Volume 44, Number 6 · April 10, 1997
The Rest vs. the West
By Anthony Grafton
The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization
by Walter D. Mignolo
University of Michigan Press, 426 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450-1650
edited by Claire Farago
Yale University Press, 394 pp., $45.00
José de Acosta did not mind confronting problems. A brilliant speaker and efficient administrator, he dominated the Jesuits' mission in Peru in the 1570s. Acosta taught, preached, organized church councils, rewrote the liturgy, and went on expeditions into the interior of the country, even though he suffered grievously from melancholy, which, many believed at the time, afflicted men of high talent. Later, back in Spain, he wrote one of the most influential historical works of the later sixteenth century, a Natural and Moral History of the Indies, which appeared in 1590. Translated into Italian, French, English, Dutch, and Latin, it found a public everywhere in Europe.
Review, 6154 words
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