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i n t roduc t ion NEW WOR LD, NEW HISTORY AND THE W R ITING OF AM ER ICA In 1493 a fourteen-year-old boy serving as a page for the Spanish prince Don Juan stood in awe as Christopher Columbus met with the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand and Isabella. Columbus unveiled to the royal court in Barcelona his findings from his first voyage, displaying colorful parrots, enticing bits of gold, and native people. Nearly forty years later this boy, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, would write about this first presence of the New World on European land in his General and Natural History of the Indies (1535, 1850s). Appointed official royal chronicler of the Indies by the king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (the Catholic Kings’ grandson), a post he held from 1532 until his death in 1557, Oviedo lived in the midst of radical changes in western Europe: the Age of Exploration and the birth of the Hapsburg Empire as well as the new intellectual and religious trends born out of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Writing from the island of Hispaniola, the crossroads for the Spanish enterprise in the New World during the sixteenth century, Oviedo composed the most comprehensive history of the discovery, conquest, and colonization of the Americas from 1492 to 1547. Both a chronicle of the Spanish domination of America and a description of its flora, fauna, and indigenous peoples, the two-thousand -page general and natural history is the most authoritative text on the Americas from the first half of the sixteenth century. Granted a royal decree, Oviedo had access to all the official reports about America. In addition , he knew or interviewed many of the major figures of the period. In Europe, Oviedo worked with three generations of Spanish monarchs (the Catholic Kings, Charles V, and Philip II) and an array of prominent political and religious men. In America, Oviedo knew Columbus and his sons, Juan Ponce de León, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Francisco, Gonzalo, Juan, and Hernando Pizarro, Diego de Almagro, Hernando de Soto, Vasco Núñez de Balboa, and many others. He also met a number fernández de oviedo’s chronicle of america 2 of important indigenous leaders in the Caribbean and Central America. The only other comparable history from the period, the History of the Indies by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, does not include an extensive natural history and was not published until the late eighteenth century. The General and Natural History can help modern readers understand how the new “discovery” became a catalyst for change in European historiography, geography, politics, and philosophy. Indeed, Oviedo’s text itself served as a catalyst for European historiographical change. Oviedo’s dilemma was to write a history of a new world at a time when only two types of textual precedents were available: military and navigational accounts and histories written in Europe. The military accounts , for example, Hernán Cortés’s letter about the Conquest of Mexico (1520), addressed specific expeditions and concerns. The histories, such as Peter Martyr’s De Orbe Novo (1530), lacked the authority of an eyewitness account. Oviedo also looked to contemporary European histories and to the Greco-Roman tradition of Herodotus, Pliny, and Thucydides, among others, but these models fell short. The ancients did not know, much less write, about the Western Hemisphere. Oviedo had to reconcile the established histories with his own observations, frequently citing the ancients while also insisting that this New World required a different kind of history. Writing over the course of nearly thirty-five years (ca. 1514–1549), Oviedo found that he had to shift his strategies, developing them according to the nature of his topic, as the exploration and conquest actually unfolded. His narrative and rhetorical strategies tell the story of history— both as a written practice and as a series of events—at a crossroads. Faced with an ongoing process of exploration, conquest, and colonization, with multiple and often competing reports from the field, and with an abundant new natural world, Oviedo attempted to give his patron the king the fullest possible account about the American territories, while also promoting his innovations on traditional historiographical methods. He justified his deviations from canonical texts and authorities by creating a central role for himself as the transcriber of his own eyewitness testimony and that of others. Trained in the Castilian royal court at the beginning of the sixteenth century, exposed to...

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