Revisiting Juan José Saer’s El entenado / The Witness —Forty Years Later

From Madrid to purgatory. The art and craft of dying in sixteenth-century Spain. By Carlos M. N. Eire. (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History.) Pp. xiv + 571 incl. numerous ills. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. £40. 0 521 46018 2 - Volume 48 Issue 2

This concise yet deeply researched volume joins a growing body of work that attends to the enslavement of Indigenous people in the colonial Americas. Distinguishing her book from studies of Indigenous slavery that focus on the North American mainland and that consider the period from the seventeenth century onward, Stone traces the enslavement of people native to the circum-Caribbean from the beginning of Spanish colonization in the 1490s until the passage of the New Laws in 1542. Arguing that “the search for and profit from Indian captives was central to the development of Spanish colonial institutions,” Stone convincingly demonstrates that Indigenous slavery and the slave trade were integral to Spanish exploration, conquest, and settlement of the Americas (p. 30). By combining archaeological and written colonial sources, she also succeeds in creating a detailed ethnohistorical account of the Caribbean's original inhabitants and their initial experiences of and responses to Spanish contact. The resulting work highlights the key role that Indigenous slavery played in early Iberian expansion while simultaneously striving to keep Indigenous people at the center of analysis.Among the most welcome elements of Stone's work is her careful attention to Indigenous social and political dynamics from the precontact era until the mid-sixteenth century. In chapter 1, Stone makes deft use of available archaeological and archival evidence to analyze fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Iberia and the Greater Antilles, respectively, demonstrating that both societies were dynamic, expanding, and already engaged in practices of slavery that would continue to evolve after contact.Stone's careful reconstruction of the precontact Caribbean—a society that she convincingly shows was shaped by long-distance trade networks long before European arrival—in turn allows her to explore varied Indigenous responses to Spanish arrival. In chapter 2, Stone reconstructs why some Antillean caciques allied with the Spanish, while others—usually those who wielded more power at the time of Spanish contact—did not.Whereas Nancy van Deusen's Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain (2015) explored how freedom suits brought by Indigenous Americans enslaved in early modern Iberia shaped metropolitan understandings of race, Stone is primarily concerned with the demographic, economic, legal, and social consequences of this large-scale trade in human beings in Spain's newly claimed colonies. In chapter 3, she shows how early sixteenth-century debates over Indigenous slavery reveal its importance in both religious and secular affairs, while also illustrating the limits of crown authority in the Americas.Chapters 4 and 5 explore how slaving shaped Spanish colonization of Florida, Mexico, and Central and South America, as Indigenous slavery became “one of the largest businesses in the New World” by the 1520s (p. 104). While some Indigenous captives became “involuntary collaborators” who served as translators and guides for Spanish explorers, thousands more were trafficked to the Andes or the Caribbean (p. 94).As Stone shows in her final chapter, Indigenous slavery in the circum-Caribbean eventually ended not because it was replaced by African slavery but because it became unsustainable. Although African and Indigenous people worked alongside one another in the first decades of the sixteenth century, repeated Indigenous and interethnic uprisings in the 1520s and 1530s, coupled with the increasing availability of enslaved Africans, led the crown to pass the New Laws in 1542. Realizing that “indigenous cooperation was crucial for the economic prosperity of their American colonies,” Spanish officials banned Indigenous slavery even in cases of war (p. 155). Yet much damage had already been done: as Stone shows, Spanish enslavement and forced movement of Indigenous people played an important and little-recognized role in facilitating early colonial expansion. Just as important, other imperial powers “followed the path of Spanish slavers, continuing to enslave indigenous peoples” elsewhere in the Americas (p. 162).The lack of specificity with respect to numbers is a common problem in studies of Indigenous slavery, and Stone's estimate that “between 250,000 and 500,000” individuals fell victim to the Spanish trade may frustrate some readers (p. 7). As Stone explains, however, the nature of available documents complicates the task of quantifying Indigenous bondage. Whereas European slavers trafficked people from West Africa as human cargo, leading them to produce shipping records, Indigenous people were often captured by individual raiders who sought to hide their activities, and “labor-starved residents of the Greater Antilles” proved willing to conceal the origins of their laborers (p. 113). Rather than focusing on numbers, Stone emphasizes how slavery “scattered diverse ethnic groups and cultures across the Americas,” changing the lives of countless individuals and helping to forge new ethnic groups, such as the Kalinago (p. 157).Captives of Conquest is short and readable, making it an excellent choice for courses on comparative slavery, Indigenous history, colonial Latin America, and the Caribbean-Atlantic world. Scholars interested in the origins and consequences of Indigenous slavery in the Americas have much to gain by engaging with this groundbreaking work.

Reviewed by: How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position by Tabish Khair Emad Mirmotahari (bio) how to fight islamist terror from the missionary position Tabish Khair Interlink Books https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-to-Fight-Islamist-Terror-from-the-Missionary-Position/Tabish-Khair/9781566569705 224 pages; Print, $15.00 Tabish Khair's How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position imposes itself on the genre of the academic novel—insofar as there is agreement that there is such a genre—in an idiosyncratic way. Eschewing easy parody and satire, it thematizes some of the most pressing challenges and conditions that confront higher education in the second decade of the twenty first century and especially in the humanities and liberal arts. Though the novel is set in Århus, Denmark, circa 2005, the themes, tropes, and sources of conflict it engages resemble the professional and institutional conversations that characterize US higher education. This suggests that there is some international dimension to the "crisis of the humanities." The novel speaks to the dilemmas of tenure and what one must endure and demonstrate to earn it, unethical labor practices, as well as the suspicion that multicultural initiatives, and postcolonial studies in English departments in particular, are largely additive, perfunctory, and unlikely to really decolonize the curriculum and decenter Eurocentric principles, perspectives, and canons. As a literature professor, Khair's narrator is keenly aware of language itself, various genres of writing, and the discourse communities that cohere around them. He is also aware of the processes that shape his own narrative, something he communicates to the reader through his annotating commentary about the pitfalls of journalism and "MFA creative writing techniques," for example. The narrator also makes metafictional gestures about the narrative's place in the tradition of Anglo-Indian writing, which includes Rushdie, Ghosh, and Naipaul. Written as a mystery, the novel's unnamed narrator—a Pakistani-born academic who teaches literature at the university in Århus—regularly comments on the various genres of writing and the kinds [End Page 38] of meanings they produce and withhold. Leery of the flourishes and clichés of "university MFA creative writing," and equally of the sensationalism and hyperbole of mainstream news journalism as he sees it, the narrator tasks himself with chronologically piecing together the events that led up to the "Islamic axe plot" in what he sees as an impartial and clear-eyed way. It is in the unraveling of this "Islamic axe plot"—a plot to kill the cartoonist of irreverent and insulting caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad (no doubt a reference to the Jyllands-Posten images published in 2005)—that the novel's intervention in critical conversations about academe is laid bare. Broadly speaking, How to Fight Islamist Terror is concerned with alterity in academic spaces and institutions. In this capacity it is a distant relative of novels like Susan Choi's The Foreign Student (1998) and Ishmael Reed's Japanese by Spring (1993). And while it engages race, immigration, gender, and other categories of difference, its principal contribution to its readers' understanding of alterity and marginality in academe lies elsewhere. Khair's novel probes what it represents as the default secular underpinning of humanistic academia and how secularism shapes a scholar's beliefs and commitments. While How to Fight Islamist Terror renders differing manifestations and intensities of secularism, it largely leaves the reader with the conclusion that faith communities and the sacred have little legitimacy as vehicles of meaning-making and knowledge production as far as academics are concerned. This is not to say that the narrative endorses religion and religious worldviews as necessarily desirable or necessarily "thick" and considered in their explication of historical conditions. Nor does the novel suggest that secularism is flawed, or that it is some inert and monolithic ideological formation. Rather, Khair's novel proffers to show how secularism has produced certain patterned intellectual and political dispositions and how these dispositions act in particularly strong—and sometimes harmful—ways on Muslim or nominally Muslim academics who live in the post-9/11 West. The narrator's account yields a generous amount of narrative space to his two roommates—Ravi, a Hindu Indian doctoral...

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview ArticleSociety and Culture in Early Modern Spain Lucrecia's Dreams: Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Richard L. Kagan Emigrants and Society: Extremadura and Spanish America in the Sixteenth Century. Ida Altman The Avila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-Century City. Jodi Bilinkoff Town and Country in Pre-industrial Spain: Cuenca, 1550-1870. David Sven Reher Liberty in Absolutist Spain: The Habsburg Sale of Towns, 1516-1700. Helen Nader Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville. Mary Elizabeth Perry Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily. William Monter Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of Valencia, 1478-1834. Stephen Haliczer Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination: Studies in European and American Social and Political Theory, 1513-1830. Anthony Pagden Theatre in Spain, 1490-1700. Melveena McKendrick James AmelangJames Amelang Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 65, Number 2Jun., 1993 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/244641 Views: 8Total views on this site Copyright 1993 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Delia Mendez Montesinos. The Ingenious Simpleton: Upending Imposed Ideologies through Brief Comic Theatre. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2014. Pp. xvi + 146. $29.99. In The Ingenious Simpleton, Delia Mendez Montesinos analyzes the subversive potential of brief comic theater and popular performance, and documents its persistent ability to resist submission to hierarchical, social stratification. Through comedy, lower and marginalized classes, who often are subjected to a negative self-concept imposed by hegemonic power interested in sustaining itself, find outlets to transgress socially prescribed norms. Mendez Montesinos's valuable study concerns itself particularly with popular performances that feature a buffoon or comic simpleton, and develops case studies from three geographical regions (Spain, Mexico, and California) across disparate chronological periods. Ultimately, this study reveals a heritage of subversive comedy in twentieth-century Hispanic popular performance that can be traced to the origins of the comic simpleton figure in sixteenth-century Spain. The authors main contention is not that these kinds of politically subversive performances arise only under particular or special social circumstances, but that they can and do exist in a variety of historical, social, and political environments. The subversion of norms through comic performance is a common denominator that reveals a pervasive and enduring tradition across time. Proposing that theatre can be a powerful tool to provide marginalized groups with a needed sense of solidarity and self-worth (xi), the book's brief introduction establishes its central argument by way of the specific historical examples of Lope de Ruedas pasos as mass entertainment in sixteenth-century Spain, post-Revolutionary Mexican satirical public performance (a tradition the author sees dating to pre-Columbian times), and the Teatro Campesino among the grape-harvesters of California's San Joaquin Valley in the 1960s. The book's first chapter outlines the theoretical parameters of the study, introducing definitions of laughter and comedy in both social and theatrical contexts. Here, Mendez Montesinos provides a brief historical overview of the comic figure of the fool, its relationship to laughter (particularly in the context of the carnivalesque), and its social and theatrical roles, beginning in the early modern period. The author cites Erasmus and Shakespeare as examples of early modern authors who developed the figure of the fool; she might also have discussed equally important Spanish writers, such as Cervantes, or the popular tradition of performed entremeses and teatro breve of early modern Spain in order to provide a firmer foundation for her otherwise sound historical analysis. Mendez Montesinos's approach to laughter is largely Bakhtinian, although she also includes references to Henri Bergson, Jacques LeGoif, Thomas Hobbes, Sigmund Freud, and others. This relatively schematic overview of the history of theories of laughter summarizes well-known scholarship on the topic and highlights an important connection between the fool's marginalized perspective and the figure's ability to express or reveal truths through comic illusion, in keeping with Aritsotle's conception of eutrapelia. Throughout this chapter, Mendez Montesinos relies on a distinction between artificial and natural fools in an early modern context, claiming that the ruling classes allowed social transgression by fools because they considered their mockery to be unintentional, or because they accepted fools as mentally and/or physically inferior beings. While this discussion seems overly essentialist at times, it does serve to articulate the importance of the fool's freedom to speak, and often to speak the truth, which characterizes this stock type from its earliest appearances on the comic stage. Mendez Montesinos then defines various types of comedy, largely following the six points of Maurice Charney's metaphysics of comedy: 1) the discontinuous, 2) the accidental, 3) the autonomous, 4) the self-conscious, 5) the histrionic, and 6) the ironic. …

To Live Like a Moor: Christian Perceptions of Muslim Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain

This article borrows a paradigm from a 2003 essay by theologian Mercedes Navarro Puerto to gauge spiritual priorities in sixteenth-century Spain. Spanish Catholicism in the early modern period very often is construed as averse to horizontal ties, individual judgment, and the free construction of religious communities, but Navarro's concept of "spiritual accompaniment" helps us to grasp the presence of conversation, reciprocity, and non-confrontational discernment in early modern Spanish Catholicism. The evidence assessed here broadens our understanding of what Spanish Catholicism would tolerate and even support in the sixteenth century, and deepens the way we portray religious dissent.

MISCELLANY THE SEVENTY-SEVENTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION Report of the Committee on Program Ralph William Franklin of General Theological Seminary and Mary Elizabeth Brown of Marymount Manhattan College made up the Committee on Program for the 1997 meeting chaired by Jo Ann Kay McNamara. The committee sent out calls for papers through the Association's journal and on the Internet via various discussion lists used by the respective members. In addition, we each pursued personal contacts and enjoyed the very energetic assistance ofWilliam Callahan, the President of the Association. In our calls for papers, we explicitly encouraged the submission of single paper proposals as well as completed panels on the principle that many members are not sufficiently well integrated into scholarly networks to enter into a complete panel without our assistance. This procedure also gave us the opportunity to fashion panels at our own initiative that otherwise might not have emerged. Three panels were created in this manner with the committee supplying chairs and commentators. We were able to put together a program of nine panels ranging broadly in interest from female mystics in the Middle Ages to New York archbishops. Presenters came from every area of the United States, Canada, and Israel. A particular high point was a panel in honor of the life and work of Louis Pascoe, SJ., a long-time member and officer of the Association. All the sessions were held in the New York Hilton Hotel. There were a few minor changes in some of the panels, but all went off smoothly. January 3, morning: "Moving the Boundaries: Studying Religious Women in the Cultures of Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe." Chairman: Michael Goodich,University ofHaifa. F.Thomas Luongo,University ofNotre Dame:"FamUy Conflicts and Political Networks; Catherine of Siena and Her Disciples in the War of the Eight Saints" (Since Dr. Luongo was ill, his paper was read by Carol Lansing.); Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, Cleveland State University:"A Place in the Temporal World: The Response of Convents to Lay and Ecclesiastical Challenges in Sixteenth-Century Spain"; Katherine L. French, State University of New York— New Paltz:"Where, oh Where, Have the LayWomen Gone? Gendering Parochial Involvement in Late Medieval England." Commentator: Carol L. Lansing, Univer258 MISCELLANY259 sity of California at Santa Barbara. The panel attracted more than fifty people, some standing in the doorway throughout the session. January 3, afternoon: "Medieval Reform and Renewal: Papers in Honor of Louis B. Pascoe, SJ." Chairman: Lawrence F. Hundersmarck, Pace University. Christopher M. Bellitto, St. Joseph's Seminary, Dunwoodie,Yonkers, New York: "Nicholas de Clamange: Reformatio Personalis as the Foundation of Church Reform during the Great Schism"; Elizabeth Lowe, Fordham University: "Hervaeus Natalis: Evangelical Models and the Reform of the Dominican Order"; Thomas Giangreco,Iona College:"Cola di Rienzo and the Renewal of the City of Rome: Art, Politics, and the Revolution of 1347." Commentator: Thomas M. Izbicki,Johns Hopkins University. The session was enhanced by a brief speech of appreciation by Father Pascoe. About thirty-five persons attended. January 3, afternoon: "In That 'Umble House': The 1894-1896 Holy Family Sisters Journal of Sister Bernard Deggs." Chairman: Mary Grace Krieger, Maryknoll Mission Archives. Charles E. Nolan, Archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans and Notre Dame Seminary:"Introduction to the Deggs Journal and the Louisiana CathoUc History Perspective";Virginia Meacham Gould, De KaIb College : "The Southern Women's Studies Perspective"; Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., St. Meinrad Seminary CoUege: "Portrait of a Foundress: Henriette DeLiIIe"; Sylvia Thibodaux, Holy FamUy Sisters: "The Holy FamUy Sisters' Perspective." This session attracted about twenty-five people to a very close and detailed subject. January 4, morning:"Female Voices in Late-Medieval and Early-Modern Italian Religious Literature." Chairman:Anne Jacobson Schutte, University ofVirginia. Karen Scott, DePaul University: "Imagery of Conversion and Political Action: Catherine of Siena in Early Modern Italian Religious Writing";WUliamV Hudon, Bloomsburg University:"TheVoice ofCamilla Battista daVarano in Early-Modern Italian Devotional Literature"; Armando Maggi, University of Pennsylvania:"Stories and Histories in the Visions of Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi." Commentator: Anne Jacobson Schutte. This session, unfortunately, had to compete with two sessions of the American Historical Association on comparable topics (one devoted...

Knowing Fictions: Picaresque Reading in the Early Modern Hispanic World

Notes on Contributors

Winner of the 2015 Publication Prize awarded by the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland. Celestina by Fernando de Rojas is a canonical work of late medieval Spanish literature and one of the earliest European best-sellers. However, while we have clear evidence of its popularity and influence, scholarship has not adequately answered the question of why it continued to hold such appeal for early modern audiences. This book explores Celestina's role as a key interlocutor in European literature and thought; it argues that the work continued to be meaningful because it engaged with one of the period's defining preoccupations: the human condition, an idea often conceptualised in pro et contra debates about the misery and dignity of man. Taking an ideological and comparative approach that focuses on Celestina's reception in sixteenth-century Spain and Italy, it reads Rojas's work against a network of texts that were translated and printed concurrently in both peninsulas yet which have not previously been examined in depth or detail alongside it, including Baldassare Castiglione's Il Cortegiano, Fernan Perez de Oliva's Dialogo de la dignidad del hombre, and Pietro Aretino's Vita delle puttane. Each chapter explores themes common to sixteenth-century debates about the human condition, such as self-knowledge, self-fashioning, the formative role of language, the tension between freedom and constraint, as well as the access to knowledge provided by vernacular fiction in the context of early modern censorship. Rachel Scott is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at King's College London.

MOSHE SLUHOVSKY Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 384 pp. $45. Reviewed by Stephanie Thompson LundeenThe aim of Moshe Sluhovsky's Believe Not Every Spirit is ambitious: to reorient the study of demonic possession and exorcism away from its connection to witchcraft and toward certain forms of early modern Catholic spirituality. Sluhovsky argues that possession, mysticism, and the discernment of spirits were an interrelated triad of phenomena that gained particular prominence in Spain, Italy, and France between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. The turmoil these phenomena raised was only to be resolved by the adoption of a Roman rite for exorcism in 1614 and by a retreat from extreme practices of contemplative meditation among religious and lay practitioners. To make his case, Sluhovsky marshals an impressive cast, consisting of hundreds of theologians, mystics, cloistered and uncloistered religious, Inquisitors, charlatans, and common folk. The sheer breadth and scope of his work is its most impressive characteristic, though it is simultaneously its most problematic.According to Sluhovsky, demonic possession, previously considered a relatively minor problem, became a site for political and theological theater in the religious turmoil of early modern Europe. In 1526, for example, at the convent of Saint-Pierre in Lyon, France, the demon possessing Anthoinette de Grollee announced his allegiance to Calvinism and identified Geneva as his home. Possession also became a means for probing interiority and bringing women under tighter ecclesiastical control. The growing practice of contemplative mysticism among women, both lay and religious, peaked in sixteenth-century Spain and Italy and in the following century in France. This practice represented a serious challenge to clerical authority by promoting direct contact with the divine that could, and did, lead to the rejection of outward forms of piety, including even the sacraments. Eager to discount this strand of mysticism, theologians hastened to ascribe the ecstasies and prophecies of such women to the devil. Their cause was aided by some of the mystics themselves, who would admit to submitting to demonic possession as part of their progress toward contemplative union with God. A new theology of possession as occurring not only within the body but also, or even exclusively, within the soul promoted this potential conflation.The similarity between divine and demonic possession, Sluhovsky asserts, precipitated a theological crisis in discernment. Several prominent theologians of the period sought to establish a means to determine definitively the signs of the demonic, only to end, repeatedly, by admitting that there was no sure means. Experience and the recognition of discernment as a charismatic gift were, they concluded, the exorcist's best tools. Because of this admission, and of the failure of the learned establishment to set a definitive test, women enjoyed a de facto participation in the discernment of spirits.Sluhovsky's careful inclusion of such women-the late-medieval lay exorcists, the Mother Superiors whose letters offered advice on discernment, the mystics like Teresa of Avila who remained above reproach, the lay Italian mystics with their followers-balances his heavy reliance on clerical writings. These clerical texts, ranging from practical guides on exorcism to theological inquiries into discernment to Inquisitorial records, often display an authoritarian, even skeptical attitude toward mystical women. Indeed, several are forthrightly misogynistic, connecting demonic possession to female weakness, both physical and mental. As Sluhovsky notes, this literature would seem to preclude the reality of any degree of female empowerment, and so the inclusion of these active women serves to expose the limits of the clerical view. Even so, Sluhovsky sees the facts of early modern exorcism as instantiating the misogynistic rhetoric of possession. …

1. Dependence, servility and coerced labor in time and space David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman Part I. Slavery in Africa and Asia Minor: 2. Slavery in the Ottoman Empire in the early modern era Ehud R. Toledano 3. Slavery in Islamic Africa Rudolph T. Ware III 4. Slavery in non-Islamic West Africa, 1420-1820 G. Ugo Nwokeji 5. Slaving and resistance to slaving in west central Africa Roquinaldo Ferreira 6. White slavery in the early modern era William G. Clarence-Smith and David Eltis Part II. Slavery in Asia: 7. Slavery in Southeast Asia, 1420-1804 Kerry Ward 8. Slavery in early modern China Pamela Kyle Crossley Part III. Slavery among the Indigenous Americans: 9. Slavery in indigenous North America Leland Donald 10. Indigenous slavery in South America, 1492-1820 Neil L. Whitehead Part IV. Slavery and Serfdom in Eastern Europe: 11. Slavery and the rise of serfdom in Russia Richard Hellie 12. Manorialism and rural subjection in east central Europe, 1500-1800 Edgar Melton Part V. Slavery in the Americas: 13. Slavery in the Atlantic islands and the early modern Spanish Atlantic world William D. Phillips, Jr 14. Slavery and politics in colonial Portuguese America: the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries Joao Fragoso and Ana Rios 15. Slavery in the British Caribbean Philip D. Morgan 16. Slavery on the colonial North American mainland Lorena S. Walsh 17. Slavery in the French Caribbean, 1635-1804 Laurent Dubois 18. Slavery and the slave trade of the minor Atlantic powers Pieter Emmer Part VI. Cultural and Demographic Patterns in the Americas: 19. Demography and family structures B. W. Higman 20. The concept of creolization Richard Price 21. Black women in the early Americas Betty Wood Part VII. Legal Structures, Economics and the Movement of Coerced Peoples in the Atlantic World: 22. Involuntary migration in the early modern world, 1500-1800 David Richardson 23. Slavery, freedom and the law in the Atlantic world, 1420-1807 Sue Peabody 24. European forced labor in the early modern era Timothy Coates 25. Transatlantic slavery and economic development in the Atlantic world: West Africa, 1450-1850 Joseph E. Inikori Part VIII. Slavery and Resistance: 26. Slave worker rebellions and revolution in the Americas to 1804 Mary Turner 27. Runaways and quilombolas in the Americas Manolo Florentino and Marcia Amantino.

Notes on Contributors

Book Reviews 225 The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography of the Relaciones Geográficas. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996 By Barbara E. Mundy Wonderfully illustrated and well-crafted, this work is a useful volume for scholars in a variety of fields. Barbara Mundy traces the development of Mexican indigenous cartography of the colonial period from a variety of directions, pointing to the multifaceted unit which was ultimately created. She acknowledges rhe influence of both European and pre-colonial cartographic rradirions in crearing the indigenous maps of the ReUciones Geográficas and also considers the implications of these maps for the diverse society which they reflect. The text of the book is clear, concise, descriptive, and analytical, directly corresponding to the accompanying figures and tables. Along with eight tables, Mundy includes 101 figures and eight colot plates of the maps of the Relaciones Geográficas. As well as reproductions of selected maps, the figures range from modern-day renderings of the regions which Mundy discusses to pages from precolonial manuscripts and are incorporated into the text wonderfully. Additionally , many of the photographic reproductions are made by Mundy herself, a testament to her abilities as a researcher and the time involved in gathering data for the project. This work studies 69 maps and includes a catalogued appendix of relevant information for each. It also includes an appendix transcribing the questionnaire on which the maps were based and a detailed index. Fat from a simple analysis of images, Mundy examines these maps from many perspectives. Included are studies of the etymology of place names and the impottance of both alphabetic and logographic script in analyzing the data. Mundy discusses the use of alphabetic script in the maps as alternately nominative, descriptive or historical in nature while the logographic script extends beyond monodimensional images into a multilayered discourse. Pictorial devices discussed by Mundy include placement on the page and the use of determinative or classificatory logographs. According to Mundy's reading of the maps, the meaning of a logograph would have changed according to the context of the map such that, in certain instances, a hill drawn on a map would indicate the physical geography of the land while in other instances it would be a symbolic representation of a town. The placement of the image was thus as important as the image itself, helping to establish both a physical geography and a social hierarchy through rhe pictorial representations of the space. The interpretation would depend upon the knowledge of the reader, enabling a polyphonic reading of the map, according to the context in which it were read and the level of pictorial and/or alphabetic literacy of the reader. Additionally, Mundy discusses the motivation behind the work and how it is that the intended reader would have shaped the information set out in the map. She examines both chorographic and geographic map-making traditions, 226 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies the former focusing on partial or particulat views of a place while the lattet highlight the geographic features of the region. The ReUciones Geográficas maps reflecred both types of maps, depending upon the understanding of the cartographer and his perception of the intended audience. The maps sought to combine text and image into a cohesive structure, constantly influenced by the individual map-makers. This made for a wide range of maps depending upon the cartographers ' levels of training and their indigenous or Hispanic heritage or influences. The maps became a blending of two traditions into one, multi-layered image and it is this image which Mundy seeks to understand in her work. Among other things, her book examines the Spanish Imperial ideologies, native traditions, and ideologies of language and literacy as these affected the producrion of cartographic images during the colonial era. This reviewer finds little to criticize in this work, with the exception of a question which she would pose to Mundy. Repeatedly throughout the work Mundy refers ro the map-maker as "he (or she)" but it has been documented that few women had access to literacy in either pre-colonial Latin America or sixteenth century Spain. Thus the reviewer questions the necessity of gender...