Why nobody likes a prophet: Bartolomé de las Casas, a loud voice in the wilderness (original) (raw)
Related papers
Religions, 2023
This article introduces the key issues and scope of the 16th-century debate over the rights of the native American peoples encountered by Columbus and the Castilian conquistadores. The historic attempt by theologians and missionaries to limit imperial expansion and to defend the dignity of conquered peoples is an example of Western self-criticism and a fundamental contribution of the Catholic Church to the slow emergence of human rights discourses. This article then focuses on the first pages of Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, a text that played a pivotal role in the formation of the Black Legend against Spain, but also in the drafting of the Leyes Nuevas (New Laws) of 1542. While the Short Account’s hyperbolic and explosive prose are well-known, its religious roots can be detected in the prologue and preface, with their discussion of biblical kingship, virtuous Indians, mortal sin, and (un)Christian behavior.
"Prophetism and the New World in Early Modern History", RSA 2018, New Orleans, 22-24 March 2018
With Victor Tiribás (Scuola Normale Superiore), I organized three panels at the 64th Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America (New Orleans, 22-24 March 2018), titled "Prophetism and the New World in Early Modern History". Religious polemics and anxieties, conflicts and diasporas characterized Early Modern Europe. In this context, the New World represented a place for Europeans to project economic, political and religious hope. The discourse on the New World inspired and gave strong argumentations to prophets, visionaries and millenarianists from different social and religious background. In this context, Christians, Jews, Conversos and Protestants in Europe and in the Americas embedded the New World in eschatological expectations during the 16th and 17th Centuries. The panels focus on the relation between the New World and Prophetism. They cover the period from the second half of the 15th Century to the second half of the 17th Century, in a wide geographic perspective that includes the Iberian, Dutch, and British Empires. In our opinion, studies on the relation between prophetism and the New World had mainly been monopolised by central figures such as Columbus or Menasseh ben Israel. We believe that there are several aspects that need to be further explained. The aim of these panels is to shed some light on the several trends of prophetism in Early Modern History, explaining what this word meant and how it overlapped different religions and worlds. Finally, the panels put into perspective recent and different studies on prophetism and the New World.
Bad Christians, New Spains, 2020
This book centers on two inquisitorial investigations, both of which began in the 1540s. One involved relations of Europeans and Native Americans in the Oaxacan town of Yanhuitlán (in New Spain, today's Mexico). The other involved relations of Moriscos (recent Muslim converts to Catholicism) and Old Christians (people with deep Catholic ancestries) in the Mediterranean kingdom of Valencia (in the "old" Spain). Although separated by an ocean, the social worlds preserved in these inquisi-torial files share many things. By bringing the two investigations together, Hamann reveals how very local practices and debates had long-distance parallels, parallels that reveal larger entanglements of the early modern world. Through a dialogue of two microhistories, he presents a macrohistory of large-scale social transformation. We see how attempts in both places to turn old worlds into new ones were centered on struggles over materiality and temporality. By paying close attention to theories (and practices) of reduction and conversion, Hamann suggests we can move beyond anachronistic models of social change as colonization, and place early modern concepts of time and history at the center of our understandings of the sixteenth-century past. Overall, this project intervenes in major debates from both history and anthropology: about the writing of global histories, our conceptualizations of the colonial, the nature of religious and cultural change, and the roles of material things in social life and the imagination of time.
MISSIONS AND MISSIONARIES IN THE AMERICAS: A Special Teaching and Research
F or more than 70 years, The Americas, a publication of the Academy of American Franciscan History, has been a leading forum for scholars studying the history of Spanish America's colonial missions. As the articles collected from the journal for this special issue show, the general trend has been to move beyond the hagiographic treatment of missionaries and towards a more complex understanding of the historical roles played by the colonial missions in rural life. While scholars such as Robert Ricard in the 1930s once posited a one-way " spiritual conquest " that cast native peoples as passive receptacles for Catholicism and European culture, such a view is no longer tenable, for several reasons. 1 First, since then scholars have demonstrated how the durability of indigenous cultural systems influenced the acceptance, rejection, or modification of Catholic teachings to form new kinds of syncretic and hybrid belief structures. Second, scholars have come to recognize the ways in which the " local " and idiosyncratic flavor of Spanish Catholicism also contributed to this hybridity, as did the missionaries' adaptation of their teachings through the use of indigenous languages and local forms of ritual expression. 2 Finally, recent scholarship has also begun to explore the contested nature of power within the missions and the larger spiritual economy that connected the missions, the missionaries, and native societies to the broader political and cultural terrain.
The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, 2019
Scholars have barely begun to explore the role of the Old Testament in the history of the Spanish New World. And yet this text was central for the Empire’s legal thought, playing a role in its legislation, adjudication, and understandings of group status. Institutions like the Council of the Indies, the Inquisition, and the monarchy itself invited countless parallels to ancient Hebrew justice. Scripture influenced how subjects understood and valued imperial space as well as theories about Paradise or King Solomon’s mines of Ophir. Scripture shaped debates about the nature of the New World past, the legitimacy of the conquest, and the questions of mining, taxation, and other major issues. In the world of privilege and status, conquerors and pessimists could depict the New World and its peoples as the antithesis of Israel and the Israelites, while activists, patriots, and women flipped the script with aplomb. In the readings of Indians, American-born Spaniards, nuns, and others, the correct interpretation of the Old Testament justified a new social order where these groups’ supposed demerits were in reality their virtues. Indeed, vassals and royal officials’ interpretations of the Old Testament are as diverse as the Spanish Empire itself. Scripture even outlasted the Empire. As republicans defeated royalists in the nineteenth century, divergent readings of the book, variously supporting the Israelite monarchy or the Hebrew republic, had their day on the battlefield itself.
University Press of Colorado, 2017
A sophisticated, state-of-the-art study of the remaking of Christianity by indigenous societies, Words and Worlds Turned Around reveals the manifold transformations of Christian discourses in the colonial Americas. The book surveys how Christian messages were rendered in indigenous languages; explores what was added, transformed, or glossed over; and ends with an epilogue about contemporary Nahuatl Christianities. In eleven case studies drawn from eight Amerindian languages—Nahuatl, Northern and Valley Zapotec, Quechua, Yucatec Maya, K'iche' Maya, Q'eqchi' Maya, and Tupi—the authors address Christian texts and traditions that were repeatedly changed through translation—a process of “turning around” as conveyed in Classical Nahuatl. Through an examination of how Christian terms and practices were made, remade, and negotiated by both missionaries and native authors and audiences, the volume shows the conversion of indigenous peoples as an ongoing process influenced by what native societies sought, understood, or accepted. The volume features a rapprochement of methodologies and assumptions employed in history, anthropology, and religion and combines the acuity of of methodologies drawn from philology and historical linguistics with the contextualizing force of the ethnohistory and social history of Spanish and Portuguese America. With a foreword by William B. Taylor. Contributors: Claudia Brosseder, Louise M. Burkhart, Mark Christensen, John F. Chuchiak IV, Abelardo de la Cruz, Gregory Haimovich, Kittiya Lee, Ben Leeming, Julia Madajczak, Justyna Olko, Frauke Sachse, Garry Sparks.
2002
The purpose of this article is to explore the discursive flaws and moral contradictions in Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo's writings. These contradictions stem from his post as a royal chronicler of the Indies, which pitted him forcefully against the diabolical Indians while exalting Spain's providential design, on the one hand, and his own judgment, which led him to criticize the arrogance, greed and military incompetence of some Spanish conquistadors, on the other. 1. Introduction 2. The Offspring of the Devil 3. Ambivalent Barbarity in the New World 4. Conclusion Endnotes Bibliography