Foul Biting, or Diego Valadés and the Medium of Print.

This article focuses on Diego Valadés's *Rhetorica christiana* (1579), the first illustrated book to depict Christian evangelization efforts in the Americas for a European audience, emphasizing its unique production history rather than solely its representational content. Contrary to longstanding assumptions that Valadés was mestizo (of mixed Indigenous and European descent), archival evidence identifies him as Spanish-born but raised and educated in New Spain, where he worked as a Franciscan missionary. The book’s illustrations are primarily etchings—a relatively novel and less specialized printmaking technique at the time—likely executed by Valadés himself during his exile in Perugia, Italy, reflecting both his artistic agency and the complex transatlantic networks of knowledge, patronage, and print culture. The *Rhetorica* served as a papal project that navigated tensions between Spanish imperial control and ecclesiastical authority, using Indigenous visual forms alongside European rhetorical traditions to advance Catholic missionary aims while also embodying early modern artistic innovation in printmaking.