![]() ![]() On May 23, 1596, in the city of Cholula, New Spain, Juan Cardoso appeared before the corregidor, or supervising Spanish official, to request that a notary be sent to his home because his wife was ill and desired to dictate her las will and testament. I ended that post with a bit of a teaser, asking if the pious tradition of requesting a friar’s habit meant something different to doña María Tlaltecayoa, being that she was an india principal bridging two traditions. A fellow friar, so the story goes, lent him a habit so that he could enter heaven properly attired (Carlos Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain, 110). ![]() Francis himself, who on his death bed removed his habit so that he could die humbly without attachment to material goods. Like nearly everyone in the collection of 25 Spanish-language wills I discussed, doña María Tlaltecayoa requested interment in Cholula’s Franciscan church wearing a Franciscan habit, a medieval European tradition prompted by St. Married to Juan Cardoso, a Castilian labrador, or low-ranking farmer who owned lands and the right to native labor to work it, they lived on the marshy boundaries of Cholula’s jurisdiction, a city in the modern Mexican state of Puebla. In my February post, “ Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Franciscan Habits: The Art of Dying in Late Sixteenth-Century Spanish-Indigenous Cholula,” I opened with these lines from the last will and testament of doña María Tlaltecayoa, an india principal, or a high-ranking native woman whose lineage dated to the pre-contact period. ![]()
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