Sabine Mund calls her book “minutieuse” (p. 7), and it is indeed a succinct study. At barely one hundred pages of text, it is more of an extended essay than a monograph. Its brevity makes it no less worth reading, however. The book is provocative, methodically argued, and clearly written in a style accessible to those for whom French is not their first language.
Mund’s thesis is that Bernal Díaz del Castillo, despite the claim to truth in the title of his much-read and oft-praised account of the Spanish invasion of Mexico, is “far from being objective.” She argues that he often alters or deliberately invents “certain decisive acts in the Conquest of Mexico” (p. 7). This is not an altogether original thesis, in that few scholars of the Spanish conquest any longer take Díaz’s account, or that of any other conquistador or chronicler, as an unfiltered and...
