Hispanic Issue || Columbus's Gift: Representations of Grace and Wealth and the Enterprise of the Indies (original) (raw)
Related papers
Columbus's Gift: Representations of Grace and Wealth and the Enterprise of the Indies
MLN, 2004
At the start of Spain's colonial enterprise, the itinerant court of Ferdinand and Isabella was the first stage where travel accounts and specimens of all kinds coalesced and where the New World "yielded wonder on top of wonder."' In May 1493, upon returning from his first voyage, Columbus presented at the royal court in Barcelona a procession of naked Indians adorned with gold and accompanied by multicolored parrots. This spectacle previously astonished crowds in Lisbon and Seville, and a similar display would follow his second voyage. After spending three years in La Espanola, in October 1496, the explorer brought to Burgos a cavalcade of Indians and mules loaded with gold objects (Bernaldez 600, 678). Inscribed as wonders-that which exceeds the ordinary-and inserted in the ambiance of court spectacles, these subjects and objects represented the 1 Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park stress the impact of the New World as the most outstanding event contributing to the vogue for the marvelous (100-8). El coleccionismo en Espaia byJ.M. Moran and Fernando Checa studies royal collections from the 12th to the 17th centuries and gives a detailed account of Americana held by the Spanish monarchs and their extended circle of families and friends. I thank the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at North Carolina State University for supporting my research with a Summer Stipend Grant. The completion of this article has been possible thanks to a Library of Congress Fellowship in International Studies. I am indebted to both Natasha Chang and Gina Herrmann for their insightful comments and editorial advice.
Material Encounters and Indigenous Transformations in the Early Colonial Americas: Archaeological Case Studies, 2019
This paper discusses the cultural implications of European materials recovered from early colonial indigenous spaces on the island of Hispaniola. The exchange of exotic valuables was vital for the emergent relationships between European colonists and indigenous peoples during the late 15th and early 16th century Caribbean. As the colonial presence became more pressing and intercultural dynamics more complex, formerly distinct material worlds increasingly entangled. Archaeologists have long given minimal attention to these material correlates of indigenous colonial transition. Nevertheless, more than fifty years of archaeological work in Hispaniola has revealed a select number of indigenous sites yielding such foreign artefacts, or objects with European influence, occasionally appearing in reworked, repurposed, or copied forms. Among these are glass beads, metal items, and glazed ceramics, found in a variety of contexts and ranging from singular finds to direct associations to indigenous valuables. This paper presents an overview of these findings in order to explore indigenous agencies in the ways of handling these objects related to the differential impacts of colonial power on the island. As such, this paper aims to advance our understanding of the materiality of things in these encounters and the transformations they brought about in indigenous material culture repertoires.
The Collecting of American Indian Artifacts in Europe, 1493–1750
America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750. Karen Kupperman, ed., 1995
Five centuries after Europe began to invent and discover America, the question of the role that American Indian artifacts played in the shaping of this New World in the European consciousness must remain largely unanswered. Although such artifacts have supplied tangible evidence for the human nature of the indigenous inhabitants of the lands across the Atlantic ever since Columbus returned from his first voyage, serious interest in their study—and in the study of their collecting—has significantly lagged behind the critical examination of other sources available for an understanding both of native America and of its European perception. This situation is itself an artifact of the history of research, and it illustrates in part the insignificant role and undeservedly minor academic status that ethnographic museums and their collections have played in anthropological and historical research. On the other hand, an understanding of the often now unique documents collected in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has suffered not only because they were separated from their original cultural context and meaning, but also due to the European contexts in which they were preserved. The date of 1750, which marks the end of the period under consideration, coincides rather closely with a paradigmatic change in the collecting of non European artifacts in Europe.
Art of the Hispanic World, 1492-1665
The visual arts carried out a wide array of crucial cultural work across the vast and shifting network of territories encompassed by the Spanish empire between the beginning of the conquest in 1492 and the death of Philip IV in 1665. This course will consider some of the practical, theoretical, esthetic, spiritual, and political functions that works of art performed in a selection of locales from this enormous empire, ranging from Madrid, Granada, and Lisbon, to Naples, Antwerp, Tenochtitlan, and Cuzco. What were the prerogatives and powers of images in and across these different venues? How did these prerogatives change when the images in question underwent the physical and cultural displacements of colonialism and global commerce? What did the producers and consumers of images think of themselves as producing and consuming in these cultural settings? We will explore a wide variety of art historical approaches, from traditional and canonical texts to recent interventions.
2014
M any people helped me as I wrote this book. Michael Palencia-Roth has been an unfailing mentor and model of ethical, rigorous scholarship and human compassion. I am grateful for his generous help at many stages of writing this manuscript. I am also indebted to my friend Christopher Francese, of the Department of Classical Studies at Dickinson College, who has never hesitated to answer my queries about pretty much anything related to the classical world. His intellectual curiosity and commitment to academic inquiry is inspiring. I thank him for meticulously reviewing many of the translations from Latin in this book and for making helpful comments on the drafts of my essay regarding Peter Martyr. I wish to thank Eli Bortz at Vanderbilt University Press for his faith in this project. I also thank Sue Havlish, Joell Smith-Borne, and copyeditor extraordinaire Laura Fry at Vanderbilt. I am also grateful to Silvia Benvenuto for the index. A special thanks to the anonymous readers whose careful reading significantly improved this book. Thank you to Ken Ward, librarian at the John Carter Brown Library, for scrounging up all kinds of gems for the sake of intellectual inquiry and friendship. I am also grateful to Cristóbal Macías Villalobos at the Universidad de Málaga for helping me understand more about the Romans and their language. I wish to thank Dickinson College and the Dickinson College Research and Development Committee for its generous financial support of this project and to my colleagues at Dickinson who make this a vibrant intellectual community. Thank you to Kristin Beach and Ursala Neuwirth, my Dana Research Assistants funded by Dickinson. I am grateful to the library staff at Dickinson, especially Tina Maresco and everyone in the x The Legacy of Christopher Columbus in the Americas interlibrary loan office. Thank you also to the cheerful and efficient Jennifer Kniesch, Visual Resources Librarian at the Art and Art History Department, for helping me locate images and secure permission to use them. I have benefited much from the generosity and insight of many fellow colleagues who have willingly shared material and/ or their work over the years, including Scott Breuninger, Lina del Castillo, Karen Racine, and fellow Columbus scholars Jenny Heil and Carol Delaney. I thank many friends and colleagues who have shared their expertise with me at various points in the development of this book, as well as those who have commented on various bits (long or short) of the manuscript.