October 2007

Osvaldo Pardo

Associate Professor of Spanish, Department of Modern and Classical Languages
University of Connecticut, Hartford

"On the hinc et nunc of moral theology: Vitoria's Teaching and Missionary Eexperience in the Spanish Colonies"

Abstract
The University of Salamanca occupies a special place in the history of moral theology, for it was in its classrooms that a handful of professors of theology took up the discussion of the rights of the Spanish Crown to bring under its rule entire societies from the newly discovered territories of America and the Philippines. The move was bold, as it defined a new area of investigation for a discipline that had not yet come entirely into its own and that had been traditionally thought of as the exclusive province of legal scholars. Very soon the teachings of Francisco de Vitoria and his disciples were taught and discussed in the classrooms of the recently founded universities of the Spanish viceroyalties, in many cases by theologians who had years of experience as missionaries among the Amerindians and first hand knowledge of the problems faced by royal administrators, fellow friars and Indian communities. In this talk, I will focus on the particular dimension that the theological thought of Vitoria acquired when it became a point of reference for missionaries reflecting on issues of morality bearing on the colonial designs of their fellow countrymen and the institutions of the indigenous societies they encountered.

Biography

Pardo (MA, PhD, University of Michigan) received his licenciatura from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. Before arriving at the University of Connecticut, Pardo taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Vermont, and Trinity College in Connecticut. He is the author of The Origins of Mexican Catholicism: Nahua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (University of Michigan Press, 2004). Pardo has also authored several articles including: “How To Punish Indians?: Law and Cultural Change in Early Colonial Mexico” (Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2006)and “Giovanni Botero and Bernardo de Balbuena: Art and Economy in La GrandezaMexicana” (Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2001). Pardo has received both the Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship at the University of Connecticut and the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library. He is currently a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Newberry Library.