Graduate Student, History
Ph.D. Candidate
H.C. Erik Midelfort
Alison P. Weber
Brian P. Owensby
Erin K. Rowe
About
My broad interests lie in the history of Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, especially Spain and its New World territories. Some thematic interests include language and communication, the rise of the vernacular, popular access to knowledge, and censorship.
My dissertation examines the changing attitudes of Catholic missionaries, inquisitors, and monarchs toward language use in the sixteenth-century Spanish world. More specifically, it investigates the monarchy's limits on language use for evangelization: the prohibition of Arabic, restrictions on the use of Castilian, and an ongoing debate over whether missionaries in the Americas and Philippines should continue to use native languages. Such efforts to control language use have contributed to the received notion that Spanish monarchs, inquisitors, and ecclesiasts often exaggerated the threat of heresy in order to enhance their own power, in this case, over language. Rather than assume a simple correlation between control over language and the exercise of power, this study examines the practical and intellectual reasons for the Spanish Empire’s linguistic policy.
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