Lecturas y ediciones de crónicas de Indias. Una propuesta interdisciplinaria (review)

This valuable collection of essays brings together various disciplinary perspectives on the crónica de indias. The opening section of the volume, for example, is devoted to electronic editing and publishing of the corpus. Thus, Rolena Adorno reports on the on-line edition of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's El primero nueva corónica y buen gobierno by the Royal Library of Copenhagen; Leoncio López-Ocón reviews some of the digitization projects undertaken by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas; Pilar Martínez Olmo reports on the "Pliegos de Cordel Madrileños" project of the Biblioteca de Filología of the Instituto de la Lengua Española; Frencesca Marí Doménech reflects on the development of the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes; and Daniel Restrepo Manrique discusses the Colección Cláscios Tavera.

The next section of the volume provides case studies of textual, bibliographic, and contextual scholarship on two well-known chronicles. Thus, focusing on fray Martín de Murúa's Historia General del Perú, Rolena Adorno discusses the issue of censorship in the prestigious "Wellington Manuscript," while Boserup investigates the evolution and transmission of the Salamanca manuscript. Focusing on questions of authority in Bernal Díaz del Castillo's Historia verdadera, Guillermo Serés discusses the rhetorical stance of the eyewitness, while Ángel Delgado interrogates questions of orality and literacy.

The third major part of the volume explores the genre of the crónica at the crossroad between rhetorical signification and mimeticist representation. Here, Miguel Ángel de Bunes Ibarra examines the interferences between the ongoing Christian conflict with Islam in North Africa and the representation of the New World during the sixteenth century; Karl Kohut compares eleven accounts of Moctezuma's death; José Luis de Rojas discusses internal and external influences in the changing assessment of the chronicles of Bernal Díaz and Alonso de Zorita; Esther Hernández provides an overview of some of the philological questions vexing the modern editions of Jerónimo de Mendieta's Historia Eclesiástica Indiana; Fermín del Pino investigates non-Castilian elements in José de Acosta's Historia Indiana; and Ignacio Arellano considers the relationship between "theory" and "practice" within the Spanish discourse about Native Americans.

The next major part of the volume attends to questions of textual transmission history and genealogy. Trinidad Barrera provides a discussion of the textual evolution and transmission of Cabeza de Vaca's Naufragios; Raúl Marrero-Fente attends to a number of problems with regard to textual editing and interpretation in seven of the major editions of the Relación de los primeros descubrimientos de Francisco Pizarro y Diego de Almagro; María del Carmen Martín discusses the shortcomings of presently available editions of Juan de Betanzos' Suma y narración de los incas; Christian Fernández offers bibliographic considerations for a much-needed critical edition of Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa's De la segunda parte de la historia general llamada índica; and Leoncio López-Ocón reviews the significance of Jiménez de la Espada's nineteenth-century editions of the works of Pedro Cieza de León. Next, Luis Millones Figueroa discusses a number of textual alterations and augmentations in editions and studies of the histories of Juan de Cárdenas, Cieza de León, and Alonso de Ovalle; Concepción Bravo investigates editorial criteria at work in the publication of early Andean chronicles in Spain since the nineteenth century; and Jesús María García Añoveros and Carlos Baciero, in a co-written essay, provide an overview of the Corpus Hispanorum de Pace.

The fifth and final part of this collection offers various readings of several understudied chronicles in their generic, geographical, and historical contexts. Renzo Honores discusses a 1561 report by Polo Ondegardo's 1561; Tatiana Alvarado Teodorika calls for a critical reassessment of fray Diego...