| Francisco Lopez de Gomara (1511-1559) was able to write his Historia de las Indias (1552) because he had access to a variety of oral and written sources which circulated within the context of Spain's development as an empire in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The experience of distant places through the circulation and exchange of texts, goods and human beings set in motion by the Spanish Empire seems to have had a profound impact on Gomara's conception of Spain's role as a world power. Through a historical search of Spain's imperial origins traced back to the discovery of the New World, Gomara could account for the remarkable transformations brought about by the new imperial realities. Moreover, the notion of discovery enabled him to create a sense of orientation in history and geography leading to new ways of dealing with and interpreting the displaced material realities of the empire. His keen sensibility allowed him to successfully confront the interpretive challenges posed by the complex and problematic emerging imperial universe.;This dissertation, Francisco Lopez de Gomara's Historiography of the Discovery, discusses the meaning and centrality of the topic of discovery in Gomara's Construction of the Indies as a historical subject. The emphasis it places on the discovery has its primary focus in the ways in which knowledge of the New World was collected, organized and made available within the framework of the empire. Its goal is to see how the intellectual dynamics set in motion in the building of the Spanish Empire come into play in Gomara's Historia. Through the examination of the historiographical problems and choices Gomara had to face in interpreting Spain's dealings with the Indies, this dissertation attempts to situate Gomara's contribution to the knowledge of the New World as well as to sixteenth century historiography. This should not be understood as a celebration of the kind of knowledge Gomara produced, but rather as an attempt to achieve an understanding of it in both its richness and tragedy. |
