Francisco Cervantes de Salazar’s Mexico City in 1554: A Dramaturgy of Conversion

Abstract

The interplay between cities, theatricality and conversion becomes manifest in exclusive or semi-private spaces, such as classrooms and private studies. As this chapter illustrates, the rhetorical textbooks of Fernández Salazar sought to train students in the art of Rhetoric by performing didactic dialogues that took place against the background of colonial Mexico. In so doing, the textbooks linked Renaissance humanism to the transformation of urban, social, and religious spaces that followed the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire.