When word reached us on 16 June 2012 that Sabine MacCormack had died suddenly in her beloved garden, three kinds of thoughts rushed in. We felt great sadness that a friend had passed away, and would not be around to share further in the unfolding of life. We also felt that the world was being deprived of a rare presence, an uncommonly gifted fellow-scholar and -teacher. And yet we also felt some consolation, because, while her death came too soon, here was a person who had created strong and significant things, and whose scholarly example will endure.
Sabine MacCormack died in the midst of a richly creative life to which she was only adding and completing projects of increasing precision and significance. Last winter, one of us (KM) had been corresponding with her about an utterly original essay she had contributed on the subject of ‘Prayer’ in the early modern Spanish world, destined for the Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque (University of Texas Press, 2013). Less than a fortnight before her death, we, the present authors, were together in Lima, discussing with Sabine an essay manuscript she had sent us about the apocalyptic nature of the sermons composed and preached by the great Jesuit José de Acosta (1540–1600). This piece on the End Times, which emerged from her presentation to an international symposium on El Apocalipsis en el Nuevo Mundo in Lima in 2011, was written just before she died. It will join a collection of essays to be published next year by the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú.Footnote1
Having recently published On the Wings of Time (2008), her masterly meditation on the influence of the lens of ancient Rome upon Spanish perceptions of the Inkas and Peru, as well as a fascinating return to Copacabana, one of her most beloved Andean places and themes (2010), Sabine was in the thick of her primary research.Footnote2 At the time of her death, Sabine was at work both on a textual exegesis of Saint Augustine's commentaries on Genesis and on a study of the historical thought, theology and times of the Jesuit José de Acosta. In the hope of celebrating the pioneering nature of Sabine MacCormack and fusing two of the broadest vectors of learning her research informed, the present authors will be proposing two dedicatory volumes to the University of Notre Dame Press. The first would gather Sabine's specialised articles and essays on Inka and colonial Andean history and culture, while the second, a libro homenaje about Classical learning and culture in the Spanish American viceroyalties, would consist of the invited contributions of experts from around the world.
Born in Frankfurt, Germany, during the Second World War, and educated in the wake of that conflagration at a Catholic school, a gymnasium and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Sabine obtained a solid foundation in Greek and Latin, and in the history and learning of the Classical and early Christian periods. This formation and intellectual inheritance would continue to fuel diverse researches for years to come. At the University of Oxford in England, Sabine earned a BA in Modern History (1964) and, in due course, her D. Phil. (1974). Her doctoral dissertation exploring the art and ceremony of imperial Rome and Late Antiquity would later become the pioneering Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 1981). Although most of CLAR's readers will be familiar with Sabine MacCormack's later publications on the Inka and colonial Andean history and culture, she never abandoned her study of the literatures and thought of the Classical and Late Antique periods, as her The Shadows of Poetry: Vergil in the Mind of Augustine (Berkeley, 1998) and other recent works attested.
Sabine's way into academic teaching and research was not straight. Unable to land a post upon graduation, Sabine spent much of the 1970s as an editor for Phaidon Press, and as the translator of an array of academic works, among them W. H. Schuchhardt's Greek Art (London, 1972), Johannes Geffcken's The Last days of Greco-Roman Paganism (Amsterdam and New York, 1978), Joachim Leuschner's Germany in the Later Middle Ages (Amsterdam and New York, 1980). Sabine was an artist, too, and contributed the illustrations to an abridged edition by the great anthropologist Mary Douglas of Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890), The Illustrated Golden Bough (1978).
After a brief stint teaching Classics and Roman jurisprudence at the University of Sydney in Australia, Sabine took her first full-time academic job in 1979 at the University of Texas at Austin, where she taught Classical history until 1982. That same year saw two articles appear which became her published entrées into the colonial Andean field of inquiry. The first, in the Bulletin Hispanique, explored the thought of the then under-appreciated Augustinian Creole Antonio de la Calancha, while the second, published in The Journal of Theological Studies, explored how the Inkas’ conversion was portrayed on the stage during Spain's Golden Age, notably in Pedro Calderón de la Barca's La aurora en Copacabana.
1982 also found her on the move, appointed to a joint position at Stanford University shared, wisely, between the departments of Classics and History. Sabine's subsequent move to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1990, saw the University of Michigan follow suit, appointing her in History and Classics. While at Michigan, Sabine held, first, the Alice Freeman Chair, and then the Mary Ann and Charles R. Walgreen Professorship for the Study of Human Understanding. In 2003, Sabine made a final move, named the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C. Professor of Arts and Letters by the University of Notre Dame. Shortly after her passing, Notre Dame's Dean of Arts and Letters Dr. John McGreevy referred to Sabine MacCormack as ‘one of the most distinguished humanists in Notre Dame's history, and one of the leading humanists in the contemporary scholarly world.’
Sabine spoke of first learning Spanish on her own—by reading early modern manuscripts and chroniclers of the New World in Oxford's Bodleian Library and, a little later, in Madrid's Biblioteca Nacional de España. Her meticulous notes upon these rare books, which she bound in volumes for later access, would eventually fire a whole new dimension in her scholarship. The bound notes were only part of what was on display to a number of us fortunate enough to participate in two years of bi-weekly seminars Sabine organised around ‘Sovereignty’ and ‘Historical Thought’ while she was a Mellon Distinguished Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton between 1996 and 1998. In these seminar settings, as in many others elsewhere, Sabine practised a rigorous brand of pedagogy that became more passionate and animated post-seminar, thanks to her generosity.
Sabine's stories about how her studies of Spanish and Spanish American cronistas and churchmen emerged were as evocative as her disarming (and, in some quarters, unfashionable) quip that the study of so-called dead white males was not an option but rather a requirement of her discipline. She sought the influential and great minds in the ages she studied, and it was, accordingly, a critical focus on libraries and book learning that characterised the fundamentally intellectual and philological cast of her history. Attuned to Classical and early Christian antecedents, Sabine made keen new sense of the observations of Pedro de Cieza de León, the intellectual genealogy of Bartolomé de Las Casas's Tratado de las doce dudas and the perspicacity of the jurist Juan Polo de Ondegardo, treating these and others as vital first-hand knowledge on the New World that had been profoundly informed by Mediterranean and European traditions.
Yet Sabine's penchant for thinkers of European descent and their deepest influences rarely left them without a whole new cast of intellectual contemporaries. In most all of her work on the colonial Andes Sabine took seriously and deeply the historical imaginations, the expressions of Catholic faith, the philosophical assertions and the ethnographic information emerging from dozens of indigenous and mixed-race thinkers such as Juan Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamaygua, Blas Valera, Felipe Guaman de Ayala and El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Even more importantly, Sabine joined a small group of multi-disciplinary scholars from across the world who first explored these authors’ visions and contributions alongside, within and against the continued study of the then more canonical commentators such as Las Casas, Oviedo and Acosta. A brilliant example of Sabine's fusion of the often inextricable natures of European and non-European voices and descriptions came in her ‘Ethnography in South America: The First Two Hundred Years,’ published in The Cambridge History of Native Peoples of the Americas. Volume 3: South America, eds. Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge, 1999).
Following up on two particularly pioneering essays—‘From the Sun of the Incas to the Virgin of Copacabana,’ in Representations (vol. 8, 1984) and ‘“The Heart Has it Reasons”: Predicaments of Missionary Christianity in Early Colonial Peru,’ published in the Hispanic American Historical Review (vol. 67, 1985)—Sabine's Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (1991) re-invigorated the study of Catholic Christianity and religious transformation in the colonial Andes. Sabine brought tremendous knowledge of Classical, Biblical, Patristic and medieval theological and historical learning, and her instinctively interdisciplinary erudition, to bear on the study both of how chroniclers perceived and, effectively, ‘imagined’ native Andean religion, and of how native Andeans responded. A string of other notable and related publications followed, several of which—like ‘Ubi Ecclesia? Perceptions of Medieval Europe in Spanish America,’ published in Speculum (vol. 69, 1994)—argued memorably for how classical, late antique and medieval knowledge had fed and enabled Spanish and Hispanicising minds in the Andes, as across the early modern Spanish world, to interpret that which was new and unfamiliar. Sabine returned to this subject in her award-winning and aforementioned final work, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain and Peru (2007).
Michel de Montaigne famously marvelled at the wisdom contained in the writings of the Ancients, considering the acts of discernment and relay of such wisdom one of the duties of any learned person. The inseparable goals: improvement of oneself and others. Sabine MacCormack thought in the same liberal Western tradition, with Cicero, Livy, Vergil and Augustine at her elbow. A Classical base, to which she added considerable Late Antique and Patristic knowledge, provided Sabine a formidable foundation upon which to interpret early modern commentators on Andean religion and culture. It also imparted a remarkable rigour and deep perspective to her as a teacher and interlocutor. Sabine often invited reflection before offering reassurance; she abhorred a sense of entitlement in anyone; she was aware of her well-trained mind and its effects; friends and students prized her for her directness and critical nature as much as for her ethical commitment and generosity; and she was adamant about investigating what fascinated her rather than what received practice had decreed should form the purview of a ‘Latin Americanist,’ an ‘intellectual historian,’ an ‘ethnohistorian,’ a ‘Classicist,’ or some other academic specialisation.
Sabine MacCormack's prizes and research fellowships were many, including stints at Dumbarton Oaks (1977–1978), the Wilson Center (1985), the Getty Center (1990–1991) and as a Distinguished Visitor at the aforementioned Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton (1996–1998). Elected to the American Philosophical Society and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007), she was also the recipient of a Guggenheim (1999–2000). In 2001, Sabine MacCormack won the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities. This award in particular would mean more time for her path-breaking research. But it is inspiring to contemplate just what else she did with the resources and opportunities the Mellon Award made possible. Sabine's admiration for her Michigan friend and colleague (and accomplished scholar of Quechua language and culture) Bruce Mannheim fired her enduring commitment to the survival and teaching of this and other indigenous American languages. Most recently, at Notre Dame, she mobilised funds from her Mellon Foundation award to design and endow the Latin American Indigenous Language Learning Program, and to support courses in Quechua. In 2011, she convened an international symposium on ‘Teaching and Learning Indigenous Languages of Latin America,’ which gathered an international array of scholars and native-speakers of indigenous Latin American tongues. Sabine was editing a collection of essays written by the symposium's participants at the time of her death.
People who worked closely with Sabine at a string of institutions speak in unison of her courage and integrity in the face of many kinds of institutional and personal challenges. At Notre Dame, her colleagues Edward Beatty and Karen Graubart (who have contributed a beautiful memorial for the Hispanic American Historical Review) note that Sabine worked not only for the study of indigenous Latin American languages, but also for library collections. Still other colleagues remember her work to safeguard the rigour, breadth and depth of a Humanities education. Moreover, as the spearheading editor of a valuable series at the University of Notre Dame Press Sabine continued what she had previously done at Michigan, working tirelessly with authors and others in the interest of scholarly publication.
Sabine's legacies as a valued colleague to many in the field merge with her profound contributions as a teacher of graduate and undergraduate students. Most recently, Sabine was instrumental in developing the Ph.D. track in Latin American history at Notre Dame University, where she also offered a ‘University Seminar’ course to first-year undergraduates. She herself described the latter as an exploration of nothing less than ‘the nature of knowledge; on what we think we know, and why, and what we might actually know.’
Sabine MacCormack lives on in her writing and legacy, that which is already in print, that which is soon to come, and that which will be inspired in others. It seems fitting that the cover of her final book, On the Wings of Time, features one of her watercolours of her beloved Lake Titicaca, near Copacabana. And fitting, too, that she died unexpectedly, tending her plants in a garden setting like those favoured for devotion and reflection by the Spanish American religious she so helped the rest of us to understand.
Kenneth Mills and Ramón Mujica Pinilla
Notes
1. Sabine MacCormack's essay on Acosta's sermons will appear in Apocalipsis en el Nuevo Mundo, eds. Ramón Mujica Pinilla and Kenneth Mills (Lima: Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, forthcoming); her ‘Prayer: Spanish America’ will be published in the Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque, eds. Evonne Levy and Kenneth Mills (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013).
2. On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); ‘Human and Divine Love in a Pastoral Setting: The Histories of Copacabana on Lake Titicaca,’ Representations 112: 1 (2010), 54–86, may be seen as a kind of return, and revision of thoughts, upon a theme, after ‘From the Sun of the Incas to the Virgin of Copacabana,’ Representations 8 (1984), 30–60.