1. Introduction

When the Executive Board of The Renaissance Society of America asked me to organize the Trends panel on the Spanish Atlantic world for the Society's 2008 Annual Meeting in Chicago with the intention of having the papers published in Renaissance Quarterly, they meant to send a signal about the journal and about the Society. They intended the publication of these papers to indicate the breadth of our members’ interests, which include the relationship between European and non-European cultures in the Renaissance and early modern period, a relationship paradigmatically illustrated in the culture of the Spanish Atlantic. We feel this is a fitting beginning for the first issue of Renaissance Quarterly with our new publisher, The University of Chicago Press.

We have preserved the original title of the panel, “Spain and Spanish America in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” as well as the titles of the papers, and the authors have mostly maintained the same format in their written versions as in their conference presentations. We are grateful to the three presenters for their gracious participation in the conference panel and its publication.

The panel reflects the ever-increasing expansion of the borders of Renaissance and early modern studies, whether we consider those borders to be geographical, cultural, or disciplinary. These papers register the rapid growth of scholarly interest in relations between the European and the non-European world through the extension of empire. Specifically, these papers survey important scholarly developments that treat the interrelations between Spanish, colonial, and indigenous American cultures that make up the Atlantic world and in turn make the Atlantic world a category of historical inquiry. The presentations reflect the awareness that Renaissance and early modern cultures are geographically synthetic across long distances and that investigating and understanding them requires crossdisciplinary approaches. The authors discuss Spanish Atlantic scholarship from the perspectives of art history, history, and literature, but each also addresses the interdisciplinarity within these fields. By their choice of material, they acknowledge the varying and contrasting viewpoints that emerge when metropolitan Spain, colonial Spanish America, or indigenous America is taken as the starting point of the inquiry. On the other hand, the authors write with an awareness that influence flows in all directions within the framework of both Iberian and precontact New World empires. Spain and its colonies in the Western Hemisphere come into sharper focus as a definitive Renaissance and early modern culture, and the Spanish Atlantic emerges as one of the principal points of departure for the study of the Renaissance and early modern eras.

Gauvin Bailey opens this forum by reaching back to an early phase of New World studies as it began in Latin America in the 1920s, followed by developments in the 1940s and the postwar period, bringing us up to more recent transatlantic trends. He shows how the original interest in architecture led to studies of painting, sculpture, and textiles, along with archival research and interdisciplinary approaches. Our new format makes available online the rich repertoire of images that illustrate this paper. Carla Rahn Phillips informs us of the variety of methods undertaken by historians within the inclusive category of the early modern. She takes us through “the Atlantic experience” as understood by economic, social, demographic, and religious historians, as well as by historians of science and print culture. Lisa Voigt concludes the forum with a look at the Spanish Atlantic from a literary perspective, broadly defined as “the signifying practices” in the cultural geography of the Atlantic world, with particular attention to the interdisciplinary relationships between historians and literary historians.

2. Art in Colonial Latin America: The State of the Question

The field of Latin American colonial art and architecture is at one of the most exciting moments in its history. An unprecedented level of collaboration between scholars from different Latin American countries, a groundswell of interest in the subject from people outside Latin America, and, most importantly, a burgeoning partnership between the two (thanks in part to new technologies) has placed us in an exhilarating position at the end of the first decade of the new century. Scholars of Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo arts in Latin America enjoy opportunities beyond the wildest dreams of their colleagues in Italian or French art, who are confronted with over two centuries of literature and few stones left unturned. By contrast, a graduate student of Latin American colonial art could write the first monograph on the eighteenth-century Italo-Peruvian architect Carlo Avancini, the first book-length study of the impact of late Italian Renaissance painters on viceregal Peruvian painting, or the first catalogue raissonné of the paintings of Luís Niño, one of Bolivia's — and Latin America's — greatest viceregal painters. In the past fifteen years I have seen the field grow outside Latin America from a few dedicated scholars mostly in California and the Southwest to a scholarly and student community extending across the country, with most major universities boasting classes and research programs in the subject. European universities have followed suit with internationally recognized research centers in France, Italy, and the United Kingdom, the last of which include Latin American colonial art courses and graduate programs at the Universities of London, Essex, and Aberdeen.

I do not mean to say that the field has no history — far from it. But during roughly eighty years of scholarship it has been hampered by regionalism and polemic, frequently taking the form of jingoistic patriotism, especially in the years leading up to World War II. To fit nationalist agendas, scholars from countries like Bolivia, Peru, and Argentina promoted the colonial buildings and works of art that happened to fall within their territories, and studied them in isolation, even though they had originally belonged to the same viceroyalty.Footnote ¹ In 1942, Ricardo Mariátegui Oliva encouraged his countrymen to study Peruvian colonial art, “as patriotism demands … of those [of us] who proudly call ourselves Peruvians.”Footnote ² In the boom years of the 1920s and ’30s, Argentina even had the cheek to claim the viceregal arts of Bolivia and southern Peru as their own heritage.Footnote ³ Most scholars did not talk to scholars in neighboring countries, and were often openly hostile to each other. Spanish Latin America and Brazil did not communicate, both literally, given the language barrier, and figuratively, because until recently Brazilians preferred to emphasize their European rather than their Latin American identity.

The field thus grew out of twentieth-century nationalism, and with it came a colonial revival architectural movement known as the colonial renaissance (renacimiento colonial) that swept Latin America from the 1920s to the ’50s and was championed as a homegrown alternative to international Modernism.Footnote ⁴ The colonial renaissance flourished in Peru and Argentina, where grandiose buildings such as Ricardo Malachowsky's Palacio Arzobispal in Lima (fig. 1), the neo-Andean hybrid Baroque banks and theater on the Calle Mercaderes in Arequipa (1930s and ’40s), and Estanislao Pirovano's La Nación building on the Calle Florida in Buenos Aires (1920s) combined colonial Baroque ornamentation with the brutalism of Fascist Europe.Footnote ⁵ In South America the first generation of scholars was directly involved in these projects, most notably the Peruvian architect Emilio Harth-Terré (1899–1983), one of the planners of the outsized remodeling of the Plaza de Armas in Lima in 1945 (fig. 2), and the Argentine Ángel Guido (1896–1960), responsible for the heavy-handed restorations of the colonial centers of Salta, Tucumán, and Luján, a renovation he characterized as a “nationalist restoration.”Footnote ⁶ Guido's National Monument to the Flag in Rosario (completed 1957), a cyclopean ode to Albert Speer, provides a hint of Guido's political leanings.

Figure 1 Ricardo Malachowsky, façade of Palacio Arzobispal. Lima, Peru, 1929. Author's photo.

Figure 2 Emilio Harth-Terré, Plaza de Armas. Lima, Peru, 1945. Author's photo.

Paradoxically, given this isolationist trend, Latin American colonial art history also suffered from an excess of sweeping surveys, from Franco-era Spanish tomes celebrating the glories of the Spanish Empire to pre–World War II Argentine, Peruvian, and Chilean monographs asserting the Americanness of Spanish American architecture (and it was indeed almost exclusively architecture), the latter often emphasizing the homogeneity in viceregal architecture from the Caribbean to Patagonia.Footnote ⁷ Depending upon the political views of the authors, Spanish American art was unique either because of the presence of Native American techniques and iconography or because of departures from Spanish models that demonstrated the genius of American-born whites. These books tend to trot out the usual suspects, from the Gothic Cathedral of Santo Domingo (fig. 3) in the Dominican Republic, the earliest in the New World, to the Rococo Estancia Church of Santa Catalina in Argentina (fig. 4), and they uniformly ignore archival and other primary literature. The result was convoluted chronologies, endlessly repeated commonplaces, and occasional crazy theories. For example, the Italian Fascist painter Giulio Arístide Sartorio (1860–1932) was the first to suggest that the racial connection between Native Americans and Asians gave Latin American colonial art an innate Asian quality, and that the key to their visual culture should therefore be sought in Hindu and Buddhist sources.Footnote ⁸ Chilean scholar Alfredo Benavides concurred in a 1941 book in which he exhorts scholars to look for “Hindu and Chino-Japanese” sources.Footnote ⁹ The minor detail that the Amerindians crossed the Bering Strait landmass some 10,000 to 60,000 years before the establishment of Hinduism (not to mention China or Japan) did not deter the proponents of this theory.

Figure 3 Cathedral of Santo Domingo. Dominican Republic, begun 1512. Author's photo.

Figure 4 Estancia church of Santa Catalina. Sierras de Córdoba, Argentina, 1754–60. Author's photo.

Although figures such as Manuel Toussaint in Mexico and Mariátegui and Harth-Terré in Peru undertook concentrated archival studies of viceregal architecture, painting, and other arts in the 1940s, this period is better remembered for the prepackaged theories scholars forced onto colonial buildings and works of art without understanding the most basic things about them, such as their dates of construction and renovation and the identities of their architects, builders, and patrons.Footnote ¹⁰ These theories ranged from abstruse Wölfflinian analyses to Ángel Guido's nationalistic concept of the “American re-conquest of Art,” an aesthetic rebellion against Spain that is best characterized in his own words: “In the eighteenth century, this groan that had been pent-up, constricted, and stifled, became strikingly energetic, with a stubborn eagerness to reveal itself, to live, to have its say, to foment an American artistic insurrection.”Footnote ¹¹

As it happens, a military conflict brought Latin American colonial art to the attention of the world. With the outbreak of World War II, American as well as European émigré scholars like Harold Wethey (author of a monograph on Titian), Germain Bazin (later the director of the Louvre), and the Hungarian Pál Kelemen, all of whom were prevented from working in war-torn Europe, brought their knowledge of Renaissance and Baroque culture to Latin America.Footnote ¹² This was a terrific boon for the English-speaking world, as Wethey wrote the best English survey of the architecture of viceregal Peru — this time drawing upon archival material — and Kelemen penned an engaging and accessible overview in English of the colonial heritage of both continents. Similarly, in 1948 a young Yale scholar named George Kubler published the first monograph on Mexican colonial mission churches, a comprehensive field survey combined with a contextual study that became a model for later projects, such as the monograph on Antigua Guatemala by Sidney Markman.Footnote ¹³ Although Wethey and Bazin turned their attentions back to Europe when the war ended, others, like Kubler, the Spanish émigré Leopoldo Castedo, and the Italian émigré Graziano Gasparini, stayed in Latin America and built the foundations of a lasting interest in the field outside Latin America.Footnote ¹⁴

The next dilemma to hit Latin American colonial art history was polemical. Although the prewar literature did not always agree about the meaning of viceregal art, most specialists accepted that a large portion of it had a fusion of European and Native American features. But in 1948, American Modernist art historian Alfred Neumeyer proposed that the indigenous contribution to viceregal architecture was less a product of specific cultures and more part of a worldwide phenomenon of popular, or folk, art created by people unfamiliar with Western techniques.Footnote ¹⁵ Then, in 1958, Kubler debunked the entire idea of indigenous content, dismissing the idea of cultural hybridity and insisting that viceregal art was merely a provincial version of European models.Footnote ¹⁶ Kubler's reaction was understandable. He was responding to patriotic posing, wild speculation, and the kind of nefarious racial theories that had so recently been used to justify the horrors of Nazism. But there is a big difference between believing in racially-inherent artistic characteristics and accepting the possibility that Native American visual culture, a living and flourishing tradition throughout the colonial period, had an impact on the arts of the colony. By denying an Amerindian voice and by insisting on terms such as provincial art, Kubler's interpretation of Latin American colonial art became derogatory, whether he meant it that way or not.Footnote ¹⁷

What ensued was what I call the Great Debate, a prolific and enduring argument about the origins and meaning of the hybrid arts that divided scholars into two groups that contemporary scholars called the indigenists (Harth-Terré et al.), and the hispanists (the Kubler school).Footnote ¹⁸ Paralyzing the field between the 1960s and 1980, the Great Debate involved South America, where cultural fusion was given the name “Mestizo Style” (fig. 5) — mestizo literally means a mixed-race person — as well as Mexico, where the same phenomenon was called Tequitqui, a Nahua word for “vassal” coined for this purpose in 1946 (fig. 6).Footnote ¹⁹ Significantly, scholars in the hispanist camp used a defensive tone when discrediting the indigenists; by contrast, the so-called indigenist scholars tended to be respectful of the works of their adversaries, trying in many cases to reach a happy medium.Footnote ²⁰ One standout feature of the work of the hispanists was their disrespect for archival documentation, a source of information that they did not merely avoid, but to which they were ideologically opposed. Gasparini was the most fervent, dismissing not only the idea of cultural hybridity, but also all previous studies by his colleagues, on the basis that they did not understand architecture.Footnote ²¹ Gasparini's attitude derived from his conviction that architecture was primarily an art of spatial relationships, an idea borrowed from fellow Italian Bruno Zevi (1918–2000), whose architectural theories were in vogue in the 1950s and ’60s.Footnote ²² But these theories, developed with Borromini or Guarini in mind, are not very effective in Latin America, where the most interesting part of a building is usually its decoration or the architectural framework of its façade, while the buildings themselves (except for Brazil) usually had rectilinear plans and flat walls (fig. 7). In attacking archival research in 1967 by calling it “a fetishistic dependence upon objective facts,” Gasparini anticipated the postmodern problematization of the notion of objective truth. Mexican art historian Francisco de la Maza scoffed at the time that Gasparini's spatial theory was little more than “the flavor of the month.”Footnote ²³

Figure 5 Façade detail of Compañía Church. Arequipa, Peru, 1698–99. Author's photo.

Figure 6 Posa Chapel. Huejotzingo, Mexico, mid-sixteenth century. Author's photo.

Figure 7 Church of San Juan Bautista. Juli, Peru, seventeenth–eighteenth centuries. Author's photo.

The debate resolved itself in the 1980s, as a mostly new generation of scholars acknowledged the significant indigenous content in much of viceregal art and architecture, notably in New Spain with early colonial mission complexes, Tequitqui carving, mural paintings, maps, and related documents, and in Peru with the so-called Mestizo Style architecture. In South America these efforts were spearheaded by Ramón Gutiérrez, Kubler's disciple in method, but not in ideology. Gutiérrez led several wide-ranging collaborative field surveys of the colonial churches of South America based on extensive archival research (fig. 8).Footnote ²⁴ Other scholars who built the foundations of today's field include José de Mesa and Teresa Gisbert, with their innovative efforts to contextualize the visual culture of colonial South America using anthropological, literary, and historical methodologies, and Ticio Escobar, whose shrewd anthropological study of the Jesuit sculpture of Paraguay completely revolutionized our understanding of a field particularly ravaged by theoretical posturing.Footnote ²⁵ Gutiérrez appealed to scholars to stop forcing anachronistic theories onto buildings and works of art about which so little is known, and to be open to a spectrum of methodological approaches instead of “trying to explain the entirety of a problem using partial viewpoints, each one of which is supposed to exclude all others.”Footnote ²⁶ Most importantly, he urged researchers to concentrate on the vast archival holdings in state and ecclesiastical archives throughout Latin America, and to establish a basic chronological and socioeconomic framework for colonial buildings and works of art.Footnote ²⁷

Figure 8 Church of La Asunción. Juli, Peru. Carving from mid- to late eighteenth century. Author's photo.

I would now like to try to characterize the state of the question as it has developed in the past fifteen years or so. We have come a long way since Gutiérrez's entreaty, and studies both inside and outside Latin America have grown from a limited number of approaches to a wide variety of methodologies. Conferences and email communication have encouraged unprecedented interaction and collaboration between scholars in different countries, and a spate of exhibitions in the past five years outside Latin America — in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, and Oxford, to name a few locations — has opened the world's eyes to the wonders of viceregal art.Footnote ²⁸ Interdisciplinary approaches that combine religious history, economics, anthropology, and ethnology have considerably enriched the field, and scholars have increasingly acknowledged the difficulty of applying simple words like mestizo or hybrid — although we have yet to come up with better terms — to a mixture of cultures that involves a far greater variety of peoples than can be divided according to the traditional categories of European and Native American. Specifically, studies are revealing the multiplicity of both Native American groups and those coming from Europe, as well as the crucial contributions to Latin American culture and visual arts made by Africans and the people and products of Asia (fig. 9).Footnote ²⁹ At the risk of oversimplification, I will divide this substantial body of work into six main categories, in order of volume, bearing in mind that most of these studies fall under more than one rubric.

Figure 9 Chinese-style temple lion, Monastery of São Francisco. João Pessoa, Brazil, before 1779. Author's photo.

The first is the empirical monograph, whether on individual buildings or types of objects, such as painting, sculpture, and textiles. These are based primarily on descriptive analysis and archival research with, in general, little analysis: such are Carlos Page's monograph on the Jesuit estancia of Altagracia in Argentina (fig. 10) and José de Santiago Silva's spectacularly illustrated book on the Sanctuary of Atotonilco in the Mexican state of Guanajuato.Footnote ³⁰ These are thorough and important studies, but they often fail to contextualize their findings or relate them to the viceregal arts on a larger scale. The second category is the inventory of paintings and sculpture in individual regions and collections, a commendable task as the theft of colonial objects is now at its highest level in history. However, these books also tend to omit primary sources and analysis: examples are the inventories of viceregal art in individual Argentine provinces put out by the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires from 1982 to 2000, Marta Fajardo's full-color inventory of the painting collection of the Convent of the Discalced Carmelites in Bogotá, and the three-volume inventory of the viceregal painting collection at Tepotzotlán in Mexico.Footnote ³¹

Figure 10 Estancia church of Altagracia. Sierras de Córdoba, Argentina, mid-eighteenth century. Author's photo.

The third approach, and one of the most fruitful, is the contextual study, which at its best fluidly combines archival and other primary sources, anthropological research, oral histories, and comparisons of iconography across media. The leaders are Teresa Gisbert in her 2004 analysis of Andean iconography; Sabine MacCormack on Andean religion and iconography; Jeanette Favrot Peterson's subtle look at the hybrid mural painting of the Mexican mission complex at Malinalco (fig. 11); Ramón Mujica Pinilla's bewilderingly erudite studies of the Andean context of Catholic iconography (fig. 12) — his 1996 book on the cult of apocryphal angels should be required reading for anyone working on sixteenth-century Rome; Tom Cummins's monograph of postconquest keros, ceremonial cups that combined Andean and European imagery and served critical Andean social and religious functions; Samuel Edgerton's and Jaime Lara's recent books on the interaction of religious theater, eschatological literature, messianism, and iconographic hybridity in early colonial Mexico; and Michael Schreffler's insightful new study of the semantics of imperial portraiture in the Viceregal Palace of Mexico City, a welcome addition to a field with so few studies of nonreligious art.Footnote ³² I will also mention five volumes of papers in different disciplines — two from Peru and three from Bolivia — that have profoundly enriched our understanding of the Baroque and its diffusion in Latin America: an extraordinary example of this diffusion is a head of Christ created in the eighteenth century by an indigenous sculptor from the town of Zepita on the coast of Lake Titicaca (fig. 13).Footnote ³³ Splendidly illustrated, they represent a fruitful cross-fertilization of ideas and approaches to art history, history, and cultural studies.

Figure 11 Paradise garden murals from mission church of Malincalco, Mexico, 1570s. Author's photo.

Figure 12 Detail of the façade of the church of Santa Cruz. Juli, Peru, 1753–60. Author's photo.

Figure 13 Head of Christ, eighteenth century. Church of San Juan, Juli, Peru. Author's photo.

A fourth category is made up of the catalogues raisonnés of individual artists, still a meager subsection of the field and still limited to Mexico, but including such works as Elisa Vargas Lugo's multivolume work, still in progress, on the work of one of New Spain's top artists, Juan Correa (1646–1716) and recent exhibition catalogues on the New Spanish painters José Juárez and Cristóbal de Villalpando.Footnote ³⁴ A fifth category is the growing number of studies on media that have been undeservedly overlooked owing to European art history's traditional focus on painting, sculpture, and architecture. Especially important is a recent crossdisciplinary volume on Andean textiles — an artform that was arguably more important than painting — by Teresa Gisbert, Silvia Arze, and Martha Cajías, which is now the standard work on the subject (fig. 14).Footnote ³⁵ Sara Bomchil and Virginia Carreño have done the same for furniture in a noteworthy overview that is one of the few to compare the Latin American world with North America, in this case, with English America and Quebec (fig. 15).Footnote ³⁶

Figure 14 Seventeenth-century Andean textile refashioned into a sofa cover in the nineteenth century. Convent of Santa Catalina, Arequipa, Peru. Author's photo.

Figure 15 Detail of bargueño chest with Chinese motifs. Sucre, Bolivia, eighteenth century. Author's photo.

Finally, the survey has also made a comeback, but this time based on primary source material and the presentation of architecture and the other arts in their socioreligious context. The surveys also tend to be joint efforts, providing multiple approaches and methodologies. Leading the way are Ramón Gutiérrez's two volumes, the second of which has chapters by different scholars on architecture and urbanism and on painting, sculpture, and the practical arts.Footnote ³⁷ These books are groundbreaking for several reasons: they combine colonial and postcolonial material and provide much-needed overviews of textiles, furniture, and other so-called minor arts that were more important in Latin America than in Europe. One of Gutiérrez's most noteworthy chapters treats the history of Latin American guilds, which has never been studied in such a comprehensive way.Footnote ³⁸ Another novel approach is provided by Eddy Stols and Rudi Bley's beautifully illustrated volume of papers on the impact of Flanders on Latin America, the first large-scale work to acknowledge what may have been the most important source of imagery in the colonies, through prints, paintings, and sculpture.Footnote ³⁹ I should also mention the recent survey of Iberian-American art edited by Eugenio Pérez, which contains studies of Spanish America and Brazil by seventeen authors from the United States to Argentina.Footnote ⁴⁰ Finally, my own survey of Latin American colonial art and architecture, including Brazil and a comparative chapter on colonial arts in Asia and Africa, is the first in English.Footnote ⁴¹

Other approaches to viceregal art and architecture are still in their infancy. Patronage studies and studies of ephemera, which have formed such a rich division within the field of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, have only just emerged, and two people who should be singled out are Ricardo González, for his work on confraternities and altarpieces in eighteenth-century Buenos Aires, and Rosa Maria Acosta, for her fascinating study of urban festivals in colonial Peru. Processions, entradas, and state funerals were not only a constant in the lives of viceregal Americans, but they also represent one of the most open arenas for self-expression by oppressed populations, whether Native American or African.Footnote ⁴² Serge Gruzinski has led the way in image studies, exploring the multivalent uses of pictures in the encounter between Europeans and Native Americans in New Spain, and emphasizing the way they could be manipulated by various groups to promote their own agendas.Footnote ⁴³ One of the most inventive new approaches is Gabriela Siracusano's book on the role of colors in Peruvian painting, combining conservation science with art history to look at how Andean painters used individual pigments as carriers of specific socioreligious meanings.Footnote ⁴⁴ I will end with Kellen Kee McIntyre and Richard Phillips's collection of essays that approaches viceregal art from the viewpoint of gender, an important book overall, although, disappointingly, Andrea Lepage's chapter on the painter Isabel de Cisneros is the only one on a woman painter, even though there were several known and the field is ripe for investigation.Footnote ⁴⁵

In conclusion, I would like to suggest how the field might move forward, as well as suggest some potential pitfalls. First, I will reiterate Gutiérrez's call for more field and archival work. Particularly in North America and Europe, scholars are focusing on a relatively small portion of Spanish America, with by far the greatest emphasis on New Spain and Cuzco. We run the danger here of falling into the kind of regionalism that hampered the field in the past and of having an incomplete idea of what is out there. An incalculable quantity of architecture and visual art is inadequately studied or completely unpublished. Take, for example, retablos, complex altarpieces that combine architecture, sculpture, and painting and tell us so much not only about the practice of art, but also about iconography and patronage (fig. 16). José de Mesa and Teresa Gisbert have noted that in Bolivia alone a mere 10 percent of the 400 surviving colonial retablos has been adequately studied.Footnote ⁴⁶ Every year as I have done final field surveys in Peru and Bolivia for my book on the hybrid Baroque architecture of the southern Andes, I have encountered remote colonial churches that are barely acknowledged or unknown in the literature, some of them with intact archives. There are untold archival riches to be plumbed, from Potosí in Bolivia to San Luís Potosí in Mexico, often in minor parish churches like the one in Juli, near Lake Titicaca, where piles of manuscripts from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries are kept in black garbage bags (fig. 17). Certainly this kind of field and archival research can be slow and plodding, but it is essential in a discipline in which so few dates or names are known. I hasten to add that it would be a mistake to undertake field and archival work without considering the socioeconomic and religious contexts — features that can also be found in the documents and other primary sources — and that this work does not preclude incorporating interdisciplinary interpretations of the material as the best studies today are doing. Empiricism and theory need not be mutually exclusive.

Figure 16 Retablo in the Compañía Church. Arequipa, Peru, first quarter of the eighteenth century. Author's photo.

Figure 17 Church of San Pedro, Juli, Peru, seventeenth–eighteenth centuries. Author's photo.

In keeping with the theme of this forum, I will also call for more studies that examine the interaction of Spain and Spanish America, a subject that is undeservedly overlooked despite the obvious relationship between the two regions. Marjorie Trusted's volume on Spanish and colonial Latin American art is a particularly welcome arrival.Footnote ⁴⁷ In a field where it has always been assumed that Spanish culture dominated the Americas, it would be intriguing to discover, for example, how much influence ran the other way. I will make another proposal that is a reaction as much to my own work as to that of my colleagues. Scholars outside Latin America tend to focus on hybrid topics — that is, those that best illustrate the encounter of Native American and European cultures — at the expense of looking at the substantial artistic and architectural legacy that has very little to do with acculturation. We should not shy away from acknowledging that artistic and architectural movements can simply be original and influential: an example is the post-1650 architecture of Cuzco, one of the most innovative forms of the Baroque worldwide (fig. 18). Another potentially enlightening approach that Serge Gruzinski and I have been quietly encouraging for a decade is the comparative study of the visual arts of colonial Latin America with other colonial arts traditions in the Americas, Africa, and Asia in the same period, particularly Brazil, the Spanish Philippines, French Canada, and Portugal's Asian colonies in Goa and Macao (fig. 19).Footnote ⁴⁸ There is much to learn here, not only about the transmission and interpretation of Iberian culture outside Europe, but also about intercultural negotiation.

Figure 18 Cuzco Compañía. Cuzco, Peru, completed 1668. Author's photo.

Figure 19 Dominican church of São Domingos. Macao, eighteenth century. Author's photo.

I encourage researchers not to get bogged down again in abstract formulations when we still have such an incomplete knowledge of the field — one of the temptations of this approach is for scholars to avoid primary research. Many new studies are focusing on areas particularly well suited to postcolonial methodologies, but without new bodies of work to contextualize their evidence, scholars end up repeating themselves, much as Ángel Guido did in the 1940s. An example is casta painting, a fascinating nonreligious genre that depicts Spaniards, Indians, Africans, and their mixed-blood offspring, and that provides an extraordinary opportunity to investigate the overlapping agendas of race, gender, and power. But in the wake of Magali Carrera's and Ilona Katzew's impressive contextual monographs in 2003 and 2004, casta paintings have become, to paraphrase Francisco de la Maza, the flavor of the month.Footnote ⁴⁹ Carrera notes in a 2006 review article that there is very little new to be said about them, largely because we know so little about their production, patronage, and consumption.Footnote ⁵⁰ My final entreaty is that we move beyond a monolithic model of colonial oppression that denies native agency. No one is in any doubt that the very presence of Spanish culture in the Americas is the product of conquest, oppression, and destruction of culture, and we must always bear these conditions in mind. But if we continue to focus exclusively on subjugation, we will miss out on the originality, inventiveness, and talent of three centuries of Native American, African, Asian, and white artists that make Latin American colonial art worth studying in the first place. Denying these people recognition as artists in their own right is as demeaning as insisting, as scholars have done in the past, that Latin American colonial art is little more than a debased reflection of European models.

3. Twenty Million People United by an Ocean: Spain and the Atlantic World beyond the Renaissance

According to traditional usage several decades ago, the Renaissance in Europe ended in 1492 with the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Columbus's first voyage across the Atlantic. The Age of Discoveries then ensued, followed by the Reformation, the Age of Absolutism, the Age of Mercantilism, the Scientific Revolution, the Baroque, the Enlightenment, and various other designators, depending on the focus of inquiry. The concept of early modern history had not yet taken hold. It is now an established framework for the centuries between 1300 and 1800, encompassing all of the previously mentioned packages of time, as well as the overseas ventures of Europeans and their encounters with other peoples around the world. Labels are problematical, but they can help make sense of the past, as long as we can justify their use. One of the great benefits of early modern history, as I understand the concept, is that it includes every possible topic within a broad span of time. How broad should that span of time be for an examination of Spain and its transatlantic empire for The Renaissance Society of America? Many historians of the late colonial period in Spanish America look forward to the era of revolution in the early nineteenth century and beyond. By contrast, my interests are the social, administrative, and economic structures that held the empire together for so long, creating the mature and self-conscious colonial societies that declared their independence from Spain in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.Footnote ⁵¹ I will therefore focus on the first two centuries or so of the Spanish Atlantic world: in other words, from 1492 to 1700.

The recent work that interests me most relates to the following set of questions: How did Spaniards come to terms with the new realities presented by the discovery of lands and peoples in the Western Hemisphere? In the Americas, how did indigenous civilizations deal with the sudden incursion of aliens, and what did the meeting of their two separate worlds mean for people on both sides of the ocean? These same questions arise in studying the Atlantic world in general, and one recent trend is to compare developments across traditional boundaries. J. H. Elliott's analysis of the British and Spanish Empires over the long term is an important landmark, although only part of the book deals with the formative period that interests me here.Footnote ⁵²

Some current scholars challenge the notion of an Atlantic world in favor of a global perspective. I agree with this formulation for matters of trade, migration, and the comparative study of empires, especially in the eighteenth century, but there is still much to learn about the early Atlantic experience, largely because it was unprecedented. Some Europeans knew a surprising amount about Africa, and even about India and China, long before Columbus's time, and some Africans and Asians knew a surprising amount about Europe. By contrast, the very existence of lands and peoples in the Western Hemisphere, the so-called New World, came as a surprise to even the most learned Europeans in Columbus's time. Similarly, the peoples of the Western Hemisphere, especially the imperial leaders in Mexico and Peru, were shocked to learn of the existence of the Habsburg empire in Europe.Footnote ⁵³

It took several generations for European thinkers and writers to assimilate the reality of the Western Hemisphere, a reality that altered every aspect of their understanding of the world and its peoples.Footnote ⁵⁴ Yet at the same time, Spanish merchants, soldiers, sailors, priests, bureaucrats, and ordinary settlers learned to deal with the New World, presumably without much thought about how it fit into European cosmography. Peoples in the Americas faced an even more profound readjustment of their cosmography, at the same time that Old World diseases, conquest, and other disruptions devastated their civilizations. Yet they adjusted to the changed circumstances with impressive speed, even as their own leaders and thinkers struggled to redefine the expanded cosmos and their place in it. Over the course of the sixteenth century, the Spanish Atlantic world became a mundane reality for peoples on both sides of the ocean, however extended and tenuous their ties to one another. This assertion relies in part on the enormous growth of transatlantic fleets that moved people and goods back and forth across the ocean, but this is only one focal point in a broader panorama of sweeping change and adaptation.

For the last several decades, historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and other social scientists have reexamined the process of change and adaptation on both sides of the Atlantic. In the course of testing old generalizations with detailed research, they have done much to restore a sense of agency, not only to indigenous societies before contact with Europeans, but also to the diverse mixture of peoples that came to characterize colonial Spanish America. It would be impossible to summarize this huge body of research in any detail. My colleagues are discussing scholarship related to culture and the arts. I will focus on several other broad headings: exploration and cultural encounters, population and society, economy and trade, intellectual and religious developments, and order and disorder. I will mainly cite works in English, which are the most likely to find a readership in the United States, but the scholarship is even more substantial in Spanish and other languages.

4. Hispanism and the Cultural Geography of the Early Modern Atlantic

In the Topographia e historia general de Argel, an influential early seventeenth-century description of Algiers, an interlocutor in one of the text's three dialogues poses the following rhetorical question about the cruel treatment of Christian captives there: “Since these Moorish and Turkish barbarians are so thirsty for Christian blood, and enjoy so much the torments and pain of the poor Christian captives, how is it that they have not discovered what the Occidental Indians did in times past and what the cannibals now do, who eat those whom they capture in war?”Footnote ⁹⁴ The speaker is Antonio de Sosa, a Portuguese doctor who was held captive in Algiers in the late 1570s; several recent scholars argue that Sosa is the author of the Topographia, although it was published under a different name.Footnote ⁹⁵ Sosa's question posits a rather provocative transatlantic route of discovery and exchange, with North African Muslims imitating the practices of Occidental Indians and cannibals. Early modern Iberian authors frequently used Islamic references to describe the more radically foreign cultures they encountered in the New World, as when Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) calls Mesoamerican pyramids “mosques” in his Second Letter recounting the conquest of Mexico.Footnote ⁹⁶ Here, Sosa reverses the association by using New World captors as a point of comparison, and even as a potential model, for those of the Old, in order to amplify his already exaggerated portrait of Moorish and Turkish barbarity.

Sosa may have learned about the ritual cannibalism of war captives among the Tupinambá Indians of Brazil from widely circulating visual and textual sources, such as Vespucci's letters and Hans Staden's captivity narrative and their accompanying illustrations. But during his own captivity in Algiers, Sosa quite possibly could have learned of the practice from Brazilian Indians themselves, for he includes “Indians from the Indies of Portugal, of Brazil, and of New Spain” in his long list of the different national origins of Algerian renegades.Footnote ⁹⁷ Indeed, the reference to “Brazilian renegades” suggests the intriguing possibility that some Tupinambá captives (first of Christians, then of Moors) earned their freedom by converting to Islam in Algiers, where they could teach Muslim captors how to “eat those whom they capture in war.”Footnote ⁹⁸ In any case, Sosa's comparison of Algerian and Amerindian captors does more than suggest the interchangeability of pagan and barbarian Others in the European imagination. It also reveals the interconnected nature of the Atlantic world that shaped early modern Iberian experience and individuals’ interpretation of that experience. While Antonio de Sosa makes the connection between captivities on both sides of the Atlantic for rhetorical purposes, he also refers to the actual presence of Occidental Indians in Algiers: that is, the transatlantic exchange evoked in the Topographia is both literal and figurative. As several recent works of literary scholarship demonstrate, textual analysis can bring us closer to understanding the material and symbolic dimensions of this cultural geography, through which tropes and ideas, as well as individuals and texts, moved in multiple directions.

This essay offers an overview of some of this scholarship. In part I am inspired by a forum that was recently published simultaneously in Early American Literature and in The William and Mary Quarterly: A Magazine of Early American History and Culture, entitled “The ‘Trade Gap’ in Atlantic Studies: A Forum on Literary and Historical Scholarship.” It consists of a review essay by Eric Slauter followed by responses from two historians and two literary scholars. In his essay, Slauter seeks to account for what he calls a “trade gap” between Atlantic literary and historical studies, by which he means that “literary scholars now import more from historians than they export to them.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Or, in less starkly economic terms, at the same time that there exists a growing body of markedly historicist work in Atlantic literary scholarship, historians appear to have little interest in or awareness of this work, as Slauter demonstrates through detailed numerical analysis of bibliographies, citations, and book reviews. Slauter concludes by suggesting ways to foster interdisciplinary dialogue in what appears to be an increasingly divided field, and the concurrent publication of the forum in the foremost literary and historical journals of early American studies is a part of that effort.

My goal here is not to replicate such an analysis in the field of Hispanic Studies, although I strongly suspect that such an imbalance could also be found between literary and historical scholarship on the Spanish Atlantic — that is, that literary historians read more of the work of historians than the reverse. One indication of this is the significant impact that the work of historian Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has had on colonial Latin American literary scholars; another indication is that the two foremost journals in the field of colonial Latin American studies do not follow the same historical-literary divide as The William and Mary Quarterly and Early American Literature: instead, there is the discipline-specific Colonial Latin American Historical Review and the interdisciplinary Colonial Latin American Review, both founded — not coincidentally, to be sure — in 1992, the year of the Columbus Quincentenary.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The Renaissance Society of America forum and its publication here have also sought to respond to another sort of scholarly trade gap, by bringing the literary, historical, and art historical research on the Spanish Atlantic world to the attention of Renaissance and early modern scholars more broadly. The anglophone genealogy and scope of most Atlantic studies scholarship is evident in many venues, from Bernard Bailyn's account of the emergence of the field in Atlantic History: Concept and Contours to The William and Mary Quarterly and Early American Literature forum.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In her response to Slauter's essay, Alison Games points out that “Atlantic history requires, first and foremost, a geographic reorientation by practitioners,” and the present forum reminds us that such a reorientation would have to recognize the primary role of the Iberian empires in the formation of an Atlantic world.Footnote ¹⁰²

My brief review of some recent Hispanist literary scholarship is motivated by both of these disciplinary imbalances in Atlantic studies, the literary-historical as well as the anglophone-hispanophone trade gaps (the latter of which may be confirmed in my own importation of the trade gap concept). In her contribution to The William and Mary Quarterly and Early American Literature forum, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon urges literary scholars not to endeavor to become “(belated, secondhand) historians,” but to allow themselves to be “diverted by the power of words” in the pursuit of the analysis of “signifying practices in the Atlantic world.”Footnote ¹⁰³ The scholars to whom I will refer do allow themselves to be diverted in this way, refusing to be narrowly circumscribed by a single text, author, or geographic locale, or by the groups of texts that have been canonized in national literary histories. Cynthia Stone invokes a similar spatial metaphor to describe the literary scholar's craft in her recent book In Place of Gods and Kings : “The ability to engage in metaphorical flights of fancy is precisely one of the areas in which those trained in literary analysis can best contribute to [the] interdisciplinary discussion.” By “flights of fancy,” Stone means not the pursuit of random associations, but the willingness to “push against the boundaries of what is considered appropriate for purposes of comparison.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This sort of comparative approach has allowed literary critics to trace the contours of more expansive and inclusive cultural geographies of the Atlantic world; such a methodology both echoes and helps to account for Sosa's imaginative, rhetorical association of Brazilian and Algerian captors. At the same time, literary scholarship can reveal not only metaphorical, but also actual, connections and dialogues that span the Atlantic and beyond. Sosa's reference to Amerindian renegades in Algiers exemplifies the sort of real-world exchanges that textual analysis can also expose, if we acknowledge the limitations of using European-authored texts to interpret the perspective and experience of indigenous and African Others.

***

I have organized my overview of recent work around three trios of texts that share certain thematic, generic, and geographic connections. These are, of course, representative studies of only a few of the important tendencies within the literary scholarship on the Hispanic Atlantic. The first group is centered on the writing of Spanish conquest and colonization, a topic that is inevitably transatlantic in nature. Rolena Adorno's The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative addresses the most expansive corpus, from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts by indigenous, mestizo, and Spanish authors to modern Spanish American novels. Adorno demonstrates not only how these works address a common theme, the debate over “the right of Spanish conquest in the Americas and the treatment of their native inhabitants,” but also how they are connected to each other, thus participating in the polemics of her title.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The culmination of several decades of prolific scholarship on colonial Spanish America in an imperial, transatlantic context, Adorno's book illuminates the “web of connections” that, as she points out, has been forgotten in national literary canons.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Eyda M. Merediz's Refracted Images: The Canary Islands Through a New World Lens is similar to Adorno's book in its treatment of texts that debate the justice of Spanish conquest, but different (and more explicitly transatlantic) in its geographic focus. Merediz shows, on the one hand, how the fifteenth-century Spanish experience in the Canary Islands informed the subsequent discovery and colonization of the Americas, and, on the other hand, how the representation of the Canary Islands in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century historiography and literature was informed by the debates about Spain's American conquests. The transatlantic currents navigated by Merediz are thus both triangulated through the Canary Islands and multidirectional, flowing in both directions across the Atlantic. The study contributes, in Merediz's words, to “re-mapping a far more inclusive and interdependent Hispanic Atlantic,” a project that is also evident in her forthcoming edited volume on the intersections of Latin American and Atlantic Studies.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Finally, Ricardo Padrón remaps the Hispanic Atlantic by demonstrating the importance of its maps in The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain. Padrón examines both early modern Spanish mapmaking and what he calls “cartographic literature”: historiographic and literary texts that discursively map the Americas. His exploration of the relationship between imperial expansion and cartography challenges traditional assumptions about the modernity of both endeavors by revealing the persistence of medieval spatial thinking in Spanish writing about the New World.

Before turning to my second trio of texts, let me mention another significant current within the study of Spanish New World historiography, one that focuses on indigenous- and mestizo-authored texts and on issues of discursive hybridity. Within the last five years, literary scholars have published books on the Relación de Michoacán, a manuscript from colonial New Spain that was coproduced by indigenous painters and informants; on a group of Novohispanic mestizo historians; on the native Andean Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala (ca. 1530–ca. 1610); and on the Peruvian mestizo el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616).Footnote ¹⁰⁸ While these studies primarily seek, in the words of one of the authors, to create a space for “culturally mixed texts within the corpus of colonial Spanish-American literature,” their attention to indigenous, as well as transatlantic and imperial, sources and contexts also succeeds in claiming a place for these texts in the study of the Atlantic world.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The second trio of texts pushes the geocultural boundaries of the Hispanic Atlantic outward, effectively situating the Spanish Empire in a “more inclusive and interdependent” early modern Atlantic. In Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, Diana de Armas Wilson examines the New World impact on the Cervantine novel, thus challenging — much like Sosa's cannibals in Algiers — the notion that transatlantic literary influence is limited to the exportation of models from the metropolis to the colonies. Wilson offers ample evidence of the reverse direction of influence, from specific words to the American-inflected discourses of chivalry, utopia, the epic, and ethnohistory present in Cervantes’ work. Furthermore, Wilson identifies the Spanish New World impact on a work that has been ascribed novelistic firsthood in another linguistic tradition, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. By underscoring the transatlantic, as well as inter-imperial, connections that inform both Cervantes’ and Defoe's novels, Wilson effectively challenges nationalistic and anglocentric narratives of the rise of the novel. Barbara Fuchs similarly problematizes parochial narratives about exclusive national origins in Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities. Fuchs examines the phenomenon of cultural mimesis, “the calculated imitation of a model, whether by subjects, polities, or texts,” in the context of imperial expansion and inter-imperial rivalries.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Fuchs's wide-ranging analysis demonstrates how cultural mimesis destabilizes the claims of differentiation essential to national and colonial ideologies, and in doing so reveals not only the instability of these ideologies but also the “profound interdependence” between various national and imperial arenas: Spanish and English expansion in the New World and the Mediterranean confrontation with Islam.Footnote ¹¹¹ The final work in this trio, Ralph Bauer's The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity — to which I owe the title for this essay — complements a transatlantic cultural geography with a hemispheric one, by comparing the literary and epistemological discourse of the Spanish and English American colonies. The comparison illuminates many commonalities (albeit following different chronologies) between the Spanish and English Empires, particularly with respect to the intra-imperial struggle between centers and peripheries in the production of knowledge.Footnote ¹¹² While Wilson and Fuchs push the boundaries of the Spanish Atlantic to accommodate European and Mediterranean points of contact, Bauer pushes them in a hemispheric direction in order to address two interrelated “spatial dialectics”: the “east-west dialectic with metropolitan discourses about the New World” as well as “the north-south dialectic underlying the making of modern Western Culture.”Footnote ¹¹³ Ultimately, all three of these texts underscore the Spanish Empire's central role in “modern Western Culture,” whether in terms of the rise of the novel, the development of imperial ideologies, or the organization of knowledge. In so doing, they remap the traditional anglophone parameters of Atlantic studies, attempting what Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra calls in the title of his recent monograph to “Iberianiz[e] the Atlantic” — or, more accurately, to Hispanicize it.Footnote ¹¹⁴

An example from my third trio of texts, which are dedicated to early modern women's writing, illustrates the benefits of attending to Portugal, the Iberian power left out of these books. Stephanie Merrim's Early Modern Women's Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is still unsurpassed in its comparative contextualization of the Mexican nun, poet, and intellectual Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–95). Reading Sor Juana alongside early modern women writers from Spain, Italy, France, and England may involve a “metaphorical flight of fancy,” but the results are the discovery of a wealth of commonalities, if not communities: what Merrim calls “an unceasing, unwitting, almost inevitable, textual sorority between early modern feminists who were unaware of one another and who often worked in isolation.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Kathleen Ann Myers pursues a similar comparative approach in Neither Saints Nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America, which focuses on colonial women's spiritual biographies and confessional vidas. Here Sor Juana's autobiographical self-fashioning is studied alongside that of five other seventeenth-century religious women, all of whom imperfectly fit (or purposefully revise) the model of female sainthood available to them. In this way, Myers stresses not commonalities across divides, but divergence within a common set of cultural, historical, and generic norms: as she puts it, “how a single church role for women to be saintlike perfectas religiosas in fact generated multiple life paths.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Stephanie L. Kirk's Convent Life in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities builds on Merrim's and Myers's work by focusing on the communal context — the actual, rather than the textual, sororities — in which so many of the women they study lived and wrote. The two communities of Kirk's title refer to the Church's “de jure community,” which Kirk culls from “didactic, proscriptive, and prescriptive texts” about convent life, and the “de facto community,” which she reads through letters, poetry, and official documents, such as Inquisition records.Footnote ¹¹⁷ It is in relation to the de facto community that Kirk's study acquires a surprising transatlantic dimension for a book focused on the cloistering of women in New Spain: her fifth chapter describes “the creation of a virtual community by Sor Juana and a group of Portuguese nuns, from which the women wrote safely for and to each other.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Kirk analyzes the poetic dialogue between Sor Juana and a female literary academy composed of aristocratic Portuguese nuns in a manuscript known as “Enigmas ofrecidas a la Casa del Placer.” As it turns out, Sor Juana may have worked less in isolation from other women writers than we thought, but we have to look both across the Atlantic and across imperial and linguistic borders to reconstruct that community.

By tracking Sor Juana's textual exchange with the Portuguese nuns, Stephanie Kirk demonstrates how literary study can profitably open up new transatlantic vistas on the cultural geographies and intellectual communities inhabited by early modern religious women, despite their physical enclosure in a convent. The Portuguese dimension of this community is far less surprising than the lack of references to the lusophone Atlantic in the books reviewed here.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The example with which I opened this paper, the references to American cannibals in the Topographia e historia general de Argel, also reveals the necessity of considering the Portuguese dimension of early modern transatlantic exchanges. Not only does the Topographia evoke Brazilian Indians, but the fictional interlocutor and probable author of the text — Antonio de Sosa, a companion of Cervantes’ while a captive in Algiers — was Portuguese. The impact of the Topographia also crossed the Luso-Hispanic border: both Portuguese and Spanish authors drew on it liberally in their own descriptions of the North African city.Footnote ¹²⁰ To follow Sor Juana's poetry or a Spanish history of Algiers into transatlantic as well as lusophone terrain is no flight of fancy, but the result of attending to the texts’ production and circulation.

Admittedly, the acknowledgment of Portugal's role in the early modern Atlantic ends up exploding the boundaries of this particular geographical and historical fiction. Portuguese imperial expansion long preceded Spanish and English, and it reached far beyond the Atlantic shores of Africa and South America to the Indian and Pacific Oceans.Footnote ¹²¹ Certainly Portuguese is just one of the many linguistic traditions that can both enhance and challenge our study of the Atlantic world. Fully Iberianizing the Atlantic would encourage us to valorize, more than an Atlantic geography per se, the more open and flexible disposition that characterizes Atlantic and transatlantic studies, one attentive to the connections, dialogues, and exchanges that moved widely and in many different directions in the early modern period. Such a disposition can lead us to explore a truly expansive and inclusive cultural geography: the global networks that were not just created by, but that also shaped, early modern Europe.