Sodomy

In 1613, Spanish Franciscan missionary Francisco de Pareja published his Confessionario en lengua Castellana, y Timuquana con algunos consejos para animar al penitente … (“Confessional [manual] in the Castilian and Timucua language[s], with some advice to encourage the penitent …”), one of the few surviving written works on the Timucua language and customs of the native peoples living in and around what had only recently become the Spanish colonial possession of la Florida, which encompassed what is today the states of Florida and parts of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana. Confessional manuals like this one had a practical function throughout the Americas, as in other parts of the early modern world, as religious how-to guides penned by missionaries and regularly used by priests and other Franciscan, Augustinian, and, some time later, Jesuit missionaries to administer the sacrament of confession to native peoples in their own languages. As with so many other confessional manuals written and published in the Americas, Pareja’s Confessionario was conceptually organized around the Ten Commandments, offering glosses on each of them, and then providing examples of the types of hypothetical questions and verbal exchanges that a Spanish-speaking priest (wanting to confess Timucua-speaking native peoples in Florida) might have encountered. While Pareja himself dedicated attention to all of the commandments, he conceptually framed the two gravest sins as those of homicide and of fornication, which were respectively subsumed under the fifth and sixth commandments.