Historia de las Indias (1552)

Abstract

In 1552, Francisco López de Gómara published Historia de las Indias y conquista de México, which was quickly followed by immediate success, numerous editions, and censorship. Drawing on Marcel Bataillon's lectures in the Collège de France, French scholars from four different universities have put together a new comprehensive critical edition of the first part of Gómara's work, known as Historia de las Indias. The collaborative work of these scholars, as Monique Mustapha writes, provides a “panorama de las viscitudes y censura sufridas por la Historia” based on a systematic comparison of the different editions of Gómara's work (p. 14).This new edition of Gómara's Historia is divided into two parts. The first one comprises two informative preliminary essays, the criteria for editing and transcribing Gómara's work, the content of the Historia, a list of variants among the imprints, and endnotes. In one of the preliminary essays, Mustapha writes that unlike most editions, which rely on the text of Guillermo de Millis published in Medina del Campo in 1553 (titled Hispania Victrix), the editors of this new imprint chose to follow the 1552 princeps edition and include reproductions of its original covers, mappemonde, and engraving of the bison. Historia de las Indias (1552) is particularly distinguished by its exhaustive editorial work. The editors carefully underscore the modifications that took place between the 1552 princeps edition and other editions, including its second imprint, the versions published in Medina del Campo and Antwerp, the corrected versions published in Zaragoza, and Andrés González de Barcia's edition of 1749. Such editorial work provides indeed “una visión global del conjunto de las variantes” of several imprints of Gómara's Historia (p. 48).The second part of Historia de las Indias (1552) consists of six illuminating essays, six appendixes, and two bibliographies. Based on strong archival documentation, the essays address Gómara's biography, sources, and the trajectory of the Historia and its morphosyntactic phenomena. The recently found documents on Gómara's life as well as an iconographic study stand out among the appendixes. Regarding the latter, it is worth noting that the authors demonstrate that the engraving of the bison included in the princeps edition is the only image that appears in all the sixteenth-century editions of Gómara's text and was the first representation of the bison to circulate in Europe. Throughout Historia de las Indias (1552), there is keen attention to the iconographic elements that appear in multiple editions, which stresses the editors' goal of bringing to light modifications among these texts.These French scholars' comparative analysis of the diverse versions of the Historia contributes to our understanding of the material history of Gómara's work. Experts on Gómara's Historia will find particularly useful the arduous editorial work, in which differences among various editions are presented in a clear, expositive manner. By the same token, historians and graduate students can benefit from the informative essays as well as from new archival information included in the appendixes. Scholars interested in iconographic elements of colonial texts will also find this new edition useful. Overall, the editors of Historia de las Indias (1552) make a significant contribution to the study of Gómara and his works by putting together an edition that presents Gómara's first imprint while underscoring the differences between it and its following publications.