The author has waded through a most interesting chapter in Latin American intellectual history, thoroughly and fascinatingly. Borja’s intent was to review the Franciscan Order’s spirituality, from the voyages of the 1200s to the colonization of the New World in the 1500s. He is interested not in the actions of the conquerors and colonists but in how the chroniclers of the Indies, most of them friars, narrated and interpreted the events of the conquest. Specifically, this work deals with the Franciscan Pedro de Aguado’s writings concerning the Spaniards’ adventures in Colombia and part of Venezuela.
For Borja, the problem in using chronicles as a source for the history of the conquest lies in the conceptual distance between the sixteenth century and the twenty-first. Historiography has evolved considerably in the intervening centuries, and consequently, contemporary historians should realize that one of the common characteristics of medieval texts and of books on...
