University of Groningen
The anti-biography of Gregorio Lopez Nunes, Lia
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10.33612/diss.127913790
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Nunes, L. (2020). The anti-biography of Gregorio Lopez: Deconstructing a sixteenth-century vita. University of Groningen. https://doi.org/10.33612/diss.127913790
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The anti-biography of Gregorio Lopez
Deconstructing a sixteenth-century
vita
PhD thesis
to obtain the degree of PhD at the University of Groningen
on the authority of the
Rector Magnificus Prof. C. Wijmenga and in accordance with
the decision by the College of Deans. This thesis will be defended in public on
29 June 2020 at 16:15 hours
by
Lia Fernanda Azevedo Nunes
born on 20th March 1985,Supervisors: Prof. M.P.A. de Baar Prof. J.P.O. e Costa
Co-supervisors: Dr. M. van Dijk Prof. T. Hillerkuss
Assessment committee: Prof. R.M. Esser
Prof. A.C. Montoya Prof. C.K.M. von Stuckrad
SFRH / BD / 77944 / 2011 PhD Fellowship supported by the Portuguese Organization for Science and Technology (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia).
Research done within QREN – POPH – Tipologia 4.1. – Bolsas de Formação Avançada, co-sponsored by the European Social Fund Portuguese national funds.
Fellowship granted from June of 2012 to September of 2016
2013-2587/001-001-EM Action 2 – Partnerships
EURICA – ERASMUS MUNDUS Action 2: Europe and America: Enhancing University Relations by Investing in Cooperative Actions
Fellowship granted from July to December of 2014
LIA F. A. NUNES
ISBN: 978-94-034-2778-2 Legal Deposit:
Center for Religious Studies – Center for Religion and Heritage Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies
University of Groningen
CHAM – Center for the Humanities Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas
CONTENTS
INTRODUCING GREGORIO LOPEZ, A VENERABLE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 7
‘Anti-biography’: how to deconstruct a (religious) story? 8
Sources, methods, concepts 13
Structure of the thesis: reception, production and ‘alter-native’ stories of a vita 18
Notes for the reader 20
PART I – HUMANISING THE “VENERABLE” GREGORIO LOPEZ: THE RECEPTION OF THE MYTH
22
Chapter 1. 2019-1780. The hermit of the Americas 27
1.1 An academic state of affairs: a (religious) man in context 27
1.2 Biographer’s obsessions 31
1.3 The author within the man 33
1.4 The men around Gregorio Lopez 38
1.5 A literary character 40
1.5.1 An American religious symbol 41
1.5.2 A hermit within the Anglo-Saxon Christian traditions 44
Chapter 2. 1780-1675. Dubious sanctity before Christian eyes 48
2.1 Canonisation’s new politics and economy 50
2.1.1 Alms and marketing 53
2.1.2 Religious bureaucracy and its agents 56
2.1.3 Apostolic process 58
2.1.4 Non-cultu process 64
2.2 Propagation and propaganda of a religious legend 66
2.2.1 Publish or perish 67
2.2.2 Polemical readers and marginal networks 70
2.2.3 Controversial claims 73
2.2.4 Asserting nation(alism)s 75
Chapter 3. 1675-1613. A servant of God of a new empire 79
3.1 Building (readers’) expectations 81
3.1.1 Beyond the biography 81
3.1.2 A book that crossed borders 84
3.1.3 Success in the Spanish book market: first editions and readers 89
3.1.3.1 Famous readers and reviews 91
3.1.3.2 The Mexican edition 93
3.1.3.3 The Iberian editions 95
3.2 Opening the cause 100
3.2.1 Missing parts 101
3.2.2 Part of a political process 103
3.2.3 Witnesses 105
PART II – THE MAKING OF AN OUTDATED NEW WORLD SAINT: THE PRODUCTION OF A LEGEND
114
Chapter 4. Old stories, new narratives 117
4.1 Sources and witnesses: constructing a narrative 118
4.1.1 Francisco Losa: another character? 120
4.1.2 Biographer and biographee connections 122
4.1.3 A conte(s/x)ted funeral 126
4.1.3.1 Thaumaturgic relics 128
4.1.3.2 Last wills and resting places 130
4.2 Hagiographical topoi 134
4.2.1 Blueprints of a hermit in a man’s portrait 135
4.2.2 Infused Science in Union with God 139
4.2.3 “Alternative” as a form of social criticism 142
4.2.4 A puer senex becoming a homo viator 145
4.2.5 The hagiographical confessor 149
Chapter 5. Because living saints were present – Santa Fe: 1596-1589 152
5.1 Transcribing the unconventional into Vida 155
5.1.1 Politics of discretion 162
5.1.2 Science for wizards 165
5.2 Erased references 168
5.2.1 Visits from a famous Jew 168
5.2.2 Visits from a famous mystic 170
5.2.3 Visits from ambitious religious men 172
5.2.4 Visits from women 174
5.2.5 Visits from alumbrados 178
5.3 Out of topoi or out of dogma? 181
5.3.1 In light of the sources: a web of people atoning for Gregorio Lopez 183
5.3.2 The “divine essence” and the New Jerusalem 188
5.3.2.1 Doomed dreamers 190
5.3.2.2 Of the light 192
Chapter 6. Under His eye – from Santa Cruz to Santa Fe: 1589-1580 196
6.1 Ciudad de Mexico-San Agustín de las Cuevas: 1589-1588 197
6.1.1 The fountains of a vicereine 197
6.1.2 Juan de Escobar: an unknown smith 199
6.2 Oaxtepec: 1588-1580 202
6.2.1 Changing spirits 205
6.2.2 Keeping contacts and habits 207
6.2.3 Literary production 210
6.2.3.1 Tesoro de Medicinas 212
6.2.3.2 Declaración del Apocalipsis 214
PART III – ALTER-NATIVE HISTORIES OF A SIXTEENTH-CENTURY MAN
IN-AGAINST-AND-BEYOND RELIGION
222
Chapter 7. The sources we do not have (1580-1577/6?) 227
7.1 (1580-1578) Nuestra Señora de los Remedios: the examination of conscience 228
7.1.1 The sanctuary 230
7.1.2 The examiners 233
7.2 (1579-1577?) Atlixco 239
7.2.1 Old-new disputes over a territory 240
7.2.2 The episcopal denunciation 243
Chapter 8. The sources we could not have (1577/6?-1563/1?) 245
8.1 (1576/7-1572?) Huaxteca: description of the middle of nowhere 246
8.1.1 Not becoming a priest with Juan de Mesa 249
8.1.2 Not depending on others like Luís de Carvajal de la Cueva 251
8.2 (1572?) Ciudad Mexico: remains from the middle of everything 254
8.3 (1571-1563?) Nueva Galicia: a new kingdom in la Gran Chichimeca 258
8.3.1 Not settling 259
8.3.1.1 Sebastián Mexía 260
8.3.1.2 Alonso de Ávalos 262
8.3.2 Not fighting: men like Pedro Carrillo Dávila 265
8.4 (1563-1562?) Zacatecas (w)as the limit 273
8.4.1 (Not) converting 275
8.4.2 Not dealing 278
Chapter 9. The sources we should have (1563?-1561?) 282
9.1 (1563-1561?) Ciudad de Mexico: the port of New Spain 282
9.1.1 Antonio Turcios: the first employer? 286
9.1.2 Luis de Villanueva: first host 289
9.2 (1561?) Arriving in a new world 292
9.3 (1561?) Crossing an ocean 296
9.3.1 The sea communities 300
9.3.2 The legalities 305
Chapter 10. The sources we have (1561?-1542?) 311
10.1 Guadalupe: preparing the spirit 314
10.2 Toledo: preparing to change 317
10.3 Valladolid: preparing to run 319
10.4 Navarra: preparing for God 323
10.5 Burgos: preparing to grow 330
10.6 Madrid/Linhares da Beira: preparing to walk 332
10.6.1 Madrid 335
10.6.2 Linhares da Beira 338
(DIS)CLOSING GREGORIO LOPEZ: HOMOS VIATOR AND COMPREHENSOR 349
The voice of a quiet man echoing fo(u)r centuries 355
Appendix I Bibliography lists presented by Álvaro Huerga and Francisco Guerra 362
Appendix II Diverse sets of sources related to Gregorio Lopez´s canonisation process 365 Appendix III Last will of Gregorio Lopez and royal letters for the canonisation process 404
Appendix IV Witnesses for the Informative Process of Gregorio Lopez 407
Appendix V Notary protocols from the Catálogo de Protocolos del Archivo General de Notarías de la Ciudad de México – Fondo Siglo XVI
412
Bibliography 420
Summary 447
Samenvatting 450
INTRODUCING GREGORIO LOPEZ, A VENERABLE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
This dissertation revolves around the historical and historiographical processes that turned the story of a sixteenth-century man into a religious legend, and consequently embedded this story into the mythical past of the Catholic and Spanish colonisation. This story was lived, written and reproduced during the era of the Spanish empire, one of those European entities creating an identity for that enormous continent they felt discovering, thus shaping an ´America´, a new history. That sixteenth-century man was Gregorio Lopez: born somewhere in Spain circa 1542 and passed away in New Spain in 1596. His biographer, Francisco Losa (1536-1624), recorded his story of Christian perfection, using the hagiographical literary techniques of the time to save the memory of the said “servant of God”, thus creating the legend of the first anchoret of the New World. Losa’s biography of Gregorio Lopez can be a starting point from which to study the virtuosity campaigned by the Christendom during its universalising civilizatory mission in “uncivilised” worlds.
Vida que hizo el Siervo de Dios Gregorio Lopez was already written in 1598, and it was printed in Mexico in 1613.1 From that moment on Losa’s book became an editorial success, of which I traced more than thirty edited versions and translations, ranging from Mexico to Europe, as well as North America.2 It also became the main document used in the canonisation cause that aimed to make Gregorio Lopez, a layman, an official saint of the Catholic Church. By researching the reception history of Losa’s book, we will come closer to understanding how it was read, as well as how it fits into Western religious history, and in addition, how its multiple versions simultaneously accompanied the process to canonise Gregorio Lopez as the first hermit of the Americas. Subsequently, we shall trace if and how the discourse about Gregorio Lopez intertwined with the discourse that created Latin-America.
1Francisco Losa, Vida que el siervo de Dios Gregorio Lopez hizo en algunos lugares de esta Nueva España, y
principalmente en el pueblo de Santa Fee, dos leguas de la ciudad de México donde fue su dichoso transito (México: Imprenta de Juan Ruiz, 1613). [From here onwards: Losa, Vida.]
‘Anti-biography’: how to deconstruct a (religious) vita?
For almost two millennia, saints were powerful symbols for Roman-Catholic communities and authorities, both as intermediaries and as models, a sort of legendary heroes.3 Can we imagine the ‘hero’ coming down from the pedestal of sacralisation, onto the dirt ground of life? The term ´anti-biography´ was originally crafted by Manuel Rozental (a Colombian activist and physician), although applied to a contemporary figure and with a more defined socio-political perspective of rejecting the centre of the subject in order to insert it in a communitarian movement. The ‘anti-biography’4 of Gregorio Lopez is an exercise to put forward the complexity of a man and his contexts, but without evaluating Gregorio Lopez’s sanctity or falling into what Carlo Ginzburg has described as another ideological form of history, namely, one of “failed heroes”5. I am interested in understanding how a discourse about sanctity was created and applied in a newly colonised territory where it did not exist as such, considering a higher and long-term purpose to generate an-other cultural and religious cosmovision to those ´alter´-´native´ identities already existed therein. Christian and Amerindian religious ideas were about to merge, one fighting for domination, the other fighting to resist. We know the results of those fights, but sometimes we ignore the processes and the people involved.
3Michel de Certeau identifies (the production, writing and reading of) hagiography as a discourse “à l‘extrémité de
l’historiographie, comme sa tentation et sa trahison”. The genealogy, strategies, functions and uses of the hagiographical genre are included, as a variant, in the section dedicated to “Systèmes de sens: l’écrit et l’oral” inMichel de Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, ([Paris]: Gallimard, [1975]), 274-288. We can say they were men and women serving as heroes, and, in an interdisciplinarity spirit, we can apply John Holloway’s definition of “heroes [as those who] stand out from the community, and draw to themselves the communal force of action" in John Holloway, Change the world without taking power. The meaning of revolution today, 3rd ed. (New York: Pluto,
2010), 210.
4I want to thank Manuel for sharing his ideas with me when I had the pleasure to meet him in my brief but
revealing visit in 2014 to John Holloway´s Sociology post-graduation seminar of the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades “Alfonso Vélez Pliego” of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico.
5“[…] The social history of the last few decades has at times resembled a parade of history's proud losers. I am in
two minds on this point. On the one hand, the aspects of history represented by people like Menocchio are obviously important. But we have little need for the creation of an historical counter-culture displaying a gallery of defeated heroes. That would turn history into ideology, and that is never a good thing.” Carlo Ginzburg, “On the dark side of history: Carlo Ginzburg talks to Trygve Riiser Gundersen”, in Eurozine, July 11, 2003, accessed on June 27th, 2019, https://www.eurozine.com/on-the-dark-side-of-history/).
Deconstructing the mythification of the European ‘civilizatory’ history, by using the example of Gregorio Lopez, is a way to engage in Boaventura de Sousa Santos´ proposal to give voice to “experiences that were forgotten or marginalised because they did not conform to the imperialist […] objectives prevailing after the convergence of modernity and capitalism”.6 Gregorio Lopez lived in a period we identify as the transition from medieval to modern times, and within the processes of American colonisation(s) and European confessionalisation(s); so how can Gregorio Lopez’s microhistory inform us with regard to the ways in which those (his) generations lived and wrote about themselves?7
The dissertation´s spirit is to voice a human´s experience from the margins of the Spanish empire and of the European history of colonisation, bringing to the fore other experiences of his contemporaries and those who came to be readers of his Vida. Between old and new processes of identification, domination, and empowerment, how did Gregorio Lopez experience the change and the continuity of religious ideas and practices in the globalising and interconnected worlds of the second half of the sixteenth-century? Although Losa put him up for sainthood (and thereby ‘centralised’ him), at the same time Gregorio appears marginal: by withdrawing from society as a hermit and, later, by being taken as a model by divergent religious groups such as the Alumbrados, the Quietists, the Pietists and still later the Methodists.
We can challenge Losa’s literary story by using historical sources that confront his centrality as a biographer (although his authority as such is difficult to question), as well as helping to complete a black and white history of Christian perfection with as many colourful human imperfections as possible. Before being turned into a legendary “servant
6Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “A Non-Occidentalist West? Learned Ignorance and Ecology of
Knowledge”, Theory, Culture & Society 26 (2009), 103-125, there 103, published online in 2010, see:
tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/26/7-8/103. In the same article, page 105, the sociologist helps me to locate this thesis in the necessity to recover alternative experiences from the western past: “We live in a time in which criticising the West in the West comes close to self-flagellation. To my mind, this stance is necessary and healthy, given the damage brought about by the imperialism and neocolonialism on which the hegemonic West feeds itself. I believe, nonetheless, that devolving some of the objects stolen inside the West itself is crucial to create a new pattern of interculturality, both globally and inside the West. There is little to be expected from the
interculturality currently maintained by many in the West if it does not entail retrieving an originary experience of interculturality.”
of God”, Gregorio Lopez was just another layman, no matter how extraordinary his life and experiences may have appeared to his fellow men and women: their own stories allow us to grasp the past better (in different spatial and temporal coordinates) that Gregorio Lopez lived in. Beyond the confrontation with other stories that show what Losa omitted from the biography, the persons who inhabited his multiple contexts of life show a presence in the sources against which we question Gregorio´s absence.
This ´anti-biography´ not only searches for the man in the hagiographical text but also looks for the ways and reasons that led that text to be created and reproduced, especially in connection with the Hispanic Monarchy’s and the Catholic Church’s intents to convert a layman into a saint. Alice Wood, in her work on early-Modern canonisations, recovers David Sabean’s thesis on the scholarly study of sanctity: religious culture as an ensemble of “shared relationships and discourse” more so than “shared values and beliefs”; the “misunderstandings” and “different strategies of argumentation in social negotiations” brought into the “collaborative construction not of shared ideas but of a shared discourse”; control versus conversation, reinterpretation of meaning and community needs. In her conclusions, Wood discerns two discursive levels involved in the process of making saints: “the first constructs the myth of the saint; the second constructs a myth of the Church”.8 To understand Gregorio Lopez’s canonisation process and its place within Spanish and Catholic colonial history, I will reflect upon the reception and construction of these discourses, namely, the myth about the saint, as well as the Church’s myth.
When a story is told through a hagiographical mould, it generally gives rise to a religious legend, that turns a subject into a sacred symbol. The historicity of the original story is then surpassed by the mythological dimension that symbol acquires as a discourse, for it serves representation more than a critical discussion about the reality of the past. Discourse analysis becomes then crucial as the perspective to keep throughout the criticism of a hagiographical text, for it helps deconstructing its messages, its ´truths´. Kocku von Stuckrad´s approach to the ´discursive study of religion´ identifies “processes of communicational generation, legitimisation, and negotiation of meaning
8In Alice L. Wood, The discourse of sanctity: Early Modern Canonization of Saints as a collaborative
systems”.9 More than a method, discourse analysis is the perspective I adopt to apply in this criticism exercise over historical sources and historiographical construction. The background question that remains is knowing whether the success of the cultural and religious colonisation as a civilizatory process was/is itself a historiographic myth that we have to deconstruct. Gregorio´s story is part of a strong narrative connected not only to beliefs and religious concepts, but also with power systems and institutions. How can we filter the hagiography without tearing off Lopez’s skin from Losa’s pen?
The French historian, Alain Milhou, suggests a possible bridge between story/legend/myth and history. According to Milhou:
[…] afin de corriger l’image froidement démythificatrice de l’historien attaché aux faits avérés, qu’il ne faut pas considérer les mythes fondateurs de nos collectivités comme de vulgaires mensonges, même s’ils sont le fruit de manipulations. Ce sont des fictions, au même titre que des fictions littéraires et leur mentir vrai; des fictions qui contiennent une triple part de verité: d’abord, si peu que ce soit, celle des faits historiques objectifs sur lequels elles ont été échafaudées; ensuite, celle du moment où elles ont été élaborées; enfin celle des groups successifs qui se les sont réappropriées, tant il est vrai que la réception des faits et des fictions historiques doit intéresser l’historien au même titre que la réception des fictions littéraires préoccupe de plus en plus la critique.10
The “truthful lying” (mentir vrai) of foundational myths and legendary stories deserves an in-depth analysis, so that we can deconstruct, as well as rebuild, the complexity those fictions had to eliminate to recall that which was considered essential. Far from being just “ordinary lies” (vulgaires mensonges) and “fruits of manipulation” (fruits de manipulations), these foundational myths open necessary paths of research that make us question what we are told, what is recorded, what is oversimplified, what we believe in, what our perspective is, and what the tools are to criticise given truths and given lies.11
9 Kocku von Stuckrad, “Discursive Study of Religion: Approaches, Definitions, Implications”, Method and Theory in
the Study of Religion 25 (2013), 18.
10Alain Milhou, “Préface” in Études Hispano- Américaines/Estudios Hispanoamericanos, ed.Claude Cymerman, Les
Cahiers du Criar, 16, (Rouen: Université de Rouen, 1977), 8.
11I refer to the open debate in the field of Theory of History, where the understanding and the explaining come
Following on from Milhou’s proposal to address a “foundational myth of our collectivities” – in this case, the myth of the discovery and colonisation of a New World and its conversion to Christianity, plus its civilisational repercussions – this ‘anti-biography’ of Gregorio Lopez is then a reflection of and a search for, the various layers of discourse that his story generated, namely the reception, the production and the ´alter-native (hi)stories´upon which a hagiographical biography was elaborated. How are we to get through these layers? This ‘anti-biography’ looks for the facts upon which the biography was elaborated bringing to the fore alter-native histories: alter, in Latin other, other than the narrative purely structured by Losa; native for what naturalfrom could have meant in sixteenth-century Portuguese and Castillian languages.12 There is a sense of erosion of Gregorio’s subjectivity in multiple geographical and historical narratives, stories where he was the focus, only central through other’s eyes and memories. There were those who denounced him to the Inquisition, those who hosted him in their homes and properties, those who looked for advice of various sorts, those who met him more or less superficially, those who stood by his side from the moment they met him and those who could not even stand going near his presence.
Who was Gregorio Lopez in-against-and-beyond Losa´s biography, and why was he remembered for so long amongst religious history and its respective study? When he was alive, the only supernatural force of a religious nature was his search for Christian perfection; however, the thaumaturgic dimension of his relics after his death was essential for Francisco Losa to make a case for a canonizable subject. Although unusual, Gregorio’s known work is not that meaningful, compared to many of his contemporary authors. From what appeared to be a larger production, only two books attributed to
História (Coimbra: Quarteto, 2003) or in Eelco Runia, when he states “Freud, in short, discovered that what looks like the royal road to the past never takes you anywhere but to places within sight of your point of departure, whereas exploring the present may have you, somewhere, someplace, tumbling into depths you didn’t suspect were there”, in “Presence”, History and Theory, 45.1 (February 2006), 1-29, there 8.
12I prefer to refer to Gregorio Lopez using the original sixteenth-century spelling of his name, disregarding the
modern Spanish (López) or Portuguese (Lopes) spellings. This choice intends to widen the possibilities regarding his family and social backgrounds, as his name was written as such in the extensive geographic perimeter of his life: the Ibero-American world.
Gregorio Lopez were, posthumously, published: a pharmaceutical treaty, under the name of Tesoro de Medicinas, and an exegetical paraphrasis of the Apocalypse, entitled Declaración del Apocalipsis.13 We are left with a spiral of histories, opening up from the spaces Gregorio’s life occupied in his time to as many stories as the ones deriving from the life-telling itself and its different readings.
Sources, methods, concepts
This dissertation became a methodological patchwork in order to deal with the considerable amount of information gathered around Gregorio Lopez and his afterlife. Firstly, a raw comparison between Losa’s 1613 edition and many of the subsequent versions indicated the widespread of its reading and also of its study. Gathering the state of the art and the historians’s production about the character and its mysteries (such as his origins, or his religious beliefs) it was possible not only to identify primary sources that could complete the gaps left by Losa in his account, but also to understand how the canonisation cause influenced the ways his story was told, and how to access its records would be essential. Therefore the presentation of these data and its interpretation had to be turned upside down. Thus Gregorio Lopez´s ´anti-biography´ criticises Losa´s text and the representation of Gregorio Lopez throughout four centuries.
By starting with the reception of Losa´s text, I realised I could prepare the reader for a better understanding of its production. We shall also verify how Lopez’s hagiography served as the trigger for a long canonisation process, through the evaluation of how Losa’s book-reception history follows or is followed, by the diverse phases of that process. The West Indies are a perfect example of how information did not circulate only on the basis of its written records: the vast distances between the various territories in the Americas, and their respective capitals (Mexico and Lima), left enough space for
13 Gregorio Lopez. Tesoro de medicinas para diversas enfermedades. Añadido, corregido, y emmendado en esta
segunda impression/con notas de ... Mathias de Salzedo Mariaca, y Joseph Dias Brizuela ; con tres indices muy copiosos de diversos achaques.... (Mexico, por Francisco Rodriguez Lupercio, mercader de libros, 1674); Francisco Losa, Gregorio Argaiz (ed.). Vida y escritos de Gregorio López (Madrid: Francisco de Zafra,1678); Gregorio López,
Declaración del Apocalipsis, Coleccíon “Espirituales Españoles”. Série A Textos. Vol. Vol. 46 (Madrid: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1999).
information to get lost, selected, adulterated, or just to lose its purpose or strength. On the other hand, the canonisation process – titled in the Vatican as Mexicana beatificacionis & canonizationis Servi Dei Gregorii Lopez, primii anacoretae in Indiis Occidentalibus14–, in addition to revealing the immense amount of resources, time and
energy Spain and New Spain spent in what would become a lost cause, provides us with material for new inquiries. In the company of women, men, professionally religious, officials of the old and the new kingdom, inquisitors and viceroys, soldiers and settlers, Gregorio Lopez and his story guide us through a vast geography, and precisely because of what we encounter resumed in Losa’s biography, we cannot leave other sources and facts aside: the sources we do not have, the ones we should have, the ones we could not have, as well as the ones we do have.
In order not to get lost in the enormous amounts of information that the offices of the Crown were generating already in the second half of the sixteenth century, we have often used the categories and groups of the time in order to organise our reflections: male/female; Christian, old and new; converso and morisco; Protestant, Lutheran, heretic; religious, secular, lay; criollo, mestizo, Spaniard; natural, veziño; fidalgo, segundón...Although we may criticise institutions, politics, and ideas, we should not distance ourselves from the persons, practices, and actions that embodied them. The most recent historiography and its efforts to review and reread sources, has revealed how nuanced our categories should be. Moreover, as we will see in detail throughout the dissertation, in all the platforms used – such as PARES, the online portal of Spanish Archives, or the catalogues from the Archivo General de la Nación and the Archivo Historico de Notarias de Mexico – we may resort to a large group of original and printed sources, in addition to diverse biographical dictionaries, providing us with more than just names, but also the ways they formed networks and communities.
If there were pieces of this puzzle that seem to be lost entirely (like Gregorio’s own private Bible, his world map and earth globe15, or his baptism record as well as his
register to pass to the New Indies), others appeared to expand the closed mould used by
14 See Appendix II – Diverse Sets of Sources Related to Gregorio Lopez´s Canonisation Process. 15 Losa, Vida, fl. 68, 94v.
his biographer: the inquisitorial processes of his followers and denouncers, the records of the fleet he probably took to Veracruz, records of his passage through Mexico City as amanuensis. More than four-hundred years of clues, opinions, records, processes, books, articles, sources of diverse nature had to be connected. The methodological patchwork resulted from the multitude of sources into a tailor-made research – that left loose strings, and many sources to be analysed as deserved, such as the material concerning the cause in the Archivo General de Indias and from which I’m only able to index one of the five files, just to mention one example.
This research tries to overcome the centrality of a biographical study by combining criticism of historical sources with the use of biographers’ methods, thus reinforcing its aim for complexity. It was informed by not only social network analysis, and their respective prosopographic and microhistorical tools – extremely helpful when dealing with large sets of data – but also, other empirical devices, which ethnohistory and anthropology are more familiar with, applying these in their research, via oral history and new concepts in social studies, for a better comprehension of the historical past(s).16 Much of the discourse connected to Gregorio Lopez, mainly when it comes to his canonisation process is based on people´s memories; and what they remembered was not only what they lived and experienced, but also the repetition of what others had lived and experienced – so I had to be very cautious about the processes in which the discourse about Gregorio Lopez was transmitted and transformed.
16The intersection of diverse methods and theories in social and human sciences provided me a great amplitude
of the discussion, of which I give some examples of works that have inspired me about the biographical approach to history but also its various methods, particularly in cases of timeframes and geographical contexts similar to this study: Hans Renders and Binne de Haan, (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography. Approaches from History, Microhistory and Life Writing (Lewiston, Queenston, Lam Peter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2013); Sabina Loriga, “The Role of the Individual in History: Biographical and Historical Writing in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century” in Renders and de Haan (eds.), Theoretical Discussions of Biography, 75-93; Chris Lorenz, ““You Got Your History, I Got Mine”: Some Reflections On Truth and Objectivity in History”, in Österreichische Zeitschrift Für Geschichtswissenschaften, n.º 10 (1999), 563-584; Idem, “Historical Knowledge and Historical Reality. A Plea For «Internal Realism»” in History and Theory 33.3 (1994), 297-327; Pilar Ponce Leiva and Arrigo Amadori, “Redes sociales y ejercicio del poder en la América Hispana: consideraciones teóricas y propuestas de análisi” in Revista Complutense de Historia de América, 34 (2008), 15-42; W. Raymond Wood, “Ethnohistory and Historical Method” in Archaeological Method and Theory 2 (1990), 81-109; P.H. Martins, “Redes Sociales: Un nuevo paradigma en el horizonte sociológico” in Cinta Moebio, 35 (2009), 88-109; Michel Bertrand, “Elites, parentesco y relaciones sociales en Nueva España” in Tiempos de América, n.º 3-4 (1999), 57-66.
I have learned through this research, how important it is to remind ourselves that the use of written sources should not make us blind to orature (the oral transmission and production of knowledge and information), and the consensus and interests behind the circulation of stories and memories or its concealment.17 Applied to historical research, discourse, or the ways it is produced and reproduced, shows us two things: just because it was not written down does not mean that it did not happen, nor that facts were not recognised as such; just because it was written down somewhere does not necessarily mean everyone knew about it or that the described facts happened as recorded – and this is also the case when dealing with religious discourse. Nevertheless, no matter how manipulated Losa’s account is, does it make it any less important within the history of Spanish and Mexican colonial construction of religious identity and religious culture?
When it comes to the biographical approach to history, we are forced to jump into the chaos. Amidst the wide variety of methods biographers resort to, I realised there were gaps in Losa’s narrative on Gregorio Lopez I could only fill in through historical imagination and informed speculation by reaching some compromise so as to avoid misguiding the reader, by gathering as much information as I could on Gregorio’s path and its multiple contexts. In this regard, I found out about the British biographer, Richard Holmes´ “footstepping'' method.18 The idea is readily applicable to any other biographical research: walking the biographical subject’s shoes in order to connect the dots and to humanise the 'case study'.
Even while knowing that Gregorio’s shoes are forever gone and his footsteps washed away with time, it comes without saying that to go to the same places that he went to, is to know his experience a little more, although four-hundred years have passed. The “sociology of roads”, a formula crafted by Maria del Mar Graña Cid, synthesises something we tend to forget or underestimate when studying medieval and modern
17The definition of orature can be found in Isabel Gomes, "Oratura" in Dicionário Alice., in
https://alice.ces.uc.pt/dictionary/?id=23838&pag=23918&id_lingua=4&entry=24459, accessed on May 30th of
2019.
historical times and spaces.19 From village to city; from mountains to the sea; from the desert to the jungle: each surrounding environment has the power to change us, mainly because we have to change along with it. In that movement, the various times and velocities of life, nature, and history are very vivid, and it becomes easier to appreciate the different meanings for evolution, velocity, modernity and the value of knowledge and information.
Contacts happening on the road are, more often than records show, determinant to understand chosen paths and ideas. We will learn how people read during their transatlantic voyages (authentic reading groups, listening to each other, and discussing printed stories). Also, we will see how Gregorio himself went to diverse places, driven by God, but also driven by curiosity, by necessity, by others’ advice: he heard that in Huasteca one could live out of its wild fruits20, he found his first retirement from the world while he was wandering in Nueva Galicia, and surely the experience of crossing the ocean must have been very informative for a man who was known for drawing his world maps and for making his earth globe21. Thus, since Gregorio was a solitary man who spent much of his life travelling, it was essential to find a way to address the extent of those travels in Iberia, the Atlantic, and Mexico.
Gregorio Lopez lived in certain places and contexts, and through Losa’s biography and its publicity, Gregorio Lopez’s feats circulated within multiple ´communities of interpretation´ during the last four centuries. In historical research, the problem is not acknowledging that people interacted, but rather, to connect and to use all the sources available in order to be able to confirm a hypothesis that brings those people together again, providing images to our historical imagination so we can more easily reconstruct networks and ´communities of interpretation´. The concept of communities of interpretation was developed by a European research group that studied “contexts, strategies, and processes of religious transformation in late medieval and early modern Europe” In the detailed description of the research group, it is said of these communities
19Maria del Mar Graña Cid, “Frailes, predicación y caminos en Madrid” in Cristina Segura Graiño(ed.), Caminos y
caminantes por las tierras del Madrid Medieval (Madrid: Asociación Cultural Al-Mudayna, 1994), 281-322.
20 Losa, Vida, 1613, 14v. 21 Losa, Vida, 1613, 68, 94v.
that “Through their engagement in reading, writing, performing and organising religious texts and activities, laymen and women were continuously interpreting the ‘religious’ (in the broadest sense of the word) and re-shaping it in their quest for identity in one of the most critical moments in Europe’s cultural history”.22
Structure of the thesis: reception, production and ‘alter-native’ stories of a vita This is the first monograph on Gregorio Lopez, and it attempts to bring together all the fragmented studies, analysis, and references to this figure in the religious history of New Spain´s sixteenth century. The ‘anti-biography’ of Gregorio Lopez is presented in three parts, developing Milhou´s proposal and choosing a reverse route: the reception, the production, and the facts upon which the story was elaborated. Inverting the traditional chronological order was imperative to assemble essential data in the analysis and understanding of Losa´s text, which will change the way we read the story and the historical facts associated with it. I will present the different sets of sources on which I based my research throughout each part.
Part I focuses mainly on the reception of the “first hermit of the Indies” myth, how Losa’s biography was received, having led to the start of a long and unfinished canonisation process. Parallel readings and numerous polemics arose out of the dissemination of Losa’s work, and in a way, defined Gregorio as a figure of the New World’s religious history. I have decided to begin with how Gregorio Lopez was recently studied in academia. From there, we can understand how essential Francisco Losa’s biography is to the comprehension of the reception of Gregorio’s story. Furthermore, I chronicle a short reception history of Losa’s hagiography, intersecting it with the canonisation process of Gregorio Lopez, delving into the networks in which it was read, published, and translated. The process of beatification itself underwent significant alterations precisely when Gregorio Lopez was proposed to be canonised at the Vatican,
22In the eCost Action IS1301: New Communities of Interpretation: Contexts, Strategies and Processes of Religious
Transformation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe is described in the “Project Description”, http://costaction-is1301.webhosting.rug.nl/, accessed on November 15th 2017.
a fact that invites us to look at the political and ideological dimensions of the cause: sponsors, expectations, financial costs, as well as the agents involved. As such, this part focuses on the last four centuries, from the first publication of Losa’s Vida in 1613, until nowadays.
Studying Gregorio Lopez, the hagiography is our central fiction and source. Part II delves into the moment of Losa’s elaboration of the legend, which we know had already been concluded in 1598, although it was only published in 1613. I extend the moment of production to the last period of Gregorio’s life, whence he was accompanied by Losa, between 1579 and 1596. Indeed, Losa informs us that he was already writing episodes of Gregorio’s holy life while living with him in Santa Fe, entitling us to include Gregorio as part of that process – although it is not clear whether he actively participated in creating the image Francisco Losa presented. Many considered Gregorio a living saint, while at the same time others questioned and criticised his way of life. By looking attentively at how Losa constructed his narrative, we become better prepared to understand how Lopez lived with and besides that literary construction. By looking at the literary topoi, as well as through diverse historical sources – recovered by the process of discourse analysis of Part I –, namely other biographies and inquisitorial processes that mention Gregorio, we can make the ‘legend’ more ‘real’. Better said, after deconstructing the myth of the saint, we will crack the literary capsule that Losa used to create a religious legend – a legend that Losa started to create already from 1579, when he first met Gregorio Lopez, by order of the archbishop of Mexico, to examine his conscience. We shall be looking at the period between 1579 up until 1613 when Francisco Losa finally got to see his biography printed.
I also bring to the fore the stories of Gregorio Lopez pre-Vida, which is to say other contexts and facts that might help us decompose and recompose his existence before he became a model for Christian perfection in the New World. Part III focuses on the period during which Gregorio was not yet considered a ´living saint´. This part of the anti-biography deals with the sources we can use belonging to the period of Gregorio’s life that was not under scrutiny, expressly, between circa 1542 and 1579. Gregorio’s life before he was seen by the novohispana society as a spiritual guide, although he never took up the religious habit or profession, is as much of a mystery as an opportunity to
get into the history of the common man that crossed the Atlantic in the middle of the sixteenth century. All we can do is gather as many sets of sources as possible to compare them with ecclesiastical records, such as notarial documentation from the colonial administration in the Americas. A permanently present blur lessens the possibilities of accessing Gregorio’s realities; and trying to find him in passenger lists, sacramental records, inquisitorial processes, and other documented events has proven to be a difficult task. The impossibility of finding the needle in the haystack is only rewarded through the potentialities that come from being inside the haystack itself, with everything those sources entail. The reconstruction of the historical communities of the several places Gregorio passed through is the main challenge in this third part.
The anti-biography of Gregorio Lopez brings forward the analysis of how a hagiographical legend was produced and propagated in early-Modern History and how, although the creation of this same legend failed the canonising purpose, it demonstrates, through the‘alter-native stories’ of a single man, the complexity of the processes of colonisation and evangelisation of the American continent.
Notes for the reader
Gregorio Lopez has often been the subject of some pages, or whole chapters, in monographs devoted to a variety of studies within the early-Modern History of Spain and New Spain, especially in what concerns the mentalities, religiosity, and spirituality of the second half of the sixteenth century. I chose not to present a chronology, allowing the use the table of contents as a reading guide. The maps are located in the introduction of Parts I and III to provide the reader a tool to encompass the broad horizon of interpretation Gregorio Lopez´s story invites us to have.
Having stated a proposal of anti-biography, by challenging the centrality of Losa’s text, the 1613’s biography is naturally the starting point from which we have to depart. Recurring to its multiple versions could have become problematic. As we shall see, Francisco Losa’s book was re-edited by three other authors: Alonso Rémon, Luis Muñoz, and Gregorio de Argaiz; all these editions presenting additional information to the 1613’s
original, through the inclusion of other episodes and data that came out of the canonisation process. I have chosen to recur to Losa’s original 1613´s version whenever possible and its respective 1675 English translation. All other translations are mine, including the ones of sources that remained unpublished or only edited in the original Spanish.
PART I – HUMANISING THE “VENERABLE” GREGORIO LOPEZ: THE RECEPTION OF THE MYTH
Early modern books represented a whole new world of technical advancement, similarly to what digital multimedia and Internet do today. A book comprises much more than just its text/content and its author, also involving editors, printers and booksellers. In the beginning of the seventeenth-century, the book market and its respective agents were already regulated and established, in both its legal and illegal forms. However, the centuries that ensued brought stability and organisation to the book business. The paratextual elements of a book can show the diverse communities in which it was read, authentic networks of users that reflect various religious and geopolitical confessional and denominational polemics and entanglements, as we will see in the case of Lopez´s biography.
Keeping in mind these multiple communities of readers, we shall now observe how the biography Francisco Losa wrote about Gregorio Lopez was inextricably linked to the process of creating and remembering a saint.23 Notwithstanding, by humanising Gregorio Lopez, I do not intend to evaluate the concept of sanctity, but rather to show how ‘his-story’ spread. Correlating this with the expectations deposited in the canonisation cause presented to the Vatican, I hope to find explanations for the wide circulation of his biography.
In this first part, we will examine the reception(s) of Gregorio Lopez’s story. We can divide the reception history into three distinct phases: the first going from Losa’s original release date to the start of the canonisation cause (1613-1675); the second corresponding to the time the cause got lost in the Sacred Congregation of Rites (1675-1780); and, finally, a third phase, in which the transformation of a religious myth into a broader literary and academic subject is tracked down from 1780 till nowadays.
Like peeling an onion, the first chapter corresponds to the last phase of Gregorio’s ‘afterlife’– the biography’s transformation into an academic and literary subject. From
1780 onwards, we will discuss the editions that are adaptations of the hagiography genre into a novelistic, more readable style. We shall open the doors of interpretation propounded by the latest academic offerings concerning Gregorio Lopez, through which we will be able to examine how Losa’s text circulated in different kingdoms after the Catholic Monarchy – the main sponsor of Gregorio’s canonisation – abandoned the cause.
Subsequently, we shall follow the cause’s trail through the Kafkaesque corridors that emerged between the Vatican, Spain, and New Spain. Pierre Ragon explained to me how to address this process, which is divided into three main sections: the informative process, the non-cultu process, and the apostolic process. The second chapter matches this period of diplomatic passageways stretching across the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, throughout the acceptance and evaluation of the cause, between 1675 and 1780.
In chapter three, we go back to the genesis of the sanctity claim, primarily embodied by one of the most powerful kings of early modern Christianity, namely, Felipe III. We ill analyse the aforementioned informative process in this last section: how the Congregation and the Pope were ready to proceed after the non-cultu investigation and the emission of the Positio; and how the Spanish King and his Court, along with the Archdiocese of México, were extremely busy and excited with the possibility of adding to the Catholic altars a Spanish saint ‘produced’ in the New World.
What turned Gregorio into a Catholic symbol and, subsequently, into a historiographical subject, was undoubtedly the variety of discourses produced in the reception of Losa’s biography. Consequently, by linking the multiple reprints of the book, we get an overview of the networks in which its reading and circulation took place. Looking for Gregorio Lopez and Francisco Losa, and all the different versions of their books in the search engines of the main libraries and web catalogues, a number of diverse manuscripts and copies of Lopez’s works shows up. If we add these to the numerous references to Gregorio Lopez in the works of many mystical authors, as well as in bibliographical and hagiographical catalogues, from the seventeenth century onwards, we get an idea of the far-reaching reception that they had. Through the numerous
editions of his biography, Gregorio Lopez was initially described as siervo de Dios, then later as le saint solitaire des Indes, as well as, the hermit of America.24 Furthermore, beyond Losa’s text, we will also learn more about the reception and edition of Lopez’s works, expressly Declaración del Apocalipsis and Tesoro de Medicinas para diversas enfermedades. By connecting Losa’s book history with the documentation of Gregorio’s canonisation process we can access the networks of people that transformed a human being into a mythical figure of the Mexican Catholic Church. How did the canonisation process proceed? Who was involved in it? How does it link to the reading, (re)writing, reprints and translations of Losa’s biography? What were the reasons behind such success?
24Losa, Vida; Francisco Losa, trans. Robert Arnauld d'Andilly, Le saint solitaire des Indes, ou, La vie de Gregoire
Lopez (Amsterdam: s.n., 1717); Francisco Losa, pref. and trans. John Eyre, The Life of Gregory Lopez, a Hermit in America (New York: J. Eyre, 1841).
CHAPTER 1. 2019-1780 THE HERMIT OF THE AMERICAS
A brief state of the art concerning Gregorio Lopez’s presence in diverse historiographical fields will guide us through the questions that have been asked about this sixteenth-century man. The presence of Gregorio Lopez in many scholarly works on the early modern Iberian world is partly a consequence of the widespread of the hagiography written by Francisco Losa, in which both are protagonists for future memory and interpretation. Scholar´s readings of Gregorio’s biography brought to the fore data about his life that Losa’s text did not include. The academic researchers – regardless of being Dominicans, Jesuits, Jews, or lay scholars – of heterodox movements during the Catholic Monarchy, and broadly, of religious history, all contributed towards the comparative and interpretative perspectives on the ideas circulating at the time and the practices into which these ideas were translated. Having lived a life on the fringe Gregorio Lopez ended up becoming an unavoidable subject when tracing the diverse contexts and microhistories of ‘his’ sixteenth century: although he was not the main actor, the testimony of his alternative experience complete these histories.
1.1 An academic state of affairs: a (religious) man in context
In La santidad controvertida, the Mexican historian Antonio Rubial García dedicates a chapter to the figure of the hermit in New Spain.25 Evoking the memory of Gregorio Lopez, Rubial García explains how he became a model for lay religious virtue and experience, and how this was reflected in the reception of the myth itself. Analysing popular religion and its connection to the formation of national identity in colonial México, Rubial García critically filters the official discourse in hagiographical narratives, examining their reception and the consequences they had to the failure of canonisation processes of New Spanish non-accomplished Saints. In addition, Rubial García informs us
25Antonio Rubial García, La Santidad Controvertida: Hagiografía y conciencia criolla alrededor de los venerables
no canonizados de Nueva España (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999). Also by the same
author: Profetisas e solitarios. Espacios y mensajes de una religión dirigida por ermitaños y beatas laicos en las ciudades de Nueva España (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006).
how Gregorio Lopez is referred to in treatises about contemplative life and in historical dictionaries both in the New World and the Old Continent, already at the beginning of the seventeenth century, having collected most of the references to Gregorio Lopez in various American volumes describing the peoples, missions and works involved in the New World’s religious life. Moreover, Rubial García mentions the diverse authors that describe Gregorio as somewhat of a local hero and the mandatory pilgrimage to the few places in which Gregorio is known to have lived.
At this point, we should also mention the study by Pierre Ragon on the canonisation procedures, not only concerning Gregorio Lopez but also, Sebastian de Aparicio. The French scholar resumed and analysed the supporting material of the informative and apostolic processes for both causes in the Vatican.26 Resorting to the testimonies produced regarding the beatification cause in the Vatican, Pierre Ragon, as well as Rubial García, exposed the extent to which Francisco Losa’s discourse was endorsed by bishops and theologians, as well as by members of almost every religious order present in México at the time.
Rubial García pointed me towards Alain Milhou’s article on Gregorio Lopez.27 Milhou, a scholar in Iberian Studies, can be credited with steering away from a confessional path in the study of Gregorio Lopez, a path chosen by Álvaro Huerga, who enthusiastically studied the Alumbrados, and to whom we owe the documented history of this ‘sect’: its origins, leading figures, processes, and developments.28 Huerga sees in the non-condemnation of Gregorio – even if posthumous – a sign of his innocence. Aside from the tremendous effort to catalogue the references to Gregorio Lopez, mainly in Iberia, Álvaro Huerga embodied the typical apologetic tone used to depict Gregorio Lopez within Catholic narrative:
26Pierre Ragon, Les saints et les images du Mexique (XVIe-XVIIIe siécles), coll. Recherches-Amériques latines (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2003).
27Alain Milhou, "Gregorio López, el Iluminismo y la Nueva Jerusalem Americana" in Actas del IX Congreso
Internacional de Historia de América, V. III (Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 1992).
28Álvaro Huerga, Historia de los alumbrados (l570-1630): III. Los alumbrados de Hispanoamérica
[...] [Gregorio Lopez] is a ‘rare exemplar’ of Christian embodiment in the New World, where other fevers dominate[d]: gold fever, the fever for power, evangelisation fever. It would not be fair to speak of a ‘novel’ case, for it would amount to questioning his Christian authenticity. Instead, in exchange, it is legitimate to conclude that his ‘idealized’ figure determined the ambivalent or double-sided ‘European image’ of the Mexican anchoret.29
Similarly, Huerga brought together the reactions to Gregorio Lopez once his Vida began to circulate within the European milieu, its success reflecting a spiritual rediscovery connected to an ascetic conservative attitude, as well as with emergent piety movements at the time, such as Quietism and Pietism. The Spanish scholar also channels his efforts into exhorting an appraisal tradition of Gregorio Lopez’s example within Catholic orthodox ascetic practices, contrasting it with the Quietist narrative started by Miguel de Molinos [1628-1696], which viewed Gregorio as a mystical hero, as we shall delve further into later on.
Although Huerga and Rubial García thoroughly identified the European/Christian heterodox appropriation of Gregorio’s afterlife, Alain Milhou was the first to attempt to a realistic link between his hermitic and illuminated life, and his past in the Iberian Peninsula. That which Huerga denied in Historia de los Alumbrados, Milhou decided to explore, namely, how Gregorio’s exegesis and mystical lifestyle offered the possibility of his connection with the alumbrados sect, even before he crossed the Atlantic. Milhou seems to react to Huerga’s incapacity or unwillingness to connect the dots, associating Gregorio Lopez with the first alumbrados in Spain. According to Milhou, the essay written by Gregorio commenting on the Book of Revelation in the late 1580s, in addition to the information provided by his supposed followers, are sufficient to evidence the similarities he shared with the first movement of Spanish alumbrados. Milhou paints a picture of Gregorio based on his works and the accusations he suffered in Mexico, while also questioning the religious-historical context of Gregorio’s life in Spain, whereas Huerga
29My translation of: “Con todo, resulta en un ‘raro ejemplar’ de encarnación cristiana en el Nuevo Mundo, donde
dominan otras fiebres: la del oro, la del poder, la de la evangelización. No sería justo hablar de un caso
‘novelesco’, porque equivaldría a poner en duda su autenticidad cristiana. Si, en cambio, es lícito concluir que su figura ‘idealizada’ determinó la ‘imagen europea’ ambivalente o bifronte del anacoreta mexicano”, in Álvaro Huerga, Historia de los alumbrados III, 587.
criticises legends such as those of Gregorio’s royal ancestry, or his Portuguese nationality, more so than being able to confirm Losa’s hagiographical account. Milhou paved the way to approach the life of Gregorio Lopez as a human being, rather than a static saint. By asserting Gregorio’s millenarian and apocalyptic ideas, Milhou made the necessary move beyond Losa’s Vida, preferring to connect Gregorio’s interpretation of the Apocalypse with the amalgam of religious, intellectual and spiritual currents he could have been informed about, or learned from, during his life in Iberia.
Recently, Miriam Bodian touched a raw academic nerve, so to say, concerning Jewish history. In her book, Dying in the Law of Moses, where she discusses the crypto-Jewish martyrdom in the Ibero-American world, featuring Gregorio in one of her case studies, namely that pertaining to Luis de Carvajal, el Mozo,further expanding our awareness with regard to the heterogeneous religious environment of the new Spaniard kingdoms in the conquered Americas.30 Carvajal’s past education in a Spanish Jesuit school and his contact with crypto-Jews and Catholic Judaizers reflects the extensive interconnectivity between diverse traditions. When Judaism and Islam, as well as Protestantism, were forbidden in Spain, their prohibition led to hidden and secret practices, as well as generations of believers that were forced into Catholicism and into an experience of religious acculturation, eventually leading to imprecise and restless attitudes towards dogmatic and forced orthodoxies, as many scholars have pointed out.31 When Luis de Carvajal, el Mozo, was imprisoned and tortured by the Mexican Inquisition, he informed the inquisitors on more than one hundred people he identified as Judaizers, amongst them Gregorio Lopez. While Bodian does not elaborate on Gregorio Lopez’s affiliation or connection with conversos, old Christians, as well as crypto-Jews, she presents us with yet one more path of analysis.
30Miriam Bodian, Dying in the Law of Moses. Crypto-Jewish martyrdom in the Iberian World (Bloomington &
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007).
31See, for instance, Jesús Alonso Burgos, El luteranismo en Castilla durante el s. XVI. Autos de fe de Valladolid de
21 de mayo y de 8 de octubre de 1559 (Real Sitio de San Lorenzo de el Escorial: Editorial Swan & Fundación Avantos & Hakeldama, 1983).
1.2 Biographer’s obsessions
Martin Cohen, in a suggestive 1967 article, uses a Jewish Studies filter to delve into the history of Gregorio Lopez.32 Alfonso Toro, Martin Cohen, and more recently, Miriam Bodian, all take into consideration Gregorio Lopez’s connection to the Carvajals, convicted crypto-Jews declared as such by the Mexican Inquisition. By way of the youngest Carvajal’s inquisitorial process, we come to know that he visited Gregorio Lopez several times. Martin Cohen moves beyond Losa’s biography, directly towards the suspicion of Jewish ancestry Carvajal raised, also analysing Gregorio Lopez’s explanation of the Apocalypse, thus arriving at an interpretation of Gregorio as a “Defender of the New Christians”. The portrayal of the Jews as the righteous people intertwined with a benevolent Christianity, and the millenarianism and universalism of Gregorio’s love, allowed Cohen to bring Gregorio Lopez closer to contemporary aims for ‘universality’ in religious ideas.
Although Martin Cohen touches on one of the most unique and exciting features of Gregorio Lopez, he does not manage to successfully dilute the importance of Lopez’s origins, in which most scholars hope to find the genesis of his unconventionality. The Portuguese translator of the 1675 edition of Vida, for instance, strives to prove Gregorio Lopez’s Portuguese origins.33 From this translation, a similar Portuguese narrative is corroborated by several bibliographical and hagiographical catalogues, replicating a collective memory that made Gregorio a native of Linhares da Beira, a village in the north of Portugal, a fact reinstated by Mário Martins, a Portuguese scholar of religion, whose analysis of Lopez, yet again, touched upon the problem of the anchoret’s spirituality.34
32Martin A. Cohen, “Don Gregorio López: friend of the secret Jew. A contribution to the study of religious life in
early colonial ‘México’” in Hebrew Union College Annual, 38 (1967). Later on, in 1973, Martin Cohen published his work on the Carvajals: The Martyr Luis de Carvajal, a secret jew in sixteenth century México, 2nd edition
(Albuquerque: University of New México Press, 2001).
33Pedro Lobo Correa, “Prologo”, in Francisco Losa, Pedro Lobo Correa (trans.), Nacimento, vida e morte admiraveis
do grande servo de Deos Gregorio Lopes portuguez, natural da antiga Villa de Linhares composto pelo licenciado Francisco Losa, na vida, & morte escritor verdadeiro, mas não no nacimento, patria, pays, & irmãos deste vara
(Lisboa: Oficina Domingos Carneiro, 1675).
34His three articles on this subject reveal the various angles of his analysis: Mário Martins, “Gregorio Lopes, o
More recently, Pedro Tavares, in his Beatas, inquisidores e teólogos. Reacção portuguesa a Miguel de Molinos, reacted to Huerga’s sceptical attitude regarding the ‘Portuguese hypothesis’, by presenting new sources where the genealogy of a candidate for familiar (‘officer’) of the Portuguese Holy Office in the seventeenth century, leads us back to Gregorio ‘Lopes’.35 Tavares seems to comply with José Adriano Carvalho’s view in what concerns Gregorio Lopez’s possible Portuguese origins, given that this Portuguese historian of religion does not refrain from including Gregorio in his study devoted to hermitic phenomena in early modern Portugal.36
Going a step further into the enquiry about the hermit’s origins, could the secrecy he kept about his identity be linked to his dubious ethnical-religious background? Cohen chooses to answer this question by recovering one of the possibilities that have surrounded the myth of Gregorio Lopez, mainly through literary resurgences: his royal provenance, as a bastard, or even, primogeniture, of king Felipe II of Spain – a polemic that began with the romantic revival of Gregorio in recent Mexican history. The hypothesis is completely remote, but what is interesting for this study is how it kept feeding the interest in Gregorio Lopez, whose story contains a gap concerning his origins, a gap many have tried to fill in ever since his legend started to grow. A King´s son would not have lived with a hermit in Navarre, for instance, but then again the purpose of escaping to the New World would be to erase his true identity. Nevertheless, we ought to contextualise this passionate quest for Gregorio’s noble descent as part of a nationalist program for a territory’s (pseudo-secular) sacralisation, through the rediscovery of its elitist heritage, that I will address in the following sections.
Not reaching any conclusions as to Gregorio’s origins, Martin Cohen attempted to bring another dimension of Gregorio’s life to the fore: “When Gregorio López died, the
do deserto” in Brotéria, 36 (Lisboa: Barbosa Xavier, 1943), 456-467; id., “O processo inédito do escrito e anacoreta Gregório Lopes (†1596)” in Brotéria, 48 (Lisboa: Barbosa Xavier, 1949), 72-81.
35Pedro Vilas Boas Tavares, Beatas, inquisidores e teólogos. Reacção portuguesa a Miguel de Molinos (Porto:
Centro Inter-Universitário de História da Espiritualidade, 2005), 213, notes 105 and 106.
36José Adriano de Freitas Carvalho, “Recension to Gregorio Lopez, Declaración del Apocalipsis (edición, estudio
preliminar y notas de Álvaro Huerga), Madrid, Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca. 1999” in Via Spiritus, 7 (2000), 242-245, and also by José Adriano de Freitas Carvalho, “Eremitismo em Portugal na Época Moderna: homens e imagens” in Via Spiritus 9 (2002), 83-145.
