Omar Paton was one of the last Castilian Muslims to complete the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca. He undertook the journey from his home city of Ávila (Castile), departing in 1491. Upon his return from the East, Paton depicted the experiences and emotions he lived during his long and dangerous pious expedition in his Memoir of the Journey to and…[Read more]

For the past twenty years, scholars of world and global history and literature have shown that the early modern world was a complex, entangled place. And yet, by emphasizing connection, such work at times overlooks the many separations that drove the engines of global early modernity: transoceanic slave trades, tribute labor, and the economic…[Read more]

The Popol Wuj is one of the most important, commonly studied, and widely circulated Indigenous literary works from colonial Mesoamerica. By some accounts, there are 1,200 editions of the work published in thirty world languages, all of which trace back to a single manuscript—itself a copy of an earlier Mayan work. To protect their work from b…[Read more]

Version of academic record: Wacks, David A., Review of Roza Candás, Pablo, ed. Memorial de ida i venida hasta Maka: La peregrinación de ʿOmar Paṭōn. Oviedo, 2018. ISBN 978-84-16343-67-6. 482 pp. La corónica, vol 48, no. 2, pp. 177-180. doi:10.1353/cor.2020.0013

This article reviews four crucial moments of the editorial life of Guaman Poma de Ayala’s “Nueva corónica y buen gobierno” [New Chronicle and Good Government], a 1189-page history of Peru before, during, and after the Spanish conquest. The chronicle includes 399 ink drawings made by the author. The essay also addresses unanswered questions…[Read more]

Invited contribution to the book-catalog “Libros y autores del virreinato del Perú (1542-1824)” [Books and authors of the Viceroyalty of Peru] that accompanies the one-year exhibit (same title as the book) at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid (Spain). The exhibit can be visited from September 2021-September 2022. This chapter addresses the…[Read more]

Canon, tradition, and origin anchor developmental accounts of Black literary history, describing the forward movement from a singular beginning in terms of birth, maturation, and inheritance. This model delimits a specialized field of study, but also obscures texts, practices, and archives that do not cohere with it. In the study of slave…[Read more]

Conversión de los Saluiseños de la Alta California (c. 1840) by Pablo Tac is the only published document written by an indigenous Californian during the Spanish-Mexican period. Born at Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, north of San Diego, California in 1820, Tac wrote the manuscript while studying to be a Catholic priest at a seminary in Rome. C…[Read more]

Conversión de los Saluiseños de la Alta California (Conversion of the Saluiseños of Alta California) (c. 1840) by Pablo Tac is the only published document written by an indigenous Californian during the Spanish-Mexican period. Born at Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, north of San Diego, California in 1820, Tac wrote the manuscript while st…[Read more]

Este ensayo propone una lectura de Conquista de las islas Malucas (1609) del poeta, historiador y eclesiástico Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola (1562-1631) como un gabinete de curiosidades textual lleno de narraciones y objetos maravillosos. El autor emplea sus propias ideas sobre la escritura de la historia para crear una crónica de conquista co…[Read more]

The Spatiality of the Hispanic Avant-Garde: Ultraísmo & Estridentismo, 1918-1927 is a thorough exploration of the meanings and values Hispanic poets and artists assigned to four iconic locations of modernity: the city, the cafés, means of transportation, and the sea, during the first decades of the 20th century. Joining important studies on S…[Read more]

This book delves into the inadequately explored, liberative side of Humanism during the late Renaissance. While some long-sixteenth-century thinking anticipates twentieth-century Liberation Theology, a broader description is simply “liberation thinking,” which embraces its diverse, timeless, and sometimes nontheological aspects.

Two moments fra…[Read more]

This unit (Text, intro, and notes in Spanish) contains a brief introduction to the Spanish masterpiece Celestina, or The Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea, and a fragment from a dialogue in Act VII adapted for modern readers with notes, and a short bibliography. Celestina deals with love, the decline of nobility, prostitution, witchcraft, money,…[Read more]

This bilingual unit (Spanish/English text and translation, with intro and notes in English) contains a brief introduction to the Spanish masterpiece Celestina, or The Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea, and a fragment from a dialogue in Act VII adapted for modern readers with notes, and a short bibliography. Celestina deals with love, the decline…[Read more]

Since the 1980s, there has been much discussion of the question of the literary canon. Our colleages in English have been particularly outspoken on the question (Charles Altieri 1990; Jan Gorak 1991 and 2000; John Guillory 1993; Gregory Jay 1997) and in recent years, Hispanists such as José María Pozuelo Yvancos and María Rosa Adrada Sánchez (20…[Read more]