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    Territories of History

    Humanism, Rhetoric, and the Historical Imagination in the Early Chronicles of Spanish America

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    Author(s)
    Beckjord, Sarah H.
    Language
    English
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    Abstract
    Sarah H. Beckjord’s Territories of History explores the vigorous but largely unacknowledged spirit of reflection, debate, and experimentation present in foundational Spanish American writing. In historical works by writers such as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Bartolomé de Las Casas, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Beckjord argues, the authors were not only informed by the spirit of inquiry present in the humanist tradition but also drew heavily from their encounters with New World peoples. More specifically, their attempts to distinguish superstition and magic from science and religion in the New World significantly influenced the aforementioned chroniclers, who increasingly directed their insights away from the description of native peoples and toward a reflection on the nature of truth, rhetoric, and fiction in writing history. Due to a convergence of often contradictory information from a variety of sources—eyewitness accounts, historiography, imaginative literature, as well as broader philosophical and theological influences—categorizing historical texts from this period poses no easy task, but Beckjord sifts through the information in an effective, logical manner. At the heart of Beckjord’s study, though, is a fundamental philosophical problem: the slippery nature of truth—especially when dictated by stories. Territories of History engages both a body of emerging scholarship on early modern epistemology and empiricism and recent developments in narrative theory to illuminate the importance of these colonial authors’ critical insights. In highlighting the parallels between the sixteenth-century debates and poststructuralist approaches to the study of history, Beckjord uncovers an important legacy of the Hispanic intellectual tradition and updates the study of colonial historiography in view of recent discussions of narrative theory.
    URI
    https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/100903
    Keywords
    Literature: history and criticism; History of the Americas; European history
    ISBN
    9780271034997, 9780271032788
    Publisher
    Penn State University Press
    Publisher website
    http://www.psupress.org/
    Publication date and place
    University Park, 2007
    Grantor
    • Penn State University - [...]
    Imprint
    Penn State University Press
    Series
    Penn State Romance Studies,
    Classification
    Literature: history and criticism
    History of the Americas
    Civil wars
    Modern warfare
    Spain
    Pages
    202
    Rights
    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
    • Imported or submitted locally

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    License

    • If not noted otherwise all contents are available under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

    Credits

    • logo EU
    • This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 683680, 810640, 871069 and 964352.

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