The pauper’s paradise: Franciscan perspectives on American diets in sixteenth-century New Spain

Abstract

The first Spaniards to arrive in the Americas, friars and sailors alike, lost no time in learning about American diets. Fifteenthand sixteenth-century writings record Europeans’ initial attempts to make sense of the continent’s diverse flora through comparisons to familiar foodstuffs, as well as prompt introduction of European species and the reverse transport of American plants to Spain (Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés 2016, 91, 97– 106; Martire d’Anghiera 1998, 46, 69; Fernández de Navarrete 1922, 250). Over the course of the sixteenth century, shifts in diet would provoke changes in ecology, medicine, and natural history that would lay the foundation for a new colony (Earle 2012; Crosby 2003, esp. ch. 3; Sluyter 1996; Melville 1994). While some Spanish interest in American foodways was born of necessity, recent scholarship has highlighted the role of other cultural factors in shaping how American cultivars and practices were seen by the new arrivals (Delbourgo and Dew 2008; Schiebinger and Swan 2005; Schiebinger 2005; Gómez 2017). In New Spain, particularly in central Mexico, religion played a central role. This area was one of the first zones of sustained contact between Europeans and Americans; many of the Spaniards on the front lines there were Observant Franciscan missionaries who brought with them their own thinking on how diet affected both physical health and spiritual well-being. The missions they built were hubs of knowledge exchange where the friars introduced European foods and medicines while also drawing heavily on indigenous expertise about these topics (Tucker and Janick 2020). Consequently, some of the earliest European texts about American plants were written at these Franciscan missions (Gimmel 2008). The Franciscan discourse about diet in central Mexico marked a continuation of medieval discussions within the Order about food’s relationship with the human body, the commonwealth, and a virtuous lifestyle. In fifteenth-century Europe, food was central to healthcare and religious practice, and one’s spiritual and physical health depended on eating the right things at the right times. Spanish regimen sanitatis literature extolled the virtues of moderation for bodily health, recommending a well-balanced diet based around bread, meat, and wine; from a religious perspective, fasting and abstention were seen as key to the refinement of one’s soul. Abstention was particularly characteristic of the Observant branch of the order, which over the preceding decades had separated from the Conventual branch of the same by privileging an ascetic vision of the holy life that emphasized the value of absolute poverty (Turley 2016, 1–3; Milhou 1983; Roest