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  • The Cannibal Butcher Shop:Protestant Uses of las Casas's Brevisima relacion in Europe and the American Colonies
  • E. Shaskan Bumas

In "The Cannibal Butcher Shop" E. Shaskan Bumas offers an ideological account of the Protestant reception of las Casas's Brevisimma relacion, or A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552). With his narrative of Spanish atrocities in the Caribbean and in Central and South America, Bishop las Casas aimed to convince the king of Spain to protect and Christianize his Amerindian subjects. Seventeenth-century Protestant editors and translators, however, put las Casas's text to very different ideological uses. By reviewing the numerous editions and translations of las Casas's Brief Account, Bumas tracks the ways it was used by Northern European Protestants to demonize Spain and provide a Protestant colonial identity throughout the seventeenth century. In New England, for example, the missionary John Eliot adopted the pose of a Protestant las Casas to celebrate the moral superiority of British colonization—and published his own Brief Narrative of the Progress of the Gospel Among the Indians of New England. Bumas considers visual as well as textual evidence and surveys Spanish, British, and Dutch, as well as Anglo-American, materials; his essay will be of service to teachers as well as scholars of early American literature.

Prize Committee:

Laura Rigal, Chair, University of Iowa

Marion Rust, University of Virginia

Christopher Castiglia, Loyola University of Chicago

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