Join the University Libraries Special Collections Division for a presentation by Dr. Leonardo Cerno, Fulbright Scholar in Residence, and Dr. Shawn Austin, associate professor of History. Cerno is one of the world's leading experts on the colonial variant of the Guaraní language and modern Guaraní-Spanish bilingualism in South America. He and Austin are currently co-teaching Indigenous Communities and Languages in Spanish and Portuguese Lowland South America, 1500-1800 — which unpacks fascinating Indigenous linguistic histories of the colonial era in Portuguese Brazil and Spanish Río de la Plata. 

Over the past three decades, scholars have significantly advanced our knowledge of evangelization's impacts amongst the dizzying diversity of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, especially thanks to close readings of thousands of pages of of Indigenous-language materials. One revelation is that in Ibero-America, evangelization produced Indigenous "Christianities," not an imperial monolith. One unusual feature of Guaraní-Christianity in the Jesuit missions of the Río de la Plata was the emergence of Guaraní texts designed to teach the Jesuit "spiritual exercises" to the most devout Guaraní townspeople, usually members of the towns' religious sodalities of Saint Michael and Saint Mary. Two rare manuscripts from the Hispanic Society of New York, recently purchased and made available online by the University of Arkansas' Special Collections department, provide a window onto this Jesuit and Guaraní effort to instill individual contemplation. This presentation will summarize the content of these manuscripts and lay out some of the key concepts that made Guaraní-Christianity a local phenomenon with global inflexions.