagogy. Núñez Muley’s educational experiences connect him to thousands of other children worldwide in a long and often misunderstood episode in the history of education—his experience could serve as the beginning of a general history of colonial residential schools.
Ordered Lives and Good Manners–Talavera’s Pedagogy of Orthopraxy
It is necessary that you conform yourselves in and through everything to the good and honest way of life of the good and honest Christian men and women. That is, [you must conform yourselves] to the way they dress, wear shoes, shave, eat, and to their meals and cooked meats in the way they cook them, and to the way you walk and take and receive things. And above all [you must conform yourselves] in your speech, trying to forget as much as you can the Arabic language, and pushing others to forget it, so that it is never spoken in your homes.
—Hernando de Talavera, “Instruction to a group of Albaicín neighbors,” ca. 1499Footnote 13No one should dare address another person with a Moorish proper name under penalty of two reales… . Instead, when one person addresses another, they should use their Christian proper name.
—Hernando de Talavera, “Order of the Granadan archbishopric to teach Christian doctrine to the newly converted,” ca. 1496 or 1502Footnote 14Moriscos and Talavera’s Pedagogy
Contemporary scholars agree that “for Talavera, outward practice was a fundamental aspect of the Christian religion.”Footnote 15 However, a vein of traditional historiography tends to label Talavera as an “accommodationist” and even a “multiculturalist” in his approach to the evangelization of New Christians. Traditional historiography would consider it impossible to see Talavera as pursuing an agenda of cultural assimilation or being one of the forefathers of colonial residential schooling. As traditional historiography still informs Talavera’s reputation among non-specialists, it is necessary to summarize and refute it.
Scholars following traditional historiography note that Talavera implemented “multicultural” measures, such as promoting the study of Arabic among his priests, welcoming traditional Morisco dances and clothing, and refraining from implementing a policy of mass baptisms at the outset of his tenure. Talavera also exhorted Old Christians to treat New Christians, whether converts from Judaism or Islam, with compassion and respect. That is, traditional scholars see Talavera as standing opposite the policies pursued by the 1567 pragmática. Thus, “the lonely figure of Hernando de Talavera … [and] his sensitive approach to proselytizing the Muslims by meeting them halfway in their own cultural ground” stood in contrast to the mistakes of Isabella, Ferdinand, the Inquisition, and particularly of Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436-1517).Footnote 16 Cisneros, confessor to Queen Isabella after Talavera, brought the court of the Inquisition to Granada in 1499, and began promoting campaigns of mass baptism. Traditional historiography, already established by the sixteenth century, also portrays Talavera as an advocate of inner piety over external orthopraxy.Footnote 17
Older historiography presents Talavera and Cisneros as the archetypes of, on the one hand, cultural openness and compassionate orthodoxy, and, on the other, religious authoritarianism and coercive orthopraxy. Accordingly, it sees Cisneros as the instigator of forced mass baptisms and other methods of cultural assimilation starting in late 1499.Footnote 18 This reputation is due in no small part to the efforts by Núñez Muley and Alonso Fernández de Madrid (1474-1559), Talavera’s first biographer.Footnote 19 Both authors used the figure of Talavera for their own ends—Núñez Muley to combat the pragmática, and Fernández de Madrid to present Talavera as a saintlike man and candidate for canonization.Footnote 20
Recent research has begun to paint a much different picture.Footnote 21 The texts quoted above, together with the example of Núñez Muley as a Hispanized Morisco, suggest that Talavera’s ultimate objective was the complete assimilation of all Moriscos through the regulation of their habits and bodies. Beyond the adoption of Catholic orthodoxy, Talavera encouraged New Christians to see external orthopraxy, or good manners, as the essence of their new Catholic identity. He exhorted Moriscos to adapt all aspects of their daily life to Spanish expectations: their names, their garments, and food; their gait (“how you walk”), their hands (“how you … take and receive things”), and their mouths (“your speech”). For Talavera, personal piety was expressed above all by the adoption of (Spanish) good manners, which he deemed as conforming to nature and reason.Footnote 22 There is no evidence that Talavera ever stood against Cisneros’s policies: instead, it seems he supported them.Footnote 23 Recent scholarship recognizes that Talavera only allowed certain Morisco cultural practices as a temporary measure—his objective being, like Cisneros, the total transformation of Morisco life.Footnote 24
Talavera’s fixation on homogenizing Spanish society through Catholic orthopraxy was not new when he became archbishop of Granada in January of 1493. Talavera was already known as an exacting spiritual teacher, a church and state reformer, and a Christian humanist focused on buenas costumbres. As a humanist, the twenty-year-old Talavera produced a Castilian translation of Petrarch’s Invectivae contra medicum in 1450. He became the prior of a monastery in Valladolid in 1470 and the bishop of Ávila in 1486. In that capacity, Talavera addressed several moral writings to everyone from the queen and members of the nobility to nuns and laypeople in Valladolid, instructing them on how to best organize their manners and their daily habits.Footnote 25
Moreover, as a humanist engaged with Spanish scholars, he supported their imperialist version of humanism. It was Talavera who introduced Antonio de Nebrija to the court in 1486. Scholars who qualify Talavera as an accommodationist often overlook the fact that, at least according to Nebrija, it was the bishop who coined the famed maxim “Language is the companion of empire” (Siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio). In a speech to the court, the bishop argued that any barbarian conquered by the Spanish crown must submit to the victors’ laws—that is, to the entire sphere of external behavior (dress, food, language) that was essential to Spanish Catholic culture.Footnote 26 For Talavera as well as for Nebrija, humanism and cultural assimilation went hand in hand.
In other words, to fully understand Talavera’s pedagogy, it is necessary to study it in the context of fifteenth-century humanist educational thought. Talavera was an avid reader of humanist literature throughout his life: the books he bequeathed in his will include works by Petrarch, Boccaccio, Martius Galeotti, Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, and Antonio de Nebrija, in addition to editions of Quintilian, Cicero (as well as pseudo-Cicero’s Rhetorica ad Herennium), Virgil, Seneca, Plato (via Marsilius Ficinus’s translation), and Ovid, among other Greco-Roman classics.Footnote 27
The next section will analyze Talavera’s version of Catholic orthopraxy as found in his devotional writings, and the following section will compare those writings with humanist pedagogical treatises. As we will see, Talavera’s attention to good manners and control of the body was less shaped by medieval thought than informed by a humanist morality that emphasized strict attention to outward behavior.
Talavera’s Pedagogy of Good Manners
To reach as many people as possible, Talavera preferred to write in Castilian instead of Latin. The largest written testament of Talavera’s exacting pedagogy is a collection of catechetical and moral treatises he sent to the printing press in 1496, titled Breve y muy provechosa doctrina de lo que debe saber todo Christiano con otros tractados muy provechosos, or Breve doctrina for short.Footnote 28 One of the earliest champions of the printing press in Spain, Talavera saw the invention’s potential to help instill orthopraxy throughout the realm. In addition to books, Talavera also implemented “policies of the image,” primarily through the printing and distribution of devotional stamps to New Christian households, aimed at combating Muslim aniconism.Footnote 29 As a vernacular humanist, Talavera had a deep-vested interest in cultivating literacy in Castilian, at least at a basic level, to promote Christian virtue.
The Breve doctrina contains a catechetical doctrine covering the basics of the faith titled “A brief doctrine and teaching … that children should be taught.” It was distributed independently in manuscript or print as a cartilla, or reading primer for children, the first of its kind in Castilian. The cartilla evidences Talavera’s commitment to humanist pedagogy, as printed ABC books were promoted among humanist circles.Footnote 30 According to one testimony, Talavera ordered copies of the cartilla to be distributed free of charge to all Christian households in Granada, possibly along with printed devotional stamps.Footnote 31 Thus, although he wrote the cartilla for children, Talavera intended its lessons (and those of the entire Breve doctrina) to be followed by all Christians, whether Old or New.
Most of the nine treatises contained in the Breve doctrina are concerned with external orthopraxy:
Treatise 3: “A confessional or instruction regarding how we can sin against the Ten Commandments”
Treatise 4: A brief treatise on how we should make up for and satisfy all manner of offenses”
Treatise 6: “A very useful treatise against gossip and slandering people in their absence, which is a great and very common sin”
Treatise 8: “A delightful and useful treatise against excess in clothing, footwear, food, and drink”
Treatise 9: “A useful treatise on how we should be very careful in spending our time well and how we should spend it so as not to lose good opportunities”Footnote 32
Talavera’s moral advice is characterized by its attention to outward orthopraxy and its “unusual degree of specificity.”Footnote 33 Talavera is particularly interested in providing regulations regarding how Christians should organize their everyday work, clothing, food, speech, and behavior. The cartilla says that a good Christian organizes their daily schedule around visits to the church and their annual schedule according to feasts. Treatise 9 proposes a vida ordenada structured by daily, weekly, and monthly schedules. It includes exhaustive notes on who should undertake what tasks, when, and how. Throughout the Breve doctrina, Talavera expresses an immense distaste for idleness, which, for him, constituted any time not devoted to work, study, or prayer. “Idleness teaches many evils; therefore, flee from it as from a deadly pestilence.”Footnote 34
Treatise 3 is an exhaustive list of examples of sins against each of the Ten Commandments that anyone in the church, from bishops to children, is prone to commit in their public and private lives. Treatise 8 presents what Talavera considers to be the “rational” and “natural” way of behaving with respect to clothing, footwear, food, and drink. The treatise condemns practices such as having more clothing than necessary and inventing new fashions. Condemning both dietary restrictions and overindulgence, Talavera recommends a diet of simple, unseasoned food that features the produce of the season. In the spring, this includes fowl, beef, pork, fresh fruits, and vegetables; in the winter, nuts, dried fruits, and aged meats are recommended. Given Treatise 8’s approval of government regulations regarding clothing, its estimation of Spanish practices as “rational” and “natural,” and its condemnation of dietary restrictions, it is clear that Talavera would never consider Jewish and Muslim practices to have anything but a provisional place within a Catholic order.Footnote 35
The Breve doctrina and Talavera’s instructions to Morisco communities confirm the archbishop’s conception of Catholic orthopraxy. For the archbishop, an ideal Catholic life implies considering all aspects of external behavior as essential to religion. That is, to be a Catholic means adapting daily habits to the supposed natural order and rationality inherent to Castilian good manners.
The Middle Ages featured some moral treatises concerned with good manners and regulating everyday behavior (for instance, Don Juan Manuel’s El conde Lucanor and the Libro del caballero et del Escudero). However, they were usually not concerned with the specifics of outward behavior. It was the pedagogical projects and writings of Italian and Spanish humanists that transformed moral treatises into thorough instructions regarding the orthopraxy of an educated Christian. Their treatises and their guidelines on behavior would eventually evolve into books of manners or etiquette.Footnote 36 As Nebrija’s friend and reader of Sánchez de Arévalo, Quintilian, and the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Talavera was deeply familiar with humanist pedagogical practices and theories. Humanist pedagogy provided the foundation for Talavera’s notion of orthopraxy—and the core of the educational experience at his residential school.
Humanist Pedagogy and Good Manners
Petrarch inaugurated the fundamental tension undergirding humanist pedagogy: that between eloquentia and literary erudition on the one hand, and civilitas and virtus on the other. No humanist school or pedagogue shunned either side of the tension, as humanist educators argued that classical literature fostered morality in children and adults. However, despite their Catholic religiosity, humanist educators generally understood virtue in the Greco-Roman manner: as external orthopraxy and control of daily habits, conducive to the student’s assimilation into the culture of their civitas.Footnote 37 Humanist pedagogical thought was driven by a reevaluation of ancient pedagogical treatises, most notably Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, Cicero’s De oratore, pseudo-Cicero’s Rhetorica ad Herennium, and Plutarch’s De liberis educandis. In the sixteenth century, humanism’s focus on external behavior would find its most impactful expression in Erasmus’s On Civility in Children. Footnote 38
One of the innovations of humanist education was the establishment of residential schools, also known as contubernia, which were founded as alternatives to the content and practices of medieval schools.Footnote 39 Despite their focus on Greek and Latin literature, contubernia educators did not disregard religious instruction. Contubernia derived their general regulations from the Benedictines and other orders.Footnote 40 This was the case for state-sponsored public schools in Città del Castello since the fourteenth century, as well as for Vittorino da Feltre’s Ca’ Zoiosa, operating in Mantua between 1423 and 1446.Footnote 41 Da Feltre’s contubernium, housing children and teenagers between the ages of ten and eighteen, was strongly focused on fostering virtus, both secular and religious, through a strict regulation of daily life. For da Feltre, rhetorical education was important, but regulating daily habits according to Christian virtus was central.Footnote 42
Contubernia differed from medieval schools in fundamental details. For one, they were institutions funded by cities and operating within state-owned buildings. Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua, invited da Feltre to transform the Ca’ Zoiosa, a building used for the court’s feasts, into a contubernium that would provide humanist education to the marquis’s children, aristocratic boys, and other talented youth.Footnote 43 While strongly religious, humanist schools focused on educating laymen (and some women). Da Feltre’s alumni included politicians, secretaries, writers, scholars, military officers, and lawyers.Footnote 44 Contubernia education centered on inculcating external orthopraxy as a way for students to fit and prosper in a culturally homogeneous society.
Pedagogical treatises defined the rhetorical and literary curricula at humanist residential schools. Like Talavera’s Breve doctrina, humanist pedagogical treatises are characterized by a high degree of specificity in their regulations of students’ bodies and daily habits. Theoreticians and educators such as Pier Paolo Vergerio, Enea Silvio Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), Guarino da Verona, and Maffeo Vegio proposed thorough programs of education in honesti mores (good manners). Despite their differences, they all agree on the fundamentals: moral education involves directing emotions through bodily discipline, work, and a regimented diet. The body (cleanliness, clothing, gait, and the movement and placement of one’s mouth, tongue, eyes, neck, arms) expresses a person’s decorum and dignity. Although students should have some time for leisure, their schedules should be strictly regulated to instill in learners a sense of order (ordo). Food and clothing should respond to the needs of the season. Behavior should be adapted to place and time (at home, alone, with guests, abroad, in public spaces, at church, and so on). Italian pedagogues, like Talavera, argue that their instructions regarding daily habits are grounded in nature and reason.Footnote 45
Spanish humanists adopted the pedagogical impetus of the Italians. Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo outlines specific instructions to infuse honesti mores in children and teenagers, and he is as concerned as the Italians with their bodies, food, and drink. As for speech, children should be subjected to silence. Antonio de Nebrija agrees with Sánchez de Arévalo on most points, except regarding physical punishment, which Sánchez approves but Nebrija rejects. Nebrija is exhaustive in his guidance on how children should learn to control the movements of their bodies and their gait. Both humanists claim that inculcating self-control in children through bodily and emotional asceticism leads to the construction of strong and devout adults. For Sánchez and Nebrija, education in classical literature is not as essential as forming a piety of external orthopraxy. For that reason, instruction in the vernacular is ideal.Footnote 46
Late medieval residential schools in Spain, which preceded or coexisted with Talavera’s school, responded to the influence of the Italian contubernia. Like Italian institutions, Spanish residential schools were centers sponsored by cities or private schools for a few children at a teacher’s home. In general, however, Spanish schools served more as apprenticeships for specific professions than centers of moral formation. Non-residential schools, such as schools for basic literacy (escuelas para enseñar a leer), only operated for a few hours daily. They quickly adopted the humanist format of ABC books (cartillas para enseñar a leer), especially after Talavera’s cartilla appeared in print outside Granada.Footnote 47
Talavera’s pedagogy, with its punctilious regulations of daily habits, is a continuation of humanist theories and practices in Spain and Italy. Although the medieval element is evident, given Talavera’s concern with orthodoxy, the humanist influence also informs his emphasis on orthopraxy. The archbishop’s concern with daily habits, his meticulous instructions regarding every small aspect of behavior, and the instilling of “rational” good manners as central to the education of an orthodox Christian orden mirror Italian pedagogues’ moral thoroughness. Starting in 1493, Talavera found another way of operationalizing his humanist pedagogy in the form of a contubernium for Morisco children.
A Humanist Experiment: Talavera’s Residential School for New Christian Boys
According to Fernández de Madrid’s biography of Talavera, the archbishop turned Granada into a school of “the things of faith and good manners” for Old and New Christians alike. Since the early days of his tenure, some adult converts were forced to attend catechetical instruction at the churches throughout Granada on Sundays and feast days. Some New Christian families relocated to “houses of doctrine” (casas de la doctrina), Christian neighborhoods where they could live apart from the rest of Granadan society. Catechetical instruction and separation from Muslim society provided a means to enforce the assimilation of adult Moriscos into Spanish habits.Footnote 48
Children were of special interest to Talavera. For commoner Morisco children, the archbishop hired salaried teachers who taught at local churches; in poorer churches, the sacristan acted as the teacher and exacted payment from the parents. Children between the ages of four and fourteen, mostly boys, studied a basic religious curriculum. In the cathedral and the wealthier churches, children learned how to read and write after studying the basic tenets of Christian faith and the most important prayers. The more advanced students also received lessons in singing and some basic Latin (gramática), probably only the basic prayers. At the churches, teenagers and adults could attend readings of selected texts from canon law and confessional manuals. The children’s basic textbook was Talavera’s cartilla. Schools for commoner Moriscos were non-residential.Footnote 49 Talavera’s catechetical campaigns were not as widespread as Fernández de Madrid would like us to believe.Footnote 50 However, they reveal the archbishop’s reliance on humanist methods (the cartilla) and goals (good manners as a tool for cultural assimilation).
Muleys like Francisco Núñez had a completely different educational experience. In addition to Núñez Muley and Fernández de Madrid, we know of Talavera’s residential school and the archbishop’s regulation of his palace through another source known as the Instrucción para el régimen interior de su palacio.Footnote 51 According to the Instrucción, Talavera housed an unspecified number of “newly converted boys” between the ages of five and fourteen.Footnote 52 The boys shared the palace with the archbishop and a long list of other people who lived or worked there, including financial and bureaucratic administrators, priests, seminarians and novices, secretaries, a gatekeeper, a stable hand, a pantry manager, a jailer, and others. Following the model of Italian contubernia, Talavera also housed Spanish aristocratic youth as lay students of Christian humanism or as novices. Spanish students tended to be older than their Morisco counterparts: Fernández de Madrid entered Talavera’s palace around the age of eighteen. Old Christian novices were also around eighteen years old.Footnote 53
Different sets of circumstances led to Morisco children joining their new home. Despite not being part of the collaborationists who sided with the Spanish during the war, Núñez Muley’s family, like many other muley families, accepted baptism and allied themselves with the new rulers immediately.Footnote 54 Motivated by the archbishop, these families sent some of their boys to the archbishop to fully integrate them into Spanish society. Some noble New Christian families were forced to surrender their boys as well. The school also housed at least a few boys orphaned during the war.Footnote 55
Talavera’s palace was a self-contained laboratory for the archbishop to implement his humanist pedagogy of good habits. Mirroring the Breve doctrina’s attention to detail, the Instrucción contains a long list of extremely specific guidance on behavior for everyone in the palace, from the archbishop to the students and the staff. For instance, the archbishop demands that most of his staff (secretaries, mayordomo, winery manager, stable hands, etc.) attend daily morning mass and pray before meals at the refectory. Talavera expects all his staff to wear proper, clean clothes and to perform their jobs according to the archbishop’s very detailed instructions. For example, he instructs the winery manager on how to store water, bread, wine, vinegar, bacon, oil, rat traps, eggs, fruit, fish, octopus, and the house cat, providing precise instructions for each item in proper order.Footnote 56 In short, the sources offer us a view into Talavera’s conception of his palace as a training site in Catholic orthopraxy regarding every aspect of daily behavior.
Regarding the residential school, the sources present the image of a learning space designed for constant surveillance and evaluation of orthopraxy. A cadre of palace employees worked day and night to make sure that both Old and New Christian boys enjoyed no privacy and followed Talavera’s exhaustive regulations. While the school educated Spanish students in their own culture, the Instrucción is particularly concerned with regulating and enforcing rules of behavior for Morisco children. By segregating them from their communities, Talavera’s rules made sure to separate the boys from all aspects of their identity (their culture, their language, their families) through the strict regulation of their daily habits.
During their time with Talavera, children forgot their Arabic and learned Castilian. They studied reading and writing in the Latin alphabet, learned about the workings of the church’s ceremonies, read Spanish literature and basic Latin, and ultimately lost their Arabic identities and acquired new Spanish ones. Following the archbishop’s “policies of the image,” the children were surrounded by the numerous printed and painted Catholic images contained in the main rooms of the archepiscopal palace.Footnote 57 Talavera’s school operationalized humanist pedagogy’s special concern with external behavior as the object of education.
The Instrucción describes the boys’ daily schedule. The children slept in a communal dormitory overseen by a veedor del dormitorio (dormitory inspector) and an ayo de niños (children’s tutor). The children were prohibited from waking up at night, talking in the dormitory, and, above all, acting against sexual propriety. A candle burned all night long to allow the veedor and any other adult within the dormitory to supervise the boys. When the children needed to use the restroom, they had to use the communal basin, which was supervised by yet other servants (servidores con sus paños, or attendants carrying linens), who had towels ready to clean the boys. Following Sánchez de Arévalo, Talavera advised that the children should become used to silence.Footnote 58
The boys woke up early, probably between the hours of Lauds (5 a.m.) and Prime (6 a.m.), mirroring Talavera’s waking hours. At least a pair of them woke up even earlier, joining the archbishop for the day’s first prayers. The ayo de niños was charged with waking up the children. After waking up, both the ayo and the maestro de novicios (master of novices) ensured that the children recited the basic prayers in Castilian (Our Father, Hail Mary, the Credo, etc.). Talavera ordered tutors to drill the boys on their prayers at numerous points during the day. Constant drilling provided a mechanism to assess whether the boys were thoroughly learning their lessons (and Castilian).Footnote 59 As recommended by Sánchez de Arévalo and Nebrija, the school stressed constant training in the public performance of instructional material as a way to strengthen the children’s learning.Footnote 60
In consonance with his emphasis on external behavior, Talavera taught everyone that “from a bad external composition and attire you can deduce that someone is not well composed internally.”Footnote 61 After waking up, the boys donned their uniforms, which must have seemed too simple and rough to Spanish and Morisco boys alike but were appropriate in the eyes of Fernández de Madrid, who thought the students’ clothes were proper to a life of roughness (aspereza). The boys’ clothes were made of brownish common cloth (paño común pardillo), and they wore a white doublet, also made of common cloth. Talavera also made sure that all boys wore their hair short (sobre las orejas). For all boys, whether Christian or Morisco, a change of clothes and hairstyle was a visible mark of their newly ordered lives. Clothing, especially the doublet or jubón, marked Morisco boys as Spanish. As Fernández de Madrid suggests, Talavera ensured that all the boys, regardless of origin and status, dressed, ate, and were treated the same way. That clothing made Spanish and Morisco boys equal in the eyes of the archbishop signaled to the Moriscos that Spanish fashion carried social benefits. Assimilated Moriscos like Francisco Núñez Muley were so touched by their change of clothing that they never wore Morisco attire again.Footnote 62
After getting dressed in their rough outfit, the first activity for the boys and the staff was to attend the archbishop’s mass. Talavera celebrated mass at his palace or at some of the most important early churches in Granada, which, like the site of city’s cathedral, were often mosques transformed into sites of Christian worship.Footnote 63 Walking to another church was one of the few opportunities the boys had to leave the palace. En route, they could experience a reconfiguration of the previously Muslim cityscape. Talavera (in agreement with Cisneros) sought to transform Islamic architecture into places of Catholic worship through the addition, replacement, or alteration of architectural elements. Even sounds were transformed: in the few remaining mosques, the adhan, or Islamic call to prayer, was forbidden. With their symbols of power appropriated and the sights and sounds of their city transformed, Muslims were expected to convert more promptly.Footnote 64 Because Talavera’s students encountered Catholicism behind the scenes (as altar boys, cantors, or pages), actively participating during mass and the liturgical hours, they experienced the transformation of their city more intensively than anyone else.
As Núñez Muley argues, students (“servers to the archbishop”) were the best witnesses of Talavera’s liturgical style. The author’s testimony regarding Talavera’s mass provides good evidence of the results of the school’s training in language and literature:
Some words of Arabic were even spoken in mass. When the archbishop said, “Dominus bobispon” [that is, Dominus vobiscum], people responded with, “Ybara figun” [that is, the Arabic yubārik fīkum, or “May he bless you all”]. I remember this as if it were yesterday, in the year 1502. And if there is anyone still around who served this archbishop—I doubt that any have remained in this land—he will remember something of what I have just mentioned.Footnote 65
The passage reveals the importance that language had in Talavera’s orthopraxy. As Núñez Muley’s defective Latin shows, Talavera probably disregarded any serious instruction in Latin for Morisco boys. However, Latin was the church’s language. Thus, Morisco boys were acquainted, at least phonetically, with very basic Latin, which they had to recite during daily drills and mass. In any case, Castilian was the school’s main language of instruction and ideally the only language Morisco boys ever used. The boys’ main textbooks were Talavera’s Granadan prints, mainly the cartilla. Núñez Muley also exhibits familiarity with the Bible, so Talavera surely included the study of vernacular translations of the Old and New Testaments in the boys’ curriculum.Footnote 66 In addition to reading, boys also learned music and, more crucially, how to write. The Memorandum manuscript exhibits a fine cortesana hand with some procesal traits, which reveals Núñez Muley’s lifelong training in writing in a Castilian hand that served virtually all bureaucratic purposes.Footnote 67 Talavera’s school gave Morisco boys like Núñez Muley a solid literacy foundation that allowed them to actively participate in the highly bureaucratized Spanish world.
Boys had formal lessons for some hours before and after the main meal, which occurred around 3 p.m. The rest of the time, they supported the palace staff in their tasks (tending guests during meals, cleaning the dormitory, etc.). Talavera left no room for idleness. Like Sánchez de Arévalo, the archbishop ordered the boys to always practice their reading or writing instead of playing between tasks.Footnote 68 In contrast to da Feltre’s contubernium and recommendations by Sánchez de Arévalo and Nebrija, Talavera did not give boys time for leisure and physical activity.Footnote 69 Instead, following Sánchez de Arévalo and Nebrija, the archbishop emphasized the importance of diligent work and study.Footnote 70 Despite Talavera’s roughness, sources include no mention of physical punishment at his palace.
Like other humanists, Talavera was particularly concerned with food and table manners.Footnote 71 The Instrucción is one of the best sources on the late fifteenth-century Spanish diet. It contains a comprehensive list of instructions for pantry and winery managers on how to store items in their cellars and what to include in them.Footnote 72 Given Talavera’s attention to pork and wine, Morisco boys had to get used to consuming items that were prohibited in their previous culture.Footnote 73 Thus, he considered food an essential marker of Catholic orthopraxy and yet another key element in the cultural assimilation of Morisco boys.
The main mealtime was spent in what must have been a large refectory, with the main table reserved for the archbishop and his guests. Talavera received special guests almost every day.Footnote 74 The palace was frequently visited by court officials, men of letters, and the families of Old Christian students. Morisco boys and other pages helped the maestresala (household steward) in serving the guests, observing proper table etiquette. The constant contact with influential men of different social standings gave Morisco children a training in the complexities of Spanish hierarchical society. However, the boys were not allowed to speak during mealtime, so Talavera instructed them to communicate using hand signals.Footnote 75 As in conventual refectories, during the meal a reader would recite passages from scripture and other devotional works, most likely in Castilian.
The day ended with the singing of Compline, perhaps around 9 p.m. Upon entering their constantly supervised dormitory, the boys were required to recite the basic prayers, put on their sleeping attire, and maintain sexual propriety throughout the night. Thus, from morning to night, Talavera’s residential school provided an immersive course into Castilian Catholic orthopraxy—a course informed by Talavera’s version of humanist pedagogy. Through the experience of being continuously controlled, examined, and supervised, Morisco boys grew accustomed to a way of life that set them apart from their peers in their original communities. Despite their allegiance to their culture, they, like Núñez Muley, grew to be completely Spanish in everything but lineage.
Conclusion: Talavera and Early Residential Schools in the Americas
Talavera died in May 1507. Given Núñez Muley’s report on his visit to the Alpujarras, we can infer that the archbishop continued to house Morisco boys until his death. Scholars are certain that Talavera’s contubernium and casas de la doctrina contributed to the establishment of the first large-scale, state-sponsored residential school for Morisco children. Founded in 1530, the Imperial College of San Miguel housed about a hundred children at a time, including some girls.Footnote 76 Despite their success in training a Núñez Muley here and there, the schools were not effective at converting a whole population—a reason for the existence of the 1567 pragmática. Talavera’s contubernium, however, had an immediate impact in the early 1500s. San Miguel was far from being the first residential school inspired by the archbishop’s educational project.
Shortly after the establishment of Spanish colonies in the Antilles, the Franciscan Cisneros started sending members of his order to preach to the Old Christians and catechize the Indigenous population. Nicolás de Ovando, governor of the colony of Hispaniola (current-day Dominican Republic and Haiti), received a directive from the king and queen in 1503:
We order the Governor that he should immediately construct a house in every settlement next to a church, which should congregate all the children … twice a day. The chaplain there should teach them how to read, write, sign and confess themselves, as well as the Pater Noster, the Credo, and the Salve Regina.Footnote 77
Such a task was impossible to carry out. There were very few priests on the island. Moreover, Ovando and the Spanish settlers treated the Tainos as an expendable workforce. Having adopted the encomienda system from Granada, whereby Spanish conquistadores and other important people were assigned a monopoly over the labor of a certain conquered community, Ovando and the rest of the colonizers had little to no interest in the Tainos converting in a genuine sense, and even less in their education.Footnote 78
However, some Franciscans, inspired by the Reconquista, followed Cisneros’s directives. From Bartolomé de las Casas and other sources we know of the life and deeds of a certain Don Enrique or Enriquillo (c. 1500-c. 1536), a noble Taino educated by the Franciscans at the convent of Verapaz, close to Santo Domingo. According to the sources, the Franciscans housed noble Taino boys after Ovando killed most of the Indigenous nobility. Enrique was about ten years old when he was separated from his community. Enrique’s experience at Verapaz resembled Núñez Muley’s at Talavera’s contubernium in crucial aspects. Enrique learned the essentials of the Catholic faith, but the core of his education was his training in Catholic orthopraxy at a residential center. He was taught to dress, move, speak, and pray, as well as how to organize his daily schedule. Later in life, as the leader of a rebellion against the Spaniards, Enrique distinguished himself from other Indigenous allies for his mastery of spoken and written Spanish, for dressing like a Spaniard, and for continuing to organize his daily schedule as the Franciscans did.Footnote 79 Like Núñez Muley, Enrique’s allegiance lay with his Indigenous peers—his external signs of cultural identity, however, had been assimilated to the Spanish ways.
In other words, missionary contubernia existed in the Americas as early as 1511, nearly twenty years before the Imperial College of San Miguel. From Hispaniola, the establishment of missionary residential schools began to expand wherever Europeans founded colonies. In Mexico, Peru, Brazil, and other Iberian colonies in the Americas, residential schools became centers for the cultural assimilation of Indigenous classes of people, including bureaucrats, petty rulers, artisans, and translators.Footnote 80 Mexico’s earliest and largest residential school, the College of Tlatelolco, was founded in 1536.Footnote 81 Starting in the seventeenth century, the French and English colonies in what is now Canada and the United States transplanted the model to new lands. Crucially, these schools worked in remarkably similar ways to Talavera’s school. With the objective of culturally assimilating noble boys, residential schools segregated students from their communities and imposed a strict regimen of external behavior. Talavera’s school and the rest of the residential schools it inspired followed in the spirit of Richard Henry Pratt’s infamous educational maxim: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”Footnote 82 Change “Indian” for “Morisco,” and you have Talavera’s pedagogy in a nutshell. In short, there is a common history uniting studies of modern colonial residential schooling worldwide.
This article has presented Talavera’s residential school as the earliest application of humanist pedagogy, with its emphasis on external orthopraxy, as a tool of cultural assimilation. It thus can be interpreted as the origin (unintended by Talavera, of course) of the long history of colonial residential schooling—a history that, in the lives of its survivors and their fights for historical justice, is still ongoing. It is the hope of this author that this article motivates a genealogical investigation of colonial residential schooling that brings together strands of scholarship currently divided by national and chronological boundaries. Such a coming together can help us recuperate lost voices and experiences and contribute to mutual understanding between the peoples who still live with the consequences of such horrifying educational projects.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Carlos Diego Arenas-Pacheco is Professor of Education at the Escuela de Pedagogía, Universidad Panamericana, Mexico City. He wishes to thank Sara de la Lama for her support in the research and writing of this article. He also wants to thank Bert Carlstrom for allowing him to read and cite his forthcoming piece.
