On Lockhart

What a relief to read Lockhart and Gibson! It was refreshing to delve into the subject from the perspective of twentieth century historians who had the advantage of modern methods and access to a wider variety of sources.

Lockhart’s research into Nahuatl documents informed his work, with brilliant results. His greater knowledge of indigenous culture allows him to move beyond traditional interpretations that take the conquerors at face value, toward a clearer understanding of the indigenous experience of conquest.
Convergence is key—for it was the common ground shared between native American and Spanish cultures that allowed the history of the conquest and subsequent colonial period to develop as it did.

Lockhart sees convergence of cultures, not the tragic clash of two worlds that somehow inevitably led to native decline and desolation. Instead of assuming unilateral resistance to all things foreign on the part of the conquered, Lockhart points out that people instead reacted in pragmatic, logical ways that depended on their culture, situation and options.

Again, Lockhart’s research into indigenous languages has allowed him a wider perspective than historians who went before him. His linguistic analysis of Nahuatl is quite impressive. As someone with a rudimentary understanding of linguistics—and some exposure to the Quechua language that Lockhart touches on as a complement to the Nahuatl experience—I am able to appreciate the remarkable amount and quality of work that Lockhart has done in this area. He was ahead of his time—and he paved the way for a future generation of scholars of the indigenous language.
This is what the New Philology (also called the Lockhart School) is all about—blurring disciplinary boundaries and looking at indigenous language and history in its own context, on its own terms.

Matthew Restall writes,

“Simply put, the New Philology includes those students of the ethnohistory of colonial Mesoamerica whose scholarship is based on native-language sources (the vast majority hitherto unstudied), who emphasize a broadly philological (i.e., historical-linguistic) analysis of those sources, and who subscribe to the view that the study of native-language sources is crucial to understanding indigenous societies. The school is thus both a model and a method, with the “New” referring to the innovation both of emphasizing native roles in colonial history through the study of native-language sources (the model) and of analyzing those sources philologically (the method).” (Matthew Restall, “A History of the New Philology and the New Philology in History,” Latin American Research Review 38, no 1 (2003), 113-134, 114)

This is what Lockhart does when he “reads between the lines.” Importantly, this is a method that other scholars can apply to their own work, not just to indigenous language sources, but wherever a fresh and deep analysis of documents is called for.