Father Clavijero and the Tongue of St. John of Nepomuk

Abstract

A personal contretemps affecting the early years of Father Francisco Xavier Clavijero’s intellectual life—the harassment of the censors—helps to explain the function and specific features of the cult of St. John Nepomucene in New Spain. In the third decade of the eighteenth century this devotion had still barely taken root and it was promoted by the Jesuits themselves as a defense mechanism against the adverse times that loomed over their institution; in the case of New Spain in particular it generated a profuse and diverse iconography that has received little attention as regards its social and political significance. Father Clavijero—in his facet as confessor, and himself a victim of banishment—on several occasions saw his own image in the vital mirror of the martyr of Prague, whose portrait must surely have adorned the wall over his bed. The cult of St. John of Nepomuk, which was already politicized at its point of origin, took on new ideological and emotional tones in the Americas following the expulsion of 1767. The illustrious historian Clavijero thus found a deep cultural identification in this devotion which bore a heavy burden of revindication and nonconformity.