Dutch ‘translations’ of 16th century Iberian chronicles of Indies.

• In Event: Chronicles of Indies and Early Modern Science

Abstract

This presentation will discuss how early seventeenth century Netherlands historians re-took sixteenth century Hispanic chronicles about the so-called New World, in the context of the founding of the Dutch Company of the West Indies. The chronicles they used were mostly accounts of the Spanish conquest of the Western Indies and its aftermath. The great amount of historical, ethnographic, linguistic and natural history information they had recorded, made them to quickly become necessary consultation documents. These chronicles undeniably contributed to strengthening certain reconstructions about the seen, lived and told in the Americas before and after the Conquest. There were also epistemological transformations that occurred when doctors, naturalists and geographers of the Netherlands drew on the texts of the sixteenth century. What role then did the notions of discovery, innovation and authorship had at the time they wrote about the things or ‘facts’ of nature in the New World? It is possible to discover certain continuities among the chronicles of the sixteenth century with information embodied in natural histories, general histories or geographies written in the Netherlands. We can even trace several continuities and changes within the emerging discourse of science and objectivity developed in the seventeenth century. This presentation aims to analyze the process through which the Iberian chronicles were translated, appropriated and re-signified at the time when a "Eurocentric world view" was being established.

Author

• Angélica Morales-Sarabia, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México