Fernández de Oviedo's Chronicle of America

Kathleen Ann Myers

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Latin American history and culture Historical Studies in Latin America Early Modern Spanish Literature

Abstract

Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478-1557) wrote the first comprehensive history of Spanish America, the Historia general y natural de las Indias, a sprawling, constantly revised work in which Oviedo attempted nothing less than a complete account of the Spanish discovery, conquest, and colonization of the Americas from 1492 to 1547, along with descriptions of the land's flora, fauna, and indigenous peoples. His Historia, which grew to an astounding fifty volumes, includes numerous interviews with the Spanish and indigenous leaders who were literally making history, the first extensive field drawings of America rendered by a European, reports of exotic creatures, ethnographic descriptions of indigenous groups, and detailed reports about the conquest and colonization process. Fernández de Oviedo's Chronicle of America explores how, in writing his Historia, Oviedo created a new historiographical model that reflected the vastness of the Americas and Spain's enterprise there. Kathleen Myers uses a series of case studies—focusing on Oviedo's self-portraits, drawings of American phenomena, approaches to myth, process of revision, and depictions of Native Americans—to analyze Oviedo's narrative and rhetorical strategies and show how they relate to the politics, history, and discursive practices of his time. Accompanying the case studies are all of Oviedo's extant field drawings and a wide selection of his text in English translation. The first study to examine the entire Historia and its evolving rhetorical and historical context, this book confirms Oviedo's assertion that "the New World required a different kind of history" as it helps modern readers understand how the discovery of the Americas became a catalyst for European historiographical change.

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References

2002How to write the history of the New World: histories, epistemologies, and identities in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world 1997Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. 1500-c. 1800 1990Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru.1949The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America.1969Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology 1992The Discursive Encounter of Spain and America: The Authority of Eyewitness Testimony in the Writing of History 1990La invencion de america

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