Rhetorical Conquests: Cortés, Gómara and Renaissance Imperialism, and: Beyond Books and Borders: Garcilaso de la Vega and La Florida del Inca (review)

At first glance these two books would seem to be quite different. The volume edited by Raquel Chang-Rodríguez is the product of a conference held in 2003 in commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of the publication in 1605 of La Florida del Inca. This volume includes not only studies on La Florida del Inca but also articles on the general outlines of the Inca's life and works, recent editions of the Comentarios reales, as well as the work of historians who have done research on the conquest and mapping of the peninsula of Florida by both Spain and France. The inclusion of studies on the history of Florida's mapping as well as the frontier wars waged by both the French and the Spanish on each other, and on and with the Amerindians who at the time ruled Florida, would appear to follow or reference the path opened by the work of José Rabasa in his Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (Oklahoma, 1993) and his later Writing Violence: The Historiography of Sixteen-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest (Duke 2000). The fact of the matter is, however, that both Rhetorical Conquests and Beyond Books and Borders could not be further in methodological approach, conceptual frame work, and perspective from Rabasa's theoretical and methodological intervention in the field of colonial studies and especially in the visual semantics of cartography.

When the books under review deal with historiographical questions, they do so within the philological framework. For the critics writing here, the text and its legacy remains paramount. Essays in Beyond Borders and chapters in Rhetorical Conquests seek to explain specific aspects of the text. Close attention is paid to various aspects of the authorial function: choice of topics, sources, borrowings, influences. Contextual aspects, such as publication conditions, revisions in original versions, determining relations to contemporary artists, intellectuals and fellow cronistas as well as publication sponsorship and hindrances are well documented and provide a rich tapestry in which to reconstruct the making and publication of the books by the Inca, Cortés's letters and Gómara's biography of the Spanish conqueror of Tenochtitlan. In this sense, reading Glen Carman's book on Gómara and Cortés falls easily next to the reading of the more diverse collection of essays that make up the richly illustrated edition of La Florida del Inca.

Beyond Borders is divided into three parts. The Introduction is dedicated to the life and works of the Inca. Chang-Rodríguez offers a thoughtful and upto date summary of the current critical understanding of La Florida del Inca and the Comentarios reales, designed to serve as the framework for the essays that follow on the conquest of Florida, the Inca's textual relation to the de Soto expedition and his reading of the Cabeza de Vaca journey.

Part I comprises four essays written by historians who have written extensively on the history of contact between Europeans and Amerindians in sixteenth century Florida. Jerald T. Milanich wades in with an informative essays on de Soto's Entrada (1539–1543) and follows with an account of the later (1559–1605) efforts by the French, under the leadership of Jean Ribault, to conquer the Amerindian inhabitants and settle in the peninsula, only to be thwarted by a new Spanish expedition which reclaimed the area for the Spanish Crown. Amy Turner Bushnell follows with a close examination of the relationship of the discourse of pacification and the praxis of continued war in this scene of European disputation for the marvelous possessions, territories and peoples of the so called New World.

Patricia Galloway offers an...