Landscapes and Languages

The encounter of Indigenous peoples with Europeans, including Franciscans, remains an important and exciting field of research. This volume presents fifteen cutting-edge and nuanced studies of this encounter in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century La Florida, what is now the southeastern United States. As professor Kathleen Deagan notes, the collection examines “how Indigenous people and Franciscan missionaries . . . perceived, constructed and contested their physical and cultural landscapes through language, both written and performative.” Landscapes and Languages advances the Franciscan and the Spanish Borderlands Project that began in earnest with the international conference “From La Florida to La California: The Genesis and Realization of Franciscan Evangelization in the Spanish Borderlands” held at Flagler College in Saint Augustine, Florida (2011). This combined effort of Flagler College and the Academy of American Franciscan History sought to unite experts from both sides of the Atlantic to examine the political, cultural, and spiritual influences of the Franciscans on the early modern cultures of Florida and beyond.

This volume mirrors the depth and breadth of current interdisciplinary scholarship. Anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists, historians, and theologians from the Americas and Europe explore how languages and landscapes, both literally and figuratively, first shaped and influenced the material-spiritual cultures of the Indigenous peoples of Northeastern Florida. While La Florida holds pride of place among the essays, the spatial-linguistic theme also offers a rich field of exploration for scholars focusing on New Mexico, Arizona, Central Mexico, Yucatan, and Spain. These essays evince the advance of scholarship that has marked the lively exchanges that have taken place at Flagler College since 2011. Topics range from the cultivation of landscapes through agriculture and village construction to the role of gendered cityscapes in ministry to how geographical knowledge can assist in decoding deities. The beauty and power of language, revealed in the intricacies of grammar, the passion of mystical performances and poetry, the gravitas of scholastic texts, and the challenges of translation, when woven into the examined landscapes of experience and imagination, produce a testament to the cultural significance of La Florida and beyond and invite further collaborative examination.