New doctoral project on the Franciscan education project in colonial Mexico (Yucatán region)

In the middle of the 16th century, the Franciscans arrived on the Yucatán peninsula, a region of the indigenous Maya, as part of the expanding colonization of Mexico. The aim of the friars was to spread the Christian faith among the indigenous population and thus turn away from the indigenous faith.

However, the religious soon realized that such a deeply rooted faith among the indigenous people could not simply be replaced by Christianity in mass baptisms. The Franciscans realized that in order to permanently adopt Christianity and European values, the indigenous people had to be integrated into the European-Christian cultural system, which at the same time meant replacing the pre-Hispanic memory (memoria) with a European-Christian memory. To achieve this, the indigenous population had to be "educated" to a certain extent by the religious – the foundation stone for the Franciscan education system in colonial Mexico.

The Franciscan religious concentrated on the education of indigenous children because they were still considered free from paganism and idolatry. They were also expected to pass on Christianity to their parents' generation. Education was differentiated according to class and gender. For example, the sons of the normal population were taught the basics of Christianity in the churchyards of the monasteries (patios), while the sons of the nobility received a higher education in the monastery schools.

For the Maya on the Yucatán Peninsula, it was specific that they already had their own writing system (hieroglyphic writing) and thus possessed reading and writing skills – a basic prerequisite for evangelization in Mexico.

Within this cross-epochal and cross-cultural doctoral project, in addition to the European view of the Franciscan educational project, the indigenous view of the events is also to be filtered out in the study of sources, insofar as this is possible. Reports by chroniclers, letters to the Spanish and religious authorities and administrative documents are available for the study of sources. From an indigenous perspective, there are documented cases in which the indigenous people turned to the authorities. There were also indigenous chroniclers.

As a further and fundamental aspect, it is important to take a look at the conditions of the Franciscans in medieval Europe and how they viewed education in general and the Christian education of the population. In accordance with current research in this field, the education of the religious will also be examined and a comparison drawn with the situation in the Yucatán.

For a detailed description of the doctoral project, see here.