Transcribed

This set of early seventeenth-century sermons was composed by Fr. Luis de Valdiva (1560–1621) , one of the first Spanish Jesuits assigned to Chile. Valdivia played a cruical role in the development of Spanish Crown’s ‘defensive war’ policy towards the Mapuche, which suspended direct attacks on native groups and emphasised acculturation.

The sermons are intended as a programatic introduction to Christian faith, with the express intent of converting the Mapuche and having them renounce their traditional beliefs and religious practices. This was a key part of Valdivia’s strategy for pacifying the region through conversion rather than — thus far unsuccessful — belicose confrontation.

The transcription was made from scans of the only extant copy of the work, held at Chile’s Biblioteca Nacional (id MC: MC0013037/id BN: 64592), which is also the source of Toribio Medina’s 1897 facsimile editon.

This version of the text is morphologically parsed To access the morphological information (with English glosses) scroll over each word. A pop-up bubble will appear giving a present-day spelling representation (in the Alfabeto Mapuche Unificado), part of speech (POS) and a breakdown into morphemes and their meanings/functions.

A preliminary list of Mapudungun suffix functions and meanings, alongside the glossing tags used here can be found in the following downloadable document (PDF). Further details of the transcription and tagging process can be found here. Tagged Text (Web) PDF Text (Image Scans) TXT Text (Spanish) TXT Text (Mapudungun)