‘Aztec Latin’: Simon Ditchfield in Conversation with Andrew Laird

Andrew Laird is the John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities and Professor of Hispanic Studies at Brown University. His research interests extend beyond ancient Greece and Rome to the European Renaissance and the colonial Americas. Of special interest to Iberian historians among his many publications are the book The Epic of America: An introduction to Rafael Landívar and the Rusticatio Mexicana (2006; re-issued as a Bloomsbury paperback in 2020) and the edited volume Antiquities and Classical Traditions in Latin America (Wiley, 2018). His latest book is Aztec Latin: Renaissance Learning and Nahuatl Traditions in Early Colonial Mexico (OUP, 2024).

Simon Ditchfield is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of York. His research interests all relate to perceptions and uses of the past in previous societies, but particularly within the context of urban and religious culture in the Italian peninsula from c. 1300-1800. His many publications include the book Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (CUP, 1995). He is currently completing a volume entitled Papacy and People: The Making of Roman Catholicism as a World Religion, 1500-1700 for the Oxford History of the Christian Church series (published by OUP).