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The Renaissance of Encounters and the Renaissance of Antiquities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2025

Joan-Pau Rubiés Open the ORCID record for Joan-Pau Rubiés [Opens in a new window]
Joan-Pau Rubiés*
Affiliation:
ICREA & Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
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Abstract

While it is no longer tenable to simply oppose interest in the cultural legacy of ancient Greece and Rome to interest in Europe’s New Worlds, the task of assessing the interpretative lens provided by a humanistic education remains rather tangled. Taking as a starting point some examples from the conquest of Chile and elsewhere in Spanish America, the lecture examines critically how classical models of memorable behavior, and an idea of antiquity that often implied an enhanced sense of cultural distance, strengthened the principle of comparability, shaped imperial self-representation, and affected the interpretation of indigenous agency.

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Type
The 2024 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture
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Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 78 , Issue 1 , Spring 2025 , pp. 1 - 41
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

I wish to thank to the Board of Directors of the Renaissance Society of America and its president, Nicholas Terpstra, for awarding me the honor of delivering the Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture at the annual meeting, held in Chicago in March 2024. As someone who has dedicated more than thirty years to the history of cultural encounters and travel writing, it was also a particular privilege to be able to offer a lecture named after a scholar distinguished for her pioneering work on the fascinating book of Sir John Mandeville. This is one of those mysterious texts, at the borderline between fact and fiction, that first led me to engage critically with travel accounts and the early chronicles of the Indies, a multifaceted genre whose enormous value for scholars—not least those devoted to the Renaissance—has only become more apparent during our lifetime. Although most of the texts I will be discussing here are richer in observed facts than the book of Sir John Mandeville, I hope that it will become clear to readers that a process of interpretative fictionalization, however subtle, remains of central importance to even the most informative of the historical accounts produced during the age of encounters.

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