HIST 317: The Latin American Baroque (HC) Spring 2018: Primary Sources

A groundbreaking book . . . provides a broad and rich sampling of documents recording the early modern voices of the African diaspora. . . . Wills, testaments, letters, and historical chronicles are some of the sources that scholars from various disciplines present in this anthology.

Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History centers on people from different parts of the world who came together to form societies by chance and by design in the years after 1492. This text encourages detailed exploration of the cultural developm

Colonial Lives offers a rich variety of archival documents in translation which bring to life the political and economic workings of Latin American colonies during 300 years of Spanish rule, as well as the day-to-day lives of the colonies' inhabitants. Intended to complement textbooks such as Burkholder and Johnson'sColonial Latin Americaby presenting students with primary sources -- the raw materials on which the facts in other textbooks are based -- this reader strives to illustrate the impact of issues such as race, class, gender, sexuality, culture and religion in the daily lives of both natives and colonists alike.

"Michael de Carvajal's fascinating and unusual play - published by Luis Hurtado de Toledo in 1557 - is a rare sixteenth-century theatrical piece about the conquest of the New World. It is arguably a long-ignored but fundamental source for the study of Latin American cultural history. A theatrical version of the Spanish Conquest clearly influenced by Bartolome de Las Casas, the play centers on a group of American natives filing a complaint against the Spanish conquistadors - before a tribunal presided over by Death. They denounce the horrors and crimes committed against them by the conquistadors and colonizers in their idolatrous greed for gold. The play constitutes an allegorical summary of the debates of the day about the emergence of the Spanish Empire, the justification of conquest, the right to wage war against the Indians, the evangelization of the natives, the discrimination against the newly converted peoples of the New World, the exploitation of Indian labor, the extent of the emperor's sovereignty, and the right to resist tyranny. The translation by Carlos Jauregui and Mark Smith-Soto is the first English edition of this important work. It is presented in an annotated, bilingual edition, with a critical introduction that discusses the origins and ideological significance of the play."--BOOK JACKET.

Early Brazil presents a collection of original sources, many published for the first time in English and some never before published in any language, that illustrates the process of conquest, colonization, and settlement in Brazil. The volume emphasizes the actions and interactions of the indigenous peoples, Portuguese, and Africans in the formation of the first extensive plantation colony based on slavery in the Americas, and it also includes documents that reveal the political, social, religious, and economic life of the colony. Original documents on early Brazilian history are difficult to find in English, and this collection will serve the interests of undergraduate students, as well as graduate students, who seek to make comparisons or to understand the history of Portuguese expansion.

The Franciscans were the first missionaries to come to Mexico, and the Franciscans developed important and lucrative ties with the newly rich conquistador elite and the faction behind Cort s. The order quickly became the wealthiest, having the most dramatic missionary churches, owning prime real estate in Mexico-Tenochtitlan, and being de facto rulers of large indigenous communities. Forgotten Franciscans offers documents and written works by three Spanish Franciscans of the early modern period who, while well known by their contemporaries, have been largely forgotten by modern-day scholars. Alfonso de Castro, an inquisitional theorist, offers a defense of Indian education; Alonso Cabello, convicted of Erasmianism in Mexico City, discusses Christ's humanity in a Nativity sermon; and Diego Mu oz, an inquisitional deputy, investigates witchcraft in Celaya. Together they offer new perspectives on the mythologies and realities of Franciscan thought in the New World.

Indigenous breadsellers riot over a Spanish monopoly scheme; Spanish authorities plan to remove native people from the city; indigenous people struggle to construct a splendid church; the city's inhabitants fight over elections and witness hangings, epidemics, and eclipses. All this and more a Native American writer of Puebla, Mexico, reported in the late seventeenth century in a set of annals in his own language, Nahuatl, telling his people's local history from the coming of the Christian faith down to his own day. These records were part of a corpus of such annals produced in the Tlaxcala-Puebla region during this period. These writings by native peoples for their own posterity provide the most direct access to the indigenous perspective on the postconquest centuries that we are ever going to find. Here in This Yearfor the first time brings two sets of Nahuatl annals—the other one being from a more provincial locale—to the English-speaking world, presenting the original Nahuatl with facing, very readable translations.

A balanced collection of sources in translation. Ideal for use in courses on the Counter-Reformation, on the history of the Jesuit order, or as part of a more general course on the history of Christianity in the early modern period.

In the early 1700s, five nuns set out from their convent in Madrid, Spain to travel halfway around the world to Lima, Peru—a journey not all would survive. Their riveting adventure story, seen through the eyes of Abbess Maria Rosa, chronicles a three-year journey through wars, pirates, disease, the high seas, and treacherous mountain passes of the Andes.- Publisher's description

Miracles, signs of divine presence and intervention, have been esteemed by Christians, especially Catholic Christians, as central to religious belief. During the second half of the eighteenth century Spain's Bourbon dynasty sought to tighten its control over New World colonies, reform imperial institutions, and change the role of the church and religion in colonial life. As a result, miracles were recognized and publicized sparingly by the church hierarchy and colonial courts were increasingly reluctant to recognize the events. Despite this lack of official encouragement, stories of amazing healings, rescues, and acts of divine retribution abounded throughout Mexico.

In 1690, a dramatic account of piracy was published in Mexico City. The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírezdescribed the incredible adventures of a poor Spanish American carpenter who was taken captive by British pirates near the Philippines and forced to work for them for two years. After circumnavigating the world, he was freed and managed to return to Mexico, where the Spanish viceroy commissioned the well-known Mexican scholar Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora to write down Ramírez's account as part of an imperial propaganda campaign against pirates. The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírezhas long been regarded as a work of fiction--in fact, as Latin America's first novel--but Fabio López Lázaro makes a convincing case that the book is a historical account of real events, albeit full of distortions and lies. Using contemporary published accounts, as well as newly discovered documents from Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, and Dutch archives, he proves that Ramírez voyaged with one of the most famous pirates of all time, William Dampier. López Lázaro's critical translation of The Misfortunes provides the only extensive Spanish eyewitness account of pirates during the period in world history (1650-1750) when they became key agents of the European powers jockeying for international political and economic dominance. An extensive introduction places The Misfortuneswithin the worldwide struggle that Spain, England, and Holland waged against the ambitious Louis XIV of France, which some historians consider to be the first world war.