Robert Schwoebel

History and Prophecy in the New World of Francisco L pez de G mara Robert Schwoebel

Francisco López de Gómara's work on the conquest of Mexico was controversial when it appeared in 1552, and remains so to the present. For the most part, it was condemned as imperial propaganda and hero worship. In recent times, critics have been either hostile to all European New World writings, or, where favorable, failed to appreciate the implications of the genre in which López de Gómara wrote-a failure that has led to much confusion. The author provides more detail on both the controversy and wider context, especially the recent historiographical context, and explains the approach. The author's goal is to demonstrate how Cortés' historian-accused of lies, hero worship, and colonial propaganda-wrote what humanists called a "true history." The humanists intended that genre to penetrate the inner meaning of historical events. Gómara's was not, however, a work that found favor with the Spanish imperial regime. In a repressive society, it was advisable for humanists to inscribe criticism and reform-of the regime and the conquerors-by sophisticated use of rhetoric and its discursive strategies. Written in the sixteenth century into a conventional rendering of events, the author finds an alternative text in which Gómara envisioned a Spanish-Amerindian society, a rhetorical New World, and a new universal historical vision that introduced precepts and practices only incorporated into the North American narrative from the Scottish Enlightenment in the eighteenth century and later. Employing rhetorical analysis, the author's reading yields an estimate of how Gómara's humanism shaped the New World cultural construct. The author examines the historian's New World text for its Renaissance rhetorical notions, attitudes, and its historical conceits. The author's interpretation of López de Gómara's work as an instance in the Renaissance story of cultural transformation-the means by which he accomplished this task-moves the analysis into the field of cultural history. In pursuing the first task, the author follows a particular way of reading a Renaissance New World humanist history. In the second, he shows how in fashioning that genre, López de Gómara participated in the reorientation of his world's perception of itself and its history, in Europe and America. The author reflects on how the humanist scholar fashioned his practice of history to accommodate his subversive vision of the New World. Those scholars who project modern views of society and inquiry on the sixteenth century have neglected these lines of historical pursuit. They have misrepresented or expunged Gómara's context and intent by lumping together the different genres of sixteenth-century historical writings (histories, chronicles, memoires, reports, probanzas) and treating them as largely imperial polemic-opportunistic or utopian, moralizing, and banal-in short, bad history. The author focuses on how in his historical practice Gómara teased heretical fibers from the cultural stock of Renaissance humanism and wove them into an American narrative; and discusses how his rhetorical practice shaped his construction of conquest and New World, and enriched and expanded humanist discourse at the beginning of the European era of global history.