El contrabando de lo secreto: La escritura de la historia en 'El carnero' de Juan Rodriguez Freile

The dissertation, entitled El contrabando de lo secreto: La escritura de la historia en El curnero de Juan Rodriguez Freile, argues that, in the work of Freile, we encounter major and significant changes in the writing of history. By focusing on several images or topoi, the study maps the ways in which the author confronts the task of writing about the first one hundred years of the discovery and conquest of the New Kingdom of Granada. El carnero articulates an alternative view of colonial geography, redefining New Granada as El Dorado. Such a shift signals that, for Freile, for Freile, the stage of conquest must be superseded by one of economic stability. The trope of the beatus ille becomes a rhetorical strategy that allows Freile to postulate an alternative to the corrupt political administrators: the "labrador" (farmer). Space begins to be defined by Freile according to the parameters of utopia.;The dissertation also explores the ways in which the narrative voice acquires and displays authority. This is accomplished in four ways: by genealogy (the familial roots of the narrator), experience, knowledge, and ethical superiority. However, the study also identifies and analyzes significant inconsistencies and anxieties that problematize authority.;Another major component of El carnero is the constant presence of women. The dissertation focuses on the ways "woman" as a category infiltrates the conception of the work as a whole. By defining El carnero as a "doncella huerfana" (orphan maiden), the text immediately positions writing as a vulnerable object that needs the protection of an author (a substitute father), who is also in need of protection (by King Philip IV). Women as characters in the history of New Granada are always positioned in an all-encompassing frame the goes back to the Biblical narrative of Adam and Eve. The exemplary juridical cases in the text are full of the constant presence of women as de-stabilizers of colonial society. Such is the frame in which women are positioned, a misogynistic view that functions as a powerful tool for the presentation of characters and their anticipated behavior.;The writing of history, then, becomes a series of manipulations of old tropes as a means of confronting major crises affecting the colonial administration in seventeenth-century New Granada.