Knowledge of the Greco-Roman past played a major role in helping early modern Europeans to sort the vast array of New World novelties into a coherent order. But classicism was no monolithic, unchanging tradition imposed by conquering elites to dominate indigenous cultures. In her new book, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru, Sabine MacCormack presents a far more nuanced view of the legacy of Greco-Roman antiquity in the Andean region that became Peru. The book is deeply learned and persuasive, a model of how to write the intellectual history of empires and imperialism.
MacCormack shows how humanistic traditions were brought to bear on a transitional moment in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish America, as a new society called “Peru” emerged that was a convergence of indigenous Inca and Spanish elements. Building on the work of such historians as Anthony Grafton and Anthony Pagden, who have...
