BackHome
Refresh: OffView Personal Schedule

ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Testimonial Acts, Between Experience and Knowledge Production (Florida and Spain, First Half of the 16th-Century)

Mon, July 13, 11:00am to 12:30pm, EICC, Floor: Level 1, Carrick Suites 1

English Abstract

Despite ubiquitous references to the value of direct eyewitness testimony for understanding America during the early modern period, few studies systematically examined witnessing as an epistemic tool. Through it, experience, cognitive theories, and traditions were intertwined to understand unfamiliar phenomena from the perspective of European cultural frameworks.
I aim to analyse the construction and use of testimonial acts concerning Florida, focusing on their epistemic qualities in two Spanish sources related to P. de Narváez’s expedition to the area in 1527. The first is the famous relación published by one of its survivors, Á. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1542 and 1555); the second is the account of Cabeza de Vaca’s experiences written by G. Fernández de Oviedo, in his Historia general y natural de las Indias. While Oviedo emphasised the importance of direct testimony, his ambitious intellectual project relied heavily on secondhand knowledge to describe America.
By analysing both sources, I will reconstruct how testimonial acts functioned as a basis for understanding Florida, and address how actual (direct) and virtual (vicarious) testimonies constructed knowledge of its nature and native peoples. In particular, I will examine the deployment of ekphrastic devices in their power to create the illusion of direct witnessing and the forensic strategies that Cabeza de Vaca and Oviedo used to present testimonial acts as trustworthy. My final goal is to reconstruct a heterogeneous, historically situated mode of knowing, built at the crossroads of rhetoric, direct observation, and secondhand testimony, that sought to overcome distance in an imperial setting of knowledge production.

Author