Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham, Sabanci University Writing Center, Turkey

This monograph examines the gradual emergence of standardized Spanish, or Castilian, in Spain and Latin America from the seventh to the sixteenth centuries. David Rojinski focuses on the role played by writing and literacy in the exercise of power (e.g. language planning policies), particularly in Spanish overseas territories, where alphabetization was a form of colonial acculturation. The work comprises six chapters, with an introduction, a postscript, and an index.

Each of the first three chapters focuses on a historical figure associated with the transition from Latin to Spanish. R uses the figures of Isadore of Seville, Alfonso X, and Antonio de Nebrija as discursive entities around which textual cultures were shaped. The following three chapters analyze the contributions of seminal figures and texts associated with the transfer of an alphabetized culture to the Americas in the sixteenth century.

Ch. 1, ‘Generating the origins of letters and kingdoms’ (31–58), analyzes aspects of the historiographical approach of Isidore of Seville manifested in his seventh century works Etymologiae, sive Origines and Historia de Regibus Gothorum. This is followed by a discussion of the expansion of vernacular writing during the reign of Alfonso X (1252–84) in Ch. 2. R examines Alfonso X’s work, Siete Partidas, as well as a contemporaneous Latinate text by Jiménez de Rada, De Rebus Hispaniae (1247). During this period of reconquest and repopulation, the author studies the acceptance of Castilian as an official written language of law on the basis of these two texts.

In Ch. 3, ‘The renaissance(s) of the “Companion to Empire”’ (93–136), R examines the function of the written word during the reign of the Catholic monarchs, and discusses different historical receptions of Nebrija’s phrase ‘siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio’ (‘language has always accompanied the Empire’). In Ch. 4,  ‘Age of iron, age of writing’ (137–76), R uses the work of Martyr D’Anghiera, De Orbe Novo, Decades (1516), to explore manifestations of humanistic rhetoric in the context of early colonization and continued territorial conquest in the Americas. He considers the extent to which this confrontation between different peoples was interpreted as one between alphabetic and non-alphabetic cultures. In the following chapter, ‘The task of translators past and present’ (177–222), R discusses the reactions of different sectors of colonial society to Mesoamerican writing systems. He also examines how a contemporary historian, James Lockhart, viewed the alphabetic transcription of pre-Hispanic writing.

In the final chapter, ‘The violence of the letrados’ (223–260), the author examines the relationship between military expansion of the empire in the Americas and the bureaucratic conquest of the empire, for which language was a fundamental instrument. He challenges previous notions that these two activities were separate. He bases his discussion on his reading of Nuño Beltran de Guzman’s transcription of the Proceso de Cazonci (‘The Trial of the Cazonci’, 1530), focusing in particular on the relationship between the infliction of violent bodily inscriptions on the last Cazonci (‘ruler’) of the ancient kingdom of Michoacán and Guzman’s description of this act in  in the Proceso. This exemplifies the intersection of colonial law-making and colonial violence.

This is an unusual text, both in its approach and breadth of content, and will appeal to scholars of medieval Hispanic and transatlantic studies.