Virgil’s Aeneid from the Aztecs to the Dark Virgin: Latin Poetry and Ethnohistory in Colonial Mexico

Virgil’s epic on the fall of Troy and foundation of Rome came to Mexico in the wake of the Spanish conquest. The poem had a role in the earliest accounts of Aztec traditions compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and his native collaborators, and in the transmission of classical learning that had begun to develop in New Spain in the 1520s. From the mid-1600s, the reading and literary imitation of Virgil in Latin inspired poetic panegyrics of the ‘Dark Virgin’, the Lady of Guadalupe, who supposedly appeared to a native Mexican in 1531. Much of this lecture will focus on Villerías’ Guadalupe, a remarkable epic from the early 1700s in order to show how Virgil (and some other classical authors) helped to inform creole constructions of identity and indigenous history during the colonial period, and to highlight the richness and complexity of Latin culture in Mexico.
The speaker is Professor Andrew Laird, University of Warwick and National Autonomous University of Mexico.

jwil 31.iii.2009