Review

Reviewed Work(s): Fernndez de Oviedo's Chronicle of America: A New History for a New
World by Kathleen Ann Myers
Review by: John Charles
Source: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Winter 2008), pp. 1291-1293
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of
America
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1353/ren.0.0363
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 REVIEWS 1291

Kathleen Ann Myers. Fernndez de Oviedos Chronicle of America: A New

History for a New World.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. xx + 324 pp. index. append. illus. tbls. map. chron.
bibl. $50. ISBN: 9780292717039.

Gonzalo Fernndez de Oviedos General and Natural History of the Indies

(1535, 1850s), the earliest full account of Spanish exploration and conquest in the
New World, with reports on Americas natural phenomena and its inhabitants,
owns a central place in the canon of colonial Spanish American history and
literature. A humanist raised in the Spanish court, who spent his later years in
Hispaniola as the crowns royal chronicler, Oviedo consulted official papers about

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1292 RENA ISSA NCE Q U A RTERLY

the conquest, interviewed many of the principal actors involved, and used novel
methods to describe a new reality overseas within the framework of what
Europeans knew up to that time about divine and human history, and the natural
world. The History is the definitive text of the early sixteenth century for examining
Americas impact on Renaissance models of geography, politics, and philosophy.
However, studies of the work consist mainly of specialized articles and book
chapters, with the exception of a few foreign-language monographs. In a far-
reaching and impeccably researched book, Kathleen Myers corrects this gap in
scholarship and makes the History accessible to English-language audiences. Far
more than an authoritative monograph, Myerss volume reproduces for the first
time the complete set of Oviedos nearly eighty field drawings that formed part of
his original manuscripts and includes Nina Scotts first-ever English translation of
six excerpts from the History, which offer readers samples of the wide range of
historiographic material in Oviedos work that Myerss analysis covers.
A literary specialist, Myers offers an integrated reading of Oviedos work in all
its generic diversity, examining the chroniclers representational strategies for both
general and natural history, when other scholars have taken up only one aspect
or the other. In doing so, she employs a threefold approach of rhetorical con-
ventions, biographical and political contexts, and compositional dates (11).
Myerss exhaustive research in various archives and repositories of Spain and the
U.S. bring these contexts to the fore. Readers learn the highlights of Oviedos
fascinating, itinerant life between two worlds divided by the Atlantic, from his
encounters as a young aristocrat with Columbus and Da Vinci to his participation
as conquistador in the violent subjugation of native peoples in Tierra Firme, along
with wider developments relating to political and philosophical innovations that
informed the elaboration of the History. Oviedos frustrated quest to see his work
in print emerges as a main theme. Little more than the first of his three-part,
fifty-book history was published at the time, largely due to the opposition of the
Dominican friar Bartolom de Las Casas, who contested Oviedos support of the
encomienda system, and it was not until 185155 that Jos Amador de los Ros
published an imperfect edition of the entire history. Myers locates all extant
manuscripts, establishes the chronology of the works four stages of composition,
and examines the implications of Oviedos writings and revisions in relation to his
ever-changing political concerns and historiographic methods. Her painstaking
reconstruction of this documentary trail is a remarkable achievement.
Following the opening chapter on Oviedos life and writings, Myers presents
six chapter-length case studies to demonstrate how the chroniclers narrative strat-
egies changed over time according to personal circumstances, imperial policies, and
advancements in knowledge. That Oviedo combined history writing with literary
self-fashioning in an attempt to gain royal favors and establish his credibility as a
historian will come as no surprise to those familiar with the pragmatic nature of
chronicle writing. Other chapters, devoted to Oviedos evolving interpretation of
the conquest of Mexico and his thoughts on reports of Amazon women in the New
World, underscore the complexity of the task to establish historical truth in the

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 REVIEWS 1293

face of a heterogeneous American reality. Though previous studies, apart from

Jess Carrillos Naturaleza e Imperio (2005), have largely ignored the Historys
trove of visual images, the illustrations of Americas flora, fauna, and ethnographic
items justly occupy the center of Myerss book. Through analysis of Oviedos
diverse verbal and visual representations of the pineapple, for example, Myers
argues that Oviedo came to rely less on European conceptual models and more on
empirical observation in an attempt to convey its appearance. Her close textual
readings give life to the frustrations of a historian painfully aware of the insuffi-
ciency of words and images to represent the divine in American nature for a
European audience without direct access to such novelties.
Myerss final chapter traces the evolution of Oviedos depiction of native
peoples according to the compositional stages of the History and reassesses the
clich, originating with Las Casas, that Oviedo represented the darker side of the
conquest for his portrayal of indigenous moral degeneracy in the service of
colonialist agendas. Not discounting the chroniclers moralizing tendency, Myers
identifies the maturing of Oviedos ethnographic impulse (126) in later drafts of
the work, which she attributes to a representational shift in the writing of history
in favor of empirical concerns, on the one hand, and to political and ethical
concerns about the treatment of native peoples, on the other. She suggests that
Oviedo grew to take seriously his role as official historian, faithful to the truth, and
consistent with Las Casas, to see the History as a critique of the conquest and the
corrupt administration of the Indies, from which he took pains to distance himself.
With this masterful study, which stands prominently among recent first-rate pub-
lications on early New World historiography Cristin Roa-de-la-Carrera,
Histories of Infamy (2005), Rolena Adorno, The Polemics of Possession (2007), and
Sabine MacCormack, On the Wings of Time (2007) Myers succeeds in cement-
ing the foundational place of Oviedos History in the canon of colonial letters, side
by side with the works of the Dominican activist, one of his greatest detractors, and
greatest influences.
JOHN CHARLES
Tulane University

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