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f i v e AMAZON WOM EN AND NEW WOR LD R EALITIES Documenting an Expanding World (bk. 6, chap. 33) Caught between two eras—one that would recognize the contribution of empiricism to historiography and one that often viewed history as writing a variation of a primal text—Spanish chroniclers of the New World frequently revised traditional historiography , but they rarely broke completely from it. In his efforts to document all he saw and heard in the Indies, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo conceived of his historiographical project as an open-ended process of recovering new information about a vast area from dozens of informants. Thus the History became a sort of repository of information that required continual revision—revision of canonical histories and revision of his own previous accounts. A study of Oviedo’s process of rewriting history brings into sharper focus the relationship between traditional historiography and the emerging ideas of empiricism. Multiple contemporary testimonies, new information appended to previous chapters in the History, and citations from traditional histories all reveal Oviedo’s attempts to come to grips with heterogeneous American reality. As we saw in the case of Oviedo’s illustrations, there were significant changes in his historiographical method over the decades that he wrote. Study of the 1535 edition and of the extant autograph manuscript reveals at least four distinct stages in the writing and revision of the History. The first stage is the publication of part I in 1535; no autograph manuscript of this version exists. Yet passages from it are taken directly from the Sumario (1526) and expanded, pointing to the author’s penchant for accumulating information in an ongoing process. The second stage is a version of the three parts of the History written as early as 1535 and 1540, a version he attempted to publish in 1541. This draft appears to have been dismantled and reworked during a third stage, around 1541–1542, when the historian reconfigured the whole historiographic project and vastly expanded it. Extant autograph manuscript sections date from this period. This 1542 amazon women and new world realities 83 version greatly expanded the number of chapters about American flora and fauna and placed them into discrete books about natural history, as a separate category from the history of different provinces. The natural world was seen increasingly as separate from the general history of conquests and government. Indeed, the general history was now thoroughly organized according to geographical regions, which corresponded to administrative divisions for provinces. Thus, when the administrative territory changed for New Spain, for example, its placement changed in the History: what had been book 28 changed four times until it finally became book 33. Oviedo attempted to leave for Spain in 1542 in order to publish this vastly reorganized three-part history, but he was prevented from traveling by a prohibition on ships leaving for Spain because of battles in the Caribbean with French corsairs. This ushered in the final stage of revision . For the next six years, until his attempt in 1548 to publish the History , Oviedo continually updated the text. Finally, he left the manuscript for safekeeping in a monastery in Seville (1549). Throughout the three parts there are marginal notes, deleted information, and insertions of new material. In other sections the author appended entire chapters and books to previous ones (books 29 and 33, for example). Almost all modern scholars who have studied the History note the chronicler’s continual revisions, but they often overlook the full implications of this process or fail to examine it systematically. In the first complete edition of the History (1850s), José Amador de los Ríos included nearly all of Oviedo’s changes but only sporadically footnoted them. He attributes most of the revisions to changing circumstances rather than to Oviedo’s methodological concerns. Alberto M. Salas proposes that Oviedo “doesn’t [so much] write as he is in the process of writing” (no escribe, sino está escribiendo) because he lacks the confidence in man’s ability to tell the whole story (100). The historian must produce all known accounts to ensure he has not left out anything. Salas concludes that Oviedo “looks for safety in detail” (busca refugio en el detalle) (101). Likewise, Antonello Gerbi perceives this “open” nature of the history and adds a nuance to Salas’s observation. Oviedo, as “the high priest of truth,” believes that multiple accounts and revisions help the truth emerge, clarifying the naturally clouded ways in which humans perceive...

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