Books of the Brave: Being an Account of Books and of Men in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth-Century New World

By Irving A. Leonard

Since its original appearance in 1949, Irving A. Leonard's pioneering Books of the Brave has endured as the classic account of the introduction of literary culture to the Spanish New World. Leonard's study documents the works of fiction that accompanied and followed the conquistadores to the Americas and argues that popular texts influenced these men and shaped the way they thought and wrote about their experiences.
 
UC Press's 1992 edition combines Leonard's text with a selection of the documents that were his most valuable sources—nine lists of books destined for the Indies. Containing a wealth of information, these lists provide the documentary evidence for what is perhaps Leonard's greatest contribution: his demonstration that royal and inquisitorial prohibitions failed to control the circulation of books and ideas in colonial Spanish America.
 
Rolena Adorno's introduction reaffirms the lasting value of Books of the Brave and chronicles developments in cultural-historical studies that have shed light on the role of books in Spanish American colonial culture. Adorno situates Leonard's work at the threshold between older, triumphalist views of Spanish conquest history and more recent perspectives engendered by studies of native American peoples.
 
With its rich descriptions of the book trade in both Spain and America, Books of the Brave has much to offer historians as well as literary critics. Indeed, it is a highly readable and engaging book for anyone interested in the cultural life of the New World.
 This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9780520309944

Irving A. Leonard

Irving A. Leonard was Professor Emeritus of Romance Languages and Hispanic American History at the University of Michigan and the author of many works on colonial Spanish America. Rolena Adorno is Sterling Professor of Spanish at Yale University. She is the author of The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative and coeditor of Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century.

Book preview

BOOKS OF THE BRAVE

THE ARRIVAL OF THE SPANISH CONQUISTADORS

BEING AN ACCOUNT OF BOOKS AND OF MEN IN THE

SPANISH CONQUEST AND SETTLEMENT OF

THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY

NEW WORLD

Irving A. Leonard

With a New Introduction

by Rokna Adomo

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY LOS ANGELES OXFORD

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

Oxford, England

Appendix Document i reprinted by permission of Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica; Documents 2 and 4-9 reprinted by permission of Hispanic Review.

© 1949 by Harvard University Press; renewed 1967 by Irving A. Leonard

© 1992 by Rolena Adorno

Printed in the United States of America

98765432 i

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. @

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Leonard, Irving Albert, 1896-

Books of the brave: being an account of books and of men in the Spanish Conquest and settlement of the sixteenth-century New World / Irving A. Leonard; with a new introduction by Rolena Adorno.

p. cm.

Originally published: Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-07990-6 (alk. paper).—ISBN 0-520-07816-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)

i. Book industries and trade—Latin America—History—16th century. 2. Spanish literature—Classical period, 1500-1700—Appreciation—Latin America. 3. Books and reading—Latin America—History—16th century. 4. Latin America—Intellectual life— 16th century. 5. America—Discovery and exploration—Spanish. 6. Latin America— History—To 1600. I. Title.

Z490.L46 1992

002’.098'09031—dc2o 92-4601

TO MY TEACHERS

Frederick B. Luquiens (1875-1940)

E. C. Hills (1867-1932)

Rudolph Schevill (1874-1946)

Herbert E. Bolton

LOS CONQUISTADORES

Como creyeron solos lo increíble, sucedió: que los límites del sueño traspasaron, y el mar y el imposible 8 Y es todo elogio a su valor, pequeño.

Y el poema es su nombre. Todavía decir Cortés, Pizarro o Alvarado, contiene más grandeza y más poesía de cuanta en este mundo se ha rimado.

Capitanes de ensueño y de quimera, rompiendo para siempre el horizonte, persiguieron al sol en su carrera 8

Y el mar, alzado hasta los cielos, monte es, entre ambas Españas, solo digno cantor de sus hazañas.

—Manuel Machado

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

I. THE SPANISH CONQUISTADOR

II. THE ROMANCES OF CHIVALRY

III. THE CONQUISTADOR AND THE LYING HISTORIES

IV. AMAZONS, BOOKS AND CONQUERORS-MEXICO

V. AMAZONS, BOOKS AND CONQUERORS—SOUTH AMERICA

VI. THE CONQUERORS AND THE MORALISTS

VII. LIGHT LITERATURE AND THE LAW

VIII. BOOKS FOLLOW THE CONQUEROR

IX. FAVORITE FICTION

X. THE HOUSE OF TRADE AND THE CONQUERORS’ BOOKS

XI. BOATS AND BOOKS

XII. VISITAS AND BOOKS

XIII. ON THE MEXICAN VI BOOK TRADE, 1576

XVI. BEST SELLERS OF THE LIMA BOOK TRADE, 1583

XV. ONE MAN’S LIBRARY, MANILA, 1583

XVI. ON THE MEXICAN BOOK TRADE, 1600

XVII. THE PICARO FOLLOWS THE CONQUISTADOR

XVIII. DON QUIXOTE INVADES THE SPANISH INDIES

XIX. DON QUIXOTE IN THE LAND OF THE INCAS

XX. THE LITERARY LEGACY

DOCUMENTARY APPENDIX

REFERENCES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE ARRIVAL OF THE SPANISH CONQUISTADORS Frontispiece (From the DeBry Collection of Voyages)

THE SPANISH CONQUISTADORS AND AMERICAN TREASURE 38

(From the DeBry Collection)

THE AMAZONS 39

(From the DeBry Collection)

SEVILLE AT THE END OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 126

(From Theatrum in quo visuntur illustriores Hispaniae urbis)

THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY SEVILLE WHARF FRONT 127

(From the DeBry Collection)

A SIXTEENTH-CENTURY MAP OF MANILA BAY 236

(From the DeBry Collection)

EARLY SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CUZCO 237

(From the DeBry Collection)

INTRODUCTION

WHEN, ON HIS NINETY-FOURTH BIRTHDAY, I CALLED Professor Leonard to extend my best wishes, he proposed—with another anniversary (the Columbian fifth centennial) in mind—that there be a new edition of Books of the Brave. Reflecting on the idea, I decided to act on the proposal. Books of the Brave synthesized a great deal of information pertinent to the introduction of print culture in Spanish America, and it firmly established the circulation of books and ideas between Spain and her ultramarine possessions as a cultural-historical topic of importance. Still cited with great frequency today, Books of the Brave has endured both because of its documentary contributions to the links between Spain and Spanish America in the field of elite, literate culture and because of the broader issues it raises regarding the role of reading and imagination in history.

Like the works of those individuals whom Leonard identifies in his prologue (xli-xlvii) as predecessors or colleagues—Francisco Rodriguez Marin, Francisco Fernández del Castillo, José Torre Re- vello, Guillermo Lohmann Villena, Agustin Millares Carlo—his own book has become a classic. Leonard raised issues that continue to be studied and debated today, including the circulation and censorship of popular fiction, the audiences to which that fiction was disseminated, the interpretation of literature by its readers, and the role that popular reading has played in history.

Leonard’s work on the circulation of books of narrative fiction, for example, can be placed after the earlier studies of Francisco Fernández del Castillo, Francisco Rodriguez Marin, and Sir Henry Thomas, and alongside those of José Torre Revello and Ida Rodriguez Prampolini, on the role of chivalric fiction in the book trade and on the popular imagination, and Dorothy Schons, on book censorship.¹ On the production and readership of the printed word and its role as stimulus to the mythic imagination, Leonard’s work is a significant antecedent to more recent investigations such as those of Maxime Chevalier, B. W. Ife, Daniel Eisenberg, Clive Griffin, Luis Weckmann, and Juan Gil.² The range of research represented by these works bears witness to the comprehensive reach of Books of the Brave. In the past few years, the specific investigations of Leonard and his colleagues have been continued,³ but they have not been superseded. Rather, writers on the subject of books in the New World reaffirm and extend the information and insights that Irving Leonard offered some time ago.⁴

Shortly after my conversation with Professor Leonard, I examined the initial reviews and press releases on Books of the Brave and was struck by the difference between those readers’ sensibilities and our own today. These differences are most apparent in Leonard’s treatment of two of the most controversial topics in Spanish history: the conquests in America and the Spanish Inquisition. Just as he made vivid the circumstances of the Spanish-New World book trade, so too did the reviews of the 1949 English and 1953 Spanish editions (carefully dated and pasted in his personal album of memorabilia) call up an era different from our own. Most of those early reviewers were entirely persuaded by the idea that the conquistadores could have been influenced by popular chivalric literature. Only a few were critical of Leonard’s views on Spain’s glorious epoch of high adventure. Whereas early readers tended to find that Leonard’s argument added luster to the prevalent image of the conquistador as hero, today’s readers (including myself) question, in fact reject, the notion that the conquests could be interpreted as acts of enviable valor, or that the invasion of America by Spain could be excused because all western Europe participated, when and where possible, in the enterprises of discovery and expansion. Finally, careful readers take exception to the notion, implicit in chapter 1, that the conquistadores’ consumption of tales of chivalry as men of their times could be used to explain or even to justify their roles in wars of enslavement and destruction.

Thus, with the passage of four decades, the points of view expressed and the interpretations offered about this era of history have changed. Yet the views of forty years ago and those of today differ not so much in kind, but in degree and emphasis. Leonard’s book appeared just as a significant shift in outlook among scholars of colonial Spanish America was occurring, and as we shall see, that shift is evident in Books of the Brave, To discuss this point, it will be useful to juxtapose Leonard’s work with scholarly and popular ideas prevalent at the time of its first publication.

Leonard’s book stood at a threshold between older trends in the investigation of history and the new ones created and enriched by ethnohistorical studies of the native peoples of America before and under Spanish rule. Books of the Brave appeared just as social history was beginning to take its place alongside institutional history; the perspective and role of the Conquistador, as discussed by Leonard, was soon to be augmented by others, such as José Durand and Mario Gongora, looking at the European invaders, and Charles Gibson, looking at native societies, with the result that the dichotomy of victor and vanquished was no longer an adequate description.⁵

In 1949, the publication of Leonard’s work coincided with that of Lewis Hanke’s The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America and the re-edition of R. B. Cunningham Graham’s The Horses of the Conquest. By examining Books of the Brave in juxtaposition with one or the other of these works, one can discern the transitional character of Leonard’s work.⁶ Hanke’s well-documented study sought to demonstrate, as its title indicates, that the Spanish crown and its royal councils labored hard to protect the native populations, whom the private, entrepreneurial conquistadores subjugated and exploited in the name of Spain. Cunningham Graham’s more literary meditation extolled the heroism of the conquest by evoking the role of its great steeds. While Hanke’s work spoke to the courage of the court to debate and denounce after the fact the rights of conquest, Cunningham Graham viewed the conquest as embodying the romance and heroic adventure of chivalric times.

Like Hanke’s work, Leonard’s reveals an unwillingness to reconcile a valedictory interpretation of Spanish history with the known history of the conquests. New information and new perspectives were beginning to emerge, offering a more balanced and complete picture of Spain’s intervention in America. For example, in 195 2, three years after the appearance of Books of the Brave, Charles Gibson published his Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century. and during those same years John V. Murra was writing his path-breaking doctoral dissertation, The Economic Organization of the Inca State (completed in 1955). Whereas Gibson challenged the notion of the Hispanization of native Mexican society at the local level, Murra revealed the extraordinary complexity of pre-Columbian economic and political organization among the Incas. In 1964, Gibson published his landmark work The Aztecs Under Spanish Ruley and in 1970 Stanley and Barbara Stein’s The Colonial Heritage of Latin America effectively provided the death knell for the triumphalist vision of Spanish history in Anglo-American historiography.⁷ The long-awaited publication of Murra’s dissertation in 1978 coincided with a plenitude of interest in the complexities of pre-Columbian and postconquest Spanish American societies.⁸

In the early fifties, another new current in Spanish American cultural history had been taking shape: the study and recuperation of indigenous American accounts of the conquests. The work of Angel Maria Garibay and Miguel León-Portilla in Mexico and of Edmundo Guillen Guillén in Peru would make it impossible to imagine a conquest without victims or to overlook the vision of the vanquished peoples.⁹ (The great mounted steeds of Cunningham Graham’s conquistadores, for example, became the ferocious two-headed monsters recalled in the Aztec accounts of the conquests recovered by Garibay and León-Portilla.) With the scholarly and critical study of colonial sociopolitical and economic systems, as well as the retrieval of indigenous Americans’ testimonies of the European invasion, Spain’s sixteenth-century enterprise could no longer be explained by a simple one-sided story, as if it represented the whole.

In a 1983 interview, Professor Leonard stated that he used Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) as one of his models for narrative history.¹⁰ This influence is evident in Leonard’s writing, for he presents historical deeds to modern readers in terms of the ways those historical characters interpreted and envisioned their own past actions. A brief examination of Prescott’s writing can reveal the spirit and sensibilities that animate Leonard’s work.

Prescott conceptualized his historical writings in ways that would bring them alive to his readers.¹¹ Nowhere is this more explicit than in his History, when in his narration of the events of 1517 he remarks: It is difficult for those of our time, as familiar from childhood with the most remote places on the globe as with those of their own neighborhood, to picture to themselves the feelings of the men who lived in the sixteenth century (1:216). The themes of chivalry were what Prescott used to communicate the thrill of heroic history, and he even called the great sea discoveries ocean chivalry. To convey to his readers his understanding (or imagining) of the conquest experience, he described the life of the cavalier as romance put into action. The story of his adventures in the New World forms one of the most remarkable pages in the history of man (ibid.).

According to Prescott, the language of heroic adventure was needed to write conquest history, no matter how remarkable its deeds had been. To bring those deeds to life for the nineteenthcentury reader, he adorned his accounts of events with references to chivalric romance. An excellent example is found in his narration of the Spaniards’ first, unsuccessful attempt to ascend the heights of Popocatepetl. Prescott sought to impress his readers with the conquistadores’ daring, noting that this undertaking was eminently characteristic of the bold spirit of the cavalier of that day, who, not content with the dangers that lay in his path, seemed to court them from the mere Quixotic love of adventure (2:45). Two years later, Prescott continues, a second attempt was made successfully; Francisco Montaño was lowered repeatedly into the abyss of the crater, where he collected sulphur for use in gunpowder. Prescott utilized these deeds, he said, to illustrate the chimerical spirit of enterprise—not inferior to that of his own romances of chivalry—which glowed in the breast of the Spanish cavalier in the sixteenth century (2:47)-

Significantly, Prescott called up two literary references—Cervantes’s masterpiece and the romances of chivalry—to communicate his view of the Spaniards’ daring. In a curious combination of ancient and modern expressions, he characterized the progress of discovery by this chivalrous spirit of enterprise (1:217, 2:47). The combination of the notion of service to others (chivalry) and service to one’s self-interests (enterprise) suggests the romantic view of the Spanish conquests that prevailed from Prescott’s time through that of Irving Leonard.

Prescott’s use of heroic language to explain to nineteenth-century readers the actions of the conquistadores is found again in Leonard’s framing of his story of the relationship between the men and books of the conquest period. Thus, Leonard’s references to Spain’s role in overseas expansion as high adventure is augmented by notions of the Europeanizing of the globe and of the historic mission of initiating the mighty task of Europeanizing the entire habitat of mankind. Literary metaphors also serve to describe Spain’s conquests and colonization in the New World as the greatest epic in human history and the heroic epic of the westernization of the world.¹²

Nevertheless, Leonard’s writing also reveals that this view of history as epitomized by heroic tales of adventure was growing brittle and no longer could be considered to ring entirely true. In fact, the careful reader will discover that his appeal to the heroic dimension is occasionally tempered by the acknowledgment that the conquests brought death and devastation to the native peoples and reduced them to lives of misery. Yet while pointing to an everincreasing victimization of the Indians at the hands of the colonists, Leonard emphatically places part of the responsibility on the missionary friars themselves, in order to deflect some culpability from the Spanish conquerors, who are condemned forever by the evidence of a star witness [Las Casas], a conspicuous countryman who had seen their works (p. i).

Leonard chooses a quotation from Las Casas’s Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies as the epigraph of chapter i in order to rebut it, that is, to restore the historical reputation of Spain and especially to portray the conquistadores as heroic adventurers. Nevertheless, a more critical attitude sometimes comes through. Although on certain occasions Leonard describes Las Casas as somewhat fanatic and as having overstated the number of native lives lost in the wars of conquest, he also cites Las Casas’s unremitting efforts to alleviate the loss of the exploited natives of the New World.¹³ Today, Las Casas emerges as emblematic of a genuine Spanish concern for the spiritual and physical welfare of the Indians, which Leonard applauded, though his ambivalence toward Las Casas reveals his reluctance to relinquish the image of the sixteenth-century conquering hero that Las Casas’s writings indisputably tarnished.

With this as background, we turn to Leonard’s work itself. Although Books of the Brave is the subject of the present discussion, it represents the consolidation of his many contributions. For this reason, his 1933 Romances of Chivalry in the Spanish Indies, as well as some of his articles of the 1940s, will be cited as well when relevant. This brief essay will critically examine the triple aims of the book as Leonard spelled them out in his Foreword to the Second Edition of 1964: to controvert an element of the Spanish Black Legend through an investigation of the wide diffusion of literary culture; to describe the workings of the book trade; and to explore the possible influence of tales of chivalry on the conquistadores.

THE INQUISITION AND BOOK CENSORSHIP

In this country, as in Spain, the historiographic tendency of the 1940s was to revise the view that Spain had been guilty of profound historical offenses—its so-called Black Legend. In an important article that analyzes the Spanish Black Legend in this century, as well as its antecedents from the postconquest period onward, Benjamin Keen noted that the phrase was coined by Julián Juderías in 1914, in an apologetic work entitled La leyenda negra. In reviewing the historical scholarship on Spain of the subsequent decades, Keen included Books of the Brave among those works of historical revisionism that came to Spain’s defense.¹⁴ Leonard, in fact, considered his work a challenge to the charge of Spanish intolerance and opposition to intellectual advancement, most specifically in one area of cultural activity: the circulation of books and ideas from Spain to America.¹⁵

In this arena of elite culture, Leonard has made a considerable contribution, the lasting value of which is acknowledged by the publication of this edition, and in particular of its extraordinary documentary appendix. The value of such documents has been underscored in the past few years by renewed study of ships’ registers and bills of sale.¹⁶ These documents refute the commonplaces about the stifling of intellectual and creative impulses, which are usually based on the royal decrees of 1531 and 1543 aimed at prohibiting the importation of fictional literature to the Indies.¹⁷ Leonard, too (chapters 11 and 12), demonstrates that most of these laws were ignored, by officials and citizens alike—his conclusions date back to 1933, and other scholars since that time have often repeated and affirmed them.¹⁸

In particular, Leonard emphasizes that the Inquisition had no jurisdiction over or interest in popular literature; moreover, he suggests, because Inquisitorial port inspections were exceedingly lax, owing to corruption, indifference, and bribery, books banned by the state managed to get through. The notion that the Inquisition, in this situation, treaded lightly so as not to annoy powerful commercial interests is of merit. Here, evidently, we have one of the few circumstances in which the secular arm of the church did not fall heavily on the objects of its vigilance, though it is consistent with Inquisition practice of supporting the economic interests of the crown. In one revealing instance, Leonard showed not only that books appearing on Quiroga’s Index of Prohibited Books of 1583 were listed for a shipment from the year 1600, but also that the list bore the Inquisitorial inspector’s signed approval (p. 248).¹⁹ Although the documented cases Leonard analyzes are few, they serve to contradict unfounded generalizations about the suppression of books. To such claims Leonard responds persuasively: Why would individuals who flouted laws prohibiting the exploitation of native populations obey injunctions about matters so personal as their private reading?

The fact that the Inquisition was, by policy, indifferent to fictional literature is too often overlooked, even though the point has been well made, first by Leonard in 1933, then by Torre Revello in 1940, by Leonard at greatér length in 1949, and by Antonio Márquez in 198o.²⁰ Writings of belletristic character, be they the lying histories of popular fiction or works of poetry and eloquence (as they were described prior to the eighteenth-century invention of the concept of literature that we know today)²¹ simply were not Inquisitorial targets.

Yet to what degree can the Inquisition be applauded for the easy flow of books into the New World? In my view, the failure of Inquisitorial authority to repress the works of popular literature merits no accolades: the ban of popular literature, namely, was an affair of the state, not of ecclesiastical or Inquisitorial authority. That is, quite apart from the Inquisition, which banned books on theological grounds and according to criteria of cultural purity, the state promulgated its own laws on the circulation of secular books that it considered subversive or otherwise harmful. Exactly why the royal decrees prohibited the importation of works of chivalric fantasy to the Indies is not self-evident; yet neither was there any reason for Inquisitorial inspectors to take notice of them.

A word in closing in regard to Leonard’s seemingly general statements that the Inquisition was in fact less cruel than previously assessed. When he states, the verdict of posterity on the Spanish Inquisition is harsher than the facts wholly warrant, he does so only with specific reference to the glimpses of its operations noted in the earlier chapters of this book: in other words, the area of book censorship—popular fiction—for which the Inquisition had no jurisdiction.²² His concern was not social but rather literary history, that is, the now-familiar topic of the lack of novels in the colonial era. In 1949, Leonard concluded that, among the causes for the failure of Spanish Americans to cultivate the novel prior to Independence, "the most important one was not the repressive influence of the Holy Office." We shall return later to the issue of intellectual and literary creativity in viceregal society.

DOCUMENTING THE BOOK TRADE

The greatest asset of this new edition of Books of the Brave is the first-time publication in an English volume (they did appear in the 1953 Mexican edition) of the documentary appendix—the book lists analyzed in chapters 13 through 19.²³ Because Leonard concentrated on the popular literature contained in these ships’ manifests and book orders (constituting some 15-30 percent of the total items listed in those inventories), a wealth of information and many topics for future research are made available by their publication.

In Books of the Brave, Leonard’s special merits as a narrative writer are apparent in the chapters devoted to the day-to-day operations of the book trade, from the processing of books at Seville’s House of Trade, through transatlantic crossings and dockside Inquisitorial inspections (chapters 10-12), to the Puertobelo Fair, the overland crossing of the Isthmus of Panama, and the overland journey from Lima to Cuzco (chapters 18-19).²⁴ Leonard’s own crossing of the Andes on horseback surely contributed to the vividness of the transAndean account he gives in Books of the Brave.²⁵

Regarding transactions of the book trade, Leonard’s greatest contribution lies in tracing what no other book-trade scholar had found: the fate of a single consignment of books (which included seventy-two copies of the first edition of Don Quixote) from its deposit at the House of Trade in Seville to its arrival, over a year later, at Lima. He did so, as he acknowledges, by carrying forward the research of Francisco Rodriguez Marin, who in 1914 showed that the books had in fact been shipped from Spain; in 1940, Irving Leonard proved that the very same consignment arrived in America.²⁶ Together, the work of these two scholars revealed that one of the greatest literary works of all time came to the Indies just after its publication, confirming the notion that the new and the novel in literary fashion made their way abroad quite rapidly.

Because the facts of this scholarly case often get garbled in the retelling, it behooves us to spell out the chain of events. Rodriguez Marin discovered the 1605 documentation for some 346 copies of Don Quixote registered at Seville for shipment to the Indies. Juan de Sarria, a bookdealer from Alcala de Henares, had delivered his books to Seville around March 26,1605, for shipment to his business associate, Miguel Mendez, in Peru. Rodriguez Marin hypothesized that probably almost the entire first edition was sent to the New World in the two annual fleets, but he had no proof of the size of the edition nor of its actual arrival in America. It was Leonard who discovered in the National Archive of Peru the recibo signed by Méndez (see document 7 of Appendix);²⁷ on June 5, 1606, the consignment was received by Sarria’s son, also named Juan, and Miguel Méndez in Lima. Furthermore, Leonard was able to add to Rodriguez Marin’s discoveries new information showing the shipment to the Indies of nearly one hundred additional copies of the novel, as well as the existence of personal copies carried on board for private reading by passengers on the 1605 crossing (pp. 270-272).

In addition to documenting the arrival of Don Quixote in Spanish America within a year of its publication, Leonard (chapter 17) has shown the same to be the case for Mateo Aleman’s Guzmán de Al- farache.²⁹ Although Leonard was far from satisfied with the number of copies of Alemán’s work he could verify as being exported to America, Carlos Alberto González Sanchez has recently discovered further documentation that attests to a single shipment of nearly five hundred copies of Guzmán de Alfarache,²⁹

Leonard’s discovery that two of the greatest works of Spanish literature arrived in the Spanish Indies soon after their publication effectively nullified the commonplace about the backwardness and cultural isolation of the ultramarine provinces of Spain. On this score, he pointed again to pragmatic considerations, arguing that the economic interests of the book merchants prevailed over any state attempts to enforce cultural policy—assertions that subsequent research has borne out.³⁰ Guaranteed high-percentage profit margins and low tariffs on books for export made attractive the shipping abroad of first editions that, unproven on the market, were considered risky investments by printers.³¹

THE ROLE OF READING AND THE IMAGINATION IN HISTORY

The portion of the Books of the Brave most often remembered and cited is its hypothesis that the popular books of chivalry inspired the deeds of the conquistadores. In itself, the idea was not new; it had appeared, as we have seen, in Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico as well as the works of other writers.³² Yet it was Irving Leonard who brought prominence to the topic and gave it persuasive force, though not positive proof.³³

Leonard’s examination of the tale of the Amazons is his best argument for the interrelationship between legend and life. By suggesting that the presentation of the Amazons in Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo’s chivalric romance Sergas de Esplandián was inspired by a mention of Columbus in his Letter of Discovery, which in turn was stimulated by an episode in Marco Polo, Leonard begins an account of the pursuit of the mythical beings by a remarkable number of explorers who reported seeking or seeing the fabled tribe of women (chapters 4-5).³⁴

The case of the Amazons is Leonard’s most compelling demonstration of the connection between the conquistadores and popular fiction; that is, what the conquistadores thought they would find was clearly conditioned by that literature. Leonard asserts that the reading (or hearing) by the conquistadores of the romances of chiv- airy had a hypnotic effect on them, adding to the delirium of the conquest. The terms he uses are revealing, for they refer to psychological states varied enough to allow us to pursue the question of how the romances of chivalry were interpreted by men at arms in the Spanish Indies. In addition, other issues raised by Leonard, such as how widespread literacy became in the course of the sixteenth century, what groups constituted the readership of the books of chivalry (and, later in the sixteenth century, the equally popular forms of the pastoral novel and the picaresque),³⁵ and what meanings various kinds of readers—state officials and private citizens alike— attached to these libros de entretenimiento, are far from being resolved.

Clive Griffin and Maxime Chevalier, for example, challenge the notion that the discovery and development of printing expanded the reading public and democratized culture.³⁶ The increased availability of books, Griffin argues, particularly in the early sixteenth century, did not necessarily reflect an increase in literacy, nor did the greater demand for books mean there were more readers; rather, it is likely that the same elite groups simply owned more volumes. As to who read the romances of chivalry, Daniel Eisenberg and Chevalier argue that the readership was elite and mostly male; the latter, in fact, concludes that the novels of chivalry held the attention of the same public of caballeros, soldiers, and educated men in the era of Philip II as during the reign of Charles V.³⁷ Griffin, however, has more recently challenged as unsubstantiated the argument that these readers were exclusively nobles.³⁸

On the perplexing questions raised by Leonard as to why fiction was considered worthy of prohibition and what its feared effects would be on readers, we can find some theoretical answers in B. W. Ife’s analysis of the Platonic critique of art. As interpreted by sixteenth-century Spanish writers, this critical position held that art was morally harmful and metaphysically illegitimate not because of its express content but because of its power to move, persuade, and convince.³⁹ Leonard evokes varied psychological consequences of indulgence in fiction when he suggests that the reading of books of chivalry served as incentive, stimulated vicarious pleasure, or consoled the conquistadores, easing their boredom or firing their imaginations. Ife’s work makes explicit the theoretical principles at stake in Leonard’s arguments about the sixteenth-century consumption of fiction.

BERNAL DÍAZ DEL CASTILLO RECONSIDERED

Although Leonard states that the tale of Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers of France was the longest-lived and most influential chivalric story in Spanish America (p. 329), he builds his case on the single example of Bernal Diaz’s references to Amadis de Gaula and other romance motifs in his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España. To explain the lack of references by the conquistador-chroniclers to the novels of chivalry, Leonard argues (chapter 6) that self-censorship was at work: they knew that this literature was the object of censure by moralist writers and so deliberately omitted all mention of popular fiction.⁴⁰

In my view, however, there is no need to explain this omission. The challenge for conquistador-reporters, after all, was to convince their readers that the experiences they described were real, not invented. Nevertheless, by raising the issue of citations of chivalric romance, Leonard in a way encourages us to examine a larger issue: the role of chivalric values as a frame of reference for the conquistadores. If they did find inspiration in the novels of chivalry, it would likely be discernible in more subtle ways.⁴¹ Analysis of formal models of composition and specifically of chivalric elements may yet yield great insight into the way conquistador-chroniclers fashioned their recollected experience.

Although the degree to which chivalric fictions and values contributed to the psychology of the conquistadores remains open to debate, such works certainly provide a language of cultural reference for describing soldiers’ experiences, as Bernal Diaz’s references to Amadis de Gaula demonstrate. That is, while direct evidence of conquistadores’ reading, much less its impact on them, is elusive, their subsequent interpretation of their deeds in relation to literary traditions is revealing.

If we look at the single statement by Bernal Diaz which Leonard uses to suggest that popular literature indeed did influence the attitudes and actions of sixteenth-century conquistadores, we recognize Bernal Diaz not as soldier, but as writer and reader.⁴²

Recalling his first sight of Tenochtitlán some thirty to forty years after the fact, he remarks:

During the morning, we arrived at a broad causeway and continued our march toward Iztapalapa, and when we saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry land and that straight and level causeway going towards Mexico, we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis, on account of the great towers … and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether some of the things we saw were not a dream. It is not to be wondered at that I here write it down in this manner, for there is so much to think over that I do not know how to describe it, seeing things as we did that have never been heard of or seen before, not even dreamed about.⁴³

The evidence suggests that the novels of chivalry inspired neither Bernal Diaz’s actions of soldiering nor his act of narrating. Instead, they become a solution to his search for a way to communicate the magnificence and splendor of his first sight of Tenochtitlán.⁴⁴ His statement reveals that the books of chivalry stood as a common reference point by which the sixteenth-century Spanish reader could make meaning of the account of a place unseen—America— as given to him by a writer and reader who shared similar literary cultural experiences.

Bemal Diaz’s strategic use of chivalric romance is confirmed by his additional references to the Amadises. On more than one occasion, he complains about the seemingly infinite number of battles he had to describe to account for the ninety-three-day siege of Tenochtitlán. Although his readers were surely tired of them, he says, it was nevertheless necessary to rehearse how and when and in what manner those battles had occurred. In this aside to his readers on the problems of writing, he mentions that he had considered organizing the narration so that each encounter would occupy a separate chapter. But this, it seemed to him, would be an endless task and, even worse, would make his work seem like an Amadis,⁴⁵ Here the reference to the chivalric romance is clearly negative. Is Bernal Diaz saying that a narration à la Amadis would produce an overlong account, putting the reader to sleep with the tiresome description of battle after battle? Or, more serious, is he saying that the reader might thus suspend belief in this true account, sentencing it to guilt by association, if it followed the narrative model of chivalric romance? Both questions can be answered in the affirmative, as the testimony of other chroniclers attests.

Bernal Diaz faced a problem commonly lamented by writers of historical accounts and histories of the Spanish conquests. Pedro de Castañeda Nájera, for example, who wrote some twenty years after the fact about the Coronado expedition of 1540-1542 in which he had participated as a soldier, made this remark near the end of his narrative account, in reference to the exploits of Captain Juan Gallego and the twenty companions who went with him:

We shall tell them in this chapter in order that those who, in the future, may read and talk about them may have a reliable author on whom to depend, an author who does not write fables, like some things we read now-a-days in books of chivalry. Were it not for the fables of enchantments with which they are laden, there are events that have happened recently in these parts to our Spaniards in conquests and clashes with the natives that surpass, as deeds of amazement, not only the aforesaid books but even the ones written about the twelve peers of France.⁴⁶

The phrase fables of enchantments with which they are laden suggests an a posteriori gloss of the fantastic onto the narration, which would prevent the reader from appreciating the historical event. In his Historia general y natural de las Indias. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo voiced the same uneasiness: after all, I do not recount the nonsense of the books of chivalry, nor such matters as are dependent on them.⁴⁷ Oviedo, himself the author of a novel of chivalry, Don Claribalte, was genuinely concerned lest his readers impose the expectations of fantasy on reading the narration of history.⁴⁸

Bernal Diaz and the others faced a common problem, one that their references to the novels of chivalry allow us to bring into sharper focus. They were writing about events and topics that seemed fantastic: great numbers of battles, horrifying evidence of human sacrifice, landscapes never before seen, and even real-life enchanters (shamans). They wished to articulate that hitherto unseen dimension accurately in order to be truthful to their understanding of their own experience. At the same time, they (Bernal Diaz in particular) wanted to exploit the unique elements of what they saw in order to engage their readers’ interest. Hence, they were caught in the dilemma of producing faithful accounts that would be appealing but that afforded no common points of reference for them and their readers. Bernal Diaz summed it up best in reflecting on his description of Tenochtitlán: It is not to be wondered at that I here write it down in this manner, for there is so much to think over that I do not know how to describe it, seeing things as we did that had never been heard of or seen before, not even dreamed about.⁴⁹ Bernal Diaz, Castañeda, and Oviedo all suggest that the comparison of their writings with the books of chivalry was inevitable. Their point, however, was that fiction paled by comparison with what they witnessed, that the historical deeds and experiences they described exceeded the only possible model for comparison that existed in their readers’ imaginations.⁵⁰

On the question of the conquest in its aftermath, Leonard suggests that criollo readers were not interested in the history of the Indies, largely because no such works appeared on a list of books to be ordered by a book dealer of Lima in 1583 (see Appendix, Document 3). Recent investigations into private libraries in the viceroyalty of Peru, however, reveal that in fact New World history inspired considerable and deep interest.⁵¹

A historical topic of much more apparent interest in the Indies was the mission of combatting infidels, as Francisco Lopez de Gomara put it, a mission modeled on and memorialized by Spain’s internal struggle against the Muslims.⁵² Significant here are Leonard’s observations about the popularity in Spanish America of historical and fictional works concerning the defeat of the Moors and Moriscos (pp. 117-119). The church often taught native Americans the lesson of the triumph of Christianity over rival traditions by having them dramatize the Spanish defeat of the Muslims, a performance tradition that persists in Latin America still today.⁵³ Clearly, the Reconquest of Spain was considered a holy war, and for ideological reasons alone, works that exploited its themes would have been promoted and requested.⁵⁴

Finally, the attempt by Philip II from 1556 onward to control the creation and circulation of works pertaining to the Indies must be reevaluated with respect to its impact in actual practice.⁵⁵ Although crown interests were not challenged by popular fiction generally, writings on the conquest were another matter and saw more scrupulous vigilance. There is no question that prohibited chronicles—Hernán Cortés’s cartas de relación. López de Gómara’s Hispania victrix—circulated despite the sanctions.⁵⁶ Yet the crown’s actions in this area, apart from its legislation, remain to be investigated.

CREATIVITY IN THE VICEROYALTY

One goal in bringing out Books of the Brave again is to transcend the old idea that the steamroller of Inquisitorial censorship prohibited creative developments.⁵⁷ Mariano Picon-Salas’s pronouncement that royal decrees and Inquisitorial policy hushed the colonial voice, which, because it was not permitted to write novels or histories concerning aboriginal inhabitants, then meandered off into the torturous byways of baroque prose, is simply not true.⁵⁸ In the first place, there was no law against writing fiction in the Indies; in the second place, imported and local fictional literature abounded.⁵⁹ Yet in the final chapter of Books of the Brave, even Leonard asks why the steady flow of books from the Iberian Peninsula did not stimulate a richer literature from the pens of colonial writers. Although he much praises the works of Spanish American literary writing admired now—those of El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Alonso de Ercilla, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—he very cautiously says only that these figures and their works made colonial literature something more than a stunted branch of the vigorous letters of the motherland (p. 320).

Today we can go much further in assessing the greatness of the Spanish American tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thanks to the scholarship of the past few decades. The magnificent works produced during the viceregal period have been too long overlooked by exegetes seeking a more conventional history of belles lettres in Spanish America. The problem was not a failure in intellectual and creative endeavors during those centuries, but rather the much more recent failure to appreciate the learned and original contributions of early New World writers.

As for works on Amerindian cultures, legislation did not—and could not—stop their production. The legislation in question was promulgated in 1577 explicitly to stop Fray Bernardino de Sahagún’s research on Nahua culture and history, which he and his assistants recorded in the Nahuatl language.⁶⁰ The Florentine Codex survives today as a testimony to the failure of the prohibition. Likewise, the publication of the information contained in Las Casas’s great encyclopedia of Caribbean and North, Central, and South American Indian cultures, the extraordinary Apologética historia sumaria, reveals that no agency could deter writing about Amerindian societies. Although Las Casas made no effort to publish his work himself, the Augustinian friar Jeronimo Román y Zamora presented the bulk of it in his own Repúblicas del mundo, which, though it was once censored and expurgated, was twice published (1575, 1595).⁶¹ in short, and as Leonard states as well, legislation designed to curb intellectual creativity can never be taken as the measure of that censorship’s effectiveness.

Why the novel was absent in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish America is a question that has entertained generations of literary scholars and commentators without notable results. In the last few years, however, theoretical developments in the discipline of textual studies have shed new light on the issue.⁶² It is hardly necessary to apologize for this literary lacuna, for, apart from Don Quixote and picaresque fiction in Spain at the turn of the seventeenth century, the novel was not born in Europe until early in the eighteenth century. To demand such an art form of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish America, then, has been to construe its cultural history in a remarkably narrow and anachronistic fashion.

In the final analysis, I would say that Irving Leonard’s meditations on the relationships among life, literature, and creativity have endured precisely because of the evocative, rather than the demonstrative, character of Books of the Brave, In this regard, two images in particular stand out: Tenochtitlán described by reference to tales of chivalry; and the mining settlement of Pausa, Peru, adorned by gentlemen dressed festively as knights errant. One image recalls the beginning of the conquest period; the other, life in the viceroyalty after a century of Spanish rule. In the first case, we have Leonard’s argument that the deeds of fiction influenced the deeds of history, based on the literary evidence supplied by Bernal Diaz del Castillo. In the second, we have the re-creation of a literary character, a fictional eccentric—Don Quixote himself—in carni- valesque fiestas of Spanish settlers in the New World, the evidence here being a relación of events that took place in Pausa in 1614 to celebrate the appointment of Juan de Mendoza y Luna, the marquis of Montesclaros, as viceroy of Peru.⁶³

To find Bernal Diaz thinking of the tales of Amadis as he recalled his first view of Tenochtitlán, and to discover that criollos a century later were dressing up as knights errant, is to see the complex way in which imagination enters into experience. Two figures add special life to the latter scene: the burlesque personification of Don Quixote, and the evocation of another lost past—not the Spaniards’ own— in the appearance of one Don Román de Baños, dressed as a knight errant but riding on an Inca’s royal litter and accompanied by a hundred Andean musicians. This last detail, fully described in the original relación,⁶⁴ shocks the reader with its bizarre juxtaposition of images: both the Andean dancers and Román de Baños dramatize histories that are not their own. Indeed, the scene evokes the remarkable constellation of cultures in the history of the Spanish viceroyalty, and leads us again to reconsider colonial creativity and interpretation.

Instead of asking why early Spanish America produced no novel, it is more productive to contemplate not absences, but presences. The great literary, historiographic, and ethnological traditions represented by authors such as Pedro Cieza de León, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernardino de Sahagún, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo have yet to be fully explored. In this respect, what Bernal Díaz has to offer is much broader than a first panoramic view of the great Tenochtitlán; his perspective embraces, historically and imaginatively, the first half-century of the Spanish presence in Mexico and Guatemala, and the heady dealings at royal council and court in Spain as well. The Historia Verdadera thus forms part of the great cultural and intellectual legacy to which today’s Latin America is heir.

For the period of the foundations of this legacy, the work of Irving A. Leonard continues to be a landmark. To explore some of the questions he posed, we can again look at the writings he examined in his works, not only as sources for specific information, but as laboratories of investigation for still broader insights into the life of early Spanish America. The publication of this new edition is more than a tribute to Irving A. Leonard’s achievement; it is an invitation to continue the work that he and his predecessors and contemporaries began several decades ago in the archives and libraries of Spain and Spanish America.

ROLENA ADORNO Princeton, New Jersey

NOTES

I would like to thank friends at Princeton University for their interest in and insight into this project: James A. Boon, Jose Antonio Mazzoni, Eyda M. Merediz, Patrick C. Pautz, and especially Andrew M. Shapiro, who assisted with the research. To Professor Irving A. Leonard I am most grateful for the generosity with which he has shared his experience and perspectives.

1 . Francisco Fernández del Castillo, Libros y libreros en el siglo XVI (1914) (Mexico City: Archivo General de la Nación y Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1982); Francisco Rodríguez Marín, El Qui- jote y Don Quijote en América (Madrid: Librería Hernando, 1911); Henry Thomas, Spanish and Portuguese Romances of Chivalry: The Revival of the Romance of Chivalry in the Spanish Peninsula, and Its Extension and Influence Abroad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920); José Torre Revello, El libro, la imprenta y el periodismo en América durante la dominación española (Buenos Aires: Jacobo Peuser, 1940); Ida Rodríguez Prampolini, Amadises de América: la hazaña de Indias como empresa caballeresca (Mexico City: Junta Mexicana de Investigaciones Históricas, 1948); Dorothy Schons, Book Censorship in New Spain (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1950).

2 . Maxime Chevalier, Lectura y lectores en la España de los siglos XVI y XVII (Madrid: Ediciones Turner, 1976); B. W. Ife, Reading and Fiction in Golden-Age Spain: A Platonist Critique and Some Picaresque Replies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Daniel Eisenberg, Romances of Chivalry in the Spanish Golden Age (Newark, Del.: Juan de la Cuesta, 1982); Clive Griffin, The Crombergers of Seville: The History of a Printing and Merchant Dynasty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Luis Weckmann, La herencia medieval de Mexico, 3 vols. (Mexico City: Colegio de Mexico, 1984); Juan Gil, Mitos y utopías del descubrimiento, vol. 1: Colón y su tiempo-, vol. 2: El Pacífico-, vol. 3: El Dorado (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1989).

3 . New studies on the exportation of books to colonial Spanish America and private libraries abound. See, for example, Carmen Arellano and Albert Meyers, "Testamento de Pedro Milachami, un curaca cañari en la región de los Wanka, Perú," Revista española de antropología americana 18 (1988): 95-127; Luis Jaime Cisneros and Pedro Guibovich Pérez, Una biblioteca cuzqueña del siglo XVII, Histórica (Lima) 6 (1982): 141-171; Pedro Guibovich Pérez, Libros para ser vendidos en el Virreinato del Perú a fines del siglo XVI, Boletín del Instituto Riva-Agüero (Lima) 13 (1984-1985): 85-114; idem, Las lecturas de Francisco de Isásaga, Histórica (Lima) 10 (1986): 191-212; Teodoro Hampe Martínez, Los primeros libros en el Perú colonial, Fénix 28-29 (1983): 71-90; idem, Presencia de un librero medinense en Lima (siglo XVI), Revista histórica (Lima) 34 (1983-1984): 103-112; idem, Lecturas de un jurista del siglo XVI: la biblioteca del doctor Gregorio González de Cuenca, presidente de la audiencia de Santo Domingo, Anuario de estudios americanos 41 (1984): 143-193; idem, Libros profanos y sagrados en la biblioteca del tesorero Antonio Dávalos, Revista de Indias 178 (July-December 1986): 385-402; idem, La biblioteca del virrey don Martín Enriquez: aficiones intelectuales de un gobernante colonial, Historia mexicana 142 (October-December 1986): 251-271; idem, Lecturas de un jurista del siglo XVI: la biblioteca del licenciado Juan Bautista de Monzón, fiscal y oidor de Lima, Atenea 455 (1987): 237-251; idem, La difusión de libros e ideas en el Perú colonial: análisis de bibliotecas particulares (siglo XVI), Bulletin hispanique 89 (1987): 55-84; idem, La biblioteca del arzobispo Hernando Arias de Ugarte: bagaje intelectual de un prelado criollo, Thesaurus 42 (1987): 337-361; idem, Una biblioteca cuzqueña confiscada por la Inquisición, Anuario de estudios americanos 45 (1988): 273-3¹55 Teodoro Hampe Martínez and Carlos A. González Sánchez, La biblioteca de un picaro indiano del siglo XVI: el cura Alonso de Torres Maldonado, Investigaciones y ensayos 36 (July-December 1987): 483-496; Helga Kropfinger von Kügelgen, Exportación de libros europeos de Sevilla a la Nueva España en el año de 1586, in Libros europeos en la Nueva España a fines del siglo XVI, Das Mexiko-Projekt der Deutschen Forschungs- gemeinschaft, vol. 5 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1973); Guillermo Lohmann Villena, Los libros españoles en Indias, Arbor (Madrid) 2, no. 6 (1944): 221-249; idem, Libros, libreros y bibliotecas en la época virreinal, Fénix 21 (1971): 17-24; Agustín Millares Cario, Bibliotecas y difusión del libro en Hispanoamérica colonial: intento bibliográfico, Boletín histórico (Caracas) 22 (January 1970): 25-72; Aurelio Miró Quesada, Fray Luis de Granada en el Perú, Revista de la Universidad Católica (Lima) 11-12 (1982): 13—20; Stephen Mohler, Publishing in Colonial Spanish America, Inter-American Review of Bibliography 28, no. 3 (1978): 259-271; Ignacio Osorio Romero, Historia de las bibliotecas novohispanas (Mexico City: SEP, Dirección General de Bibliotecas, 1986); Francisco de Solano, Fuentes para la historia cultural: libros y bibliotecas de la América colonial, in Ensayos de metodología histórica en el campo americanista (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Centro de Estudios Históricos, 1985); and Guillermo Tovar de Teresa, La ciudad de México y la utopía en el siglo XVI (Mexico City: Espejo de Obsidiana, 1987). See also the fine catalog of the 1987 exhibition Books in the Americas at the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island (Julie Greer Johnson, The Book in the Americas: The Role of Books and Printing in the Development of Culture and Society in Colonial Latin America—Catalog of an Exhibition [Providence, R.I.: John Carter Brown Library, 1988]).

A notable recent contribution is Hampe Martinez’s inventory and study of one of the most remarkable private libraries of colonial Spanish America, the three-thousand-volume collection of the mestizo priest of San Damián de Huarochiri, Peru, Francisco de Avila, who is known both for his campaigns to extirpate idolatry and for his compilation of a major collection of information on Andean religion; see also Frank Salomon and George L. Urioste, The Huarochiri Manuscript: A Testament of Ancient and Colonial Andean Religion (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991).

4 . For instance, Carlos Alberto González Sánchez’s recent work on books exported to America (El libro y la carrera de Indias: ‘Registro de ida de navios,’ Archivo hispalense: revista histórica, literaria y artística [Seville] 72, no. 220 [1989]: 93-103) reaffirms the proportion of religious (75 percent) to secular (25 percent) works cited by Leonard nearly sixty years ago; see Leonard’s Romances of Chivalry in the Spanish Indies: With Some Registros of Shipments of Books to the Spanish Colonies, University of California Publications in Modern Philology, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 217-372 (Berkeley: Uni versity of California Press, 1933), p. 230; and Books of the Brave, p. 105.

5 . Charles Gibson made this break-through for colonial historical studies in Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952). For the culture of the conquistadores, see José Durand, La transformación social del conquistador, México y lo mexicano, 15-16 (Mexico City: Porrúa y Obregón, 1953); Mario Gongora, Los grupos de conquistadores en Tierra Firme (1509-1530) (Santiago: Centro de Historia Colonial, Universidad de Chile, 1962). For studies that reveal the complexity of cultural interactions and identities in early Spanish America, see George M. Foster, Culture and Conquest: America’s Spanish Heritage, Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, no. 27 (New York: Wenner- Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1960); and, more recently, Serge Gruzinski, La colonisation de l’imaginaire: sociétés indigènes et occidentalisation dans le Mexique espagnol XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1988); and Angel Rama, La ciudad letrada, introduction by Mario Vargas Llosa, prologue by Hugo Achugar (Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 1984).

6 . Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949); R. B. Cunningham Graham, The Horses of the Conquest (1930), edited by Robert Moorman Denhardt (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1949). For the juxtaposition of these works with Leonard’s in published reviews, see, for example, Don Guzmán, Spaniards in America Described, Los Angeles Times, July 26, 1949; Max L. Moorhead, Spanish Way Not All Roses, Oklahoman (Oklahoma City), July 31, 1949; and D. W. Maurer, Books the Caballeros Read, and Horses They Rode, Courier-Journal (Louisville, Ky.), January 8, 1950.

7 . Thus Benjamin Keen (The White Legend Revisited: A Reply to Professor Hanke’s ‘Modest Proposal,’ Hispanic American Historical Reviev) 51, no. 2 [1971]: 336-355) assesses the Steins’ work. See Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-1810 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964). The continuity, rather than rupture, between these intellectual formulations and those of Leonard’s generation is marked by Charles Gibson’s having named his chaired professorship at the University of Michigan in honor of Irving A. Leonard; see John J. TePaske, An Interview with Irving A. Leonard, Hispanic American Historical Review 63, no. 2 (1983): 233-253.

8 . John V. Murra, La organización económica del estado Inca, translated by Daniel R. Wagner (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1978); idem, The Economic Organization of the Inca State, Research in Economic Anthropology suppl. i (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1979).

9 . Angel Maria Garibay K., Historia de literatura náhuatl, vol. 1: Etapa autónoma: de c. 1430 a 1321; vol. 2: El trauma de la conquista (1321- ¡730) (1953-1954), 2d ed. (Mexico City, Porrúa, 1971); Miguel León-Portilla, ed., The Broken Spears: The Aztec