Territories of History: Humanism, Rhetoric, and the Historical Imagination in the Early Chronicles of Spanish America (review)

The analysis of colonial texts that describe the New World and narrate the events of the conquest has an interesting history. Nineteenth-century philologists originally read these texts for both their content and their style. With the consolidation of independent literary studies in the twentieth-century, English-language literary scholarship in large part tended to neglect or ignore colonial historiography. The notable exceptions, such as the work of Irving Leonard, are more closely associated with history and the old philology than with the literary studies of their day. Most literary scholars who began analyzing colonial historical texts, particularly in the sixties and seventies, departed from this earlier tradition and engaged in a more modern literary reading. Indeed, for many scholars, colonial chronicles constituted the very origins of Latin American narrative literature. By the 1980s colonial literary studies had begun to shift direction to pursue research that in many ways returned to the methods of the old philology but with a new set of interests and questions. This new direction is now some thirty years old, but the slow growth of colonial studies as an independent sub-field with dedicated faculty lines within literature departments has meant that developments in research have been relatively slow as well. A colonial canon of sorts including the writings of Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo, has received the most attention, but even so the critical possibilities are still relatively wide open from the perspective of what I would call the new interdisciplinary philology. Sarah Beckjord's book Territories of History contributes to the further development and consolidation of this field by reinvigorating the traditional philological approach in an analysis of some of the most well-known historiographical texts from the colonial period. But her study does not merely offer insightful new analyses of the colonial chronicles; it also sheds light on the intellectual history of sixteenth-century Spain.

Beckjord's study focuses on several major chroniclers (Fernández de Oviedo, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo) and one peninsular intellectual who wrote about historiographical discourse (Juan Luis Vives). Both Bartolomé de las Casas and Bernal Díaz del Castillo are clearly part of what has become the colonial canon in Hispanic literary studies, read even by non-specialists. Fernández de Oviedo has arguably joined the colonial canon as well, although his work is less likely to appear in anthologies of colonial literature. Beckjord's project involves the rhetorical analysis of these texts in order to examine the particular dynamics of their relationship to the tradition of historiographical discourse in the sixteenth century. To this end, she begins the study with an analysis of the sixteenth-century preceptive tradition of historiographical discourse exemplified by Juan Luis Vives. She then goes on to discuss the way in which the writings of Fernández de Oviedo, Las Casas, and Díaz del Castillo relate to this tradition. This sort of rhetorical analysis would seem to be one of the most traditional interests of philological research, but in several respects Beckjord delves deeper than previous work producing a more nuanced understanding of sixteenth-century historiography.

One of the traditional themes that runs throughout the book is the well-known tension between fact and fiction in the early modern period. Previous work has tended to attribute this tension to the disparity between the demands of the authoritative textual tradition and the exigencies of personal experience in the Indies. Beckjord shows how this tension actually pre-exists the New World enterprise. The analysis of Vives demonstrates that the preceptive tradition was not as consistent and monolithic as one might have thought. In general terms sixteenth-century humanists like...