Beautifully written, brief, and laudatory, André-Vincent’s biography is sure to enhance the modern reputation of Bartolomé de Las Casas. This handsome paperback volume enters Fray Bartolomé in the prestigious series of “Figures de proue,” alongside Charlemagne and St. Francis, Joan of Arc and the Kaiser. For the professional historian, the book is a handy mirror of the state of Las Casas studies at the start of the current biographical explosion.
In 1957, Pérez de Tudela synthesized the work of the founders of modern lascasismo, Hanke and Giménez Fernández, in his “Estudio preliminar” to Las Casas’s Obras escogidas. In 1971, Friede and Keen assembled later essays on Las Casas in History. Now André-Vincent has drawn upon interpretations from the pseudocentennial and the work of recent European investigators for a fresh ideological portrait.
The result is as attractive as André-Vincent’s style—“Les dernières années de Las Casas se déroulent parmi les drames d’une Chrétienté en agonie” (p. 162)—as thought-provoking as his previous books on jurisprudence and theology (read pp. 151—157 and 234-238, dissecting Las Casas’s views on dominion and natural law), and as flawed as the incomplete biographical material on which the author had to depend.
Thus, he does use Las Casas’s new birthdate (p. 21), Marcus’s new guesses about the colonist (pp. 22-23), Isacio Pérez’s new analysis of Las Casas and the New Laws (pp. 110-118), and Cantù’s new find of an unknown petition (p. 137), to supplement earlier studies by Bataillon and others. He wrote before the latest books, however: this reviewer’s reappraisal of Las Casas as a Bishop (1980), and Pérez’s huge Inventario documentado of Las Casas’s writings (1981). And he was unaware of the massive new discoveries about to be published—the record of Las Casas’s ordination and Roman sojourn, his major role in the papal decrees on behalf of the Indians, his influential later career, his several brushes with the Inquisition—that reveal a far larger and more political figure.
Nevertheless, André-Vincent’s biography will be welcomed by the French reading public, by specialists interested in its updated, if imperfect, bibliography, and the excellent appendix on the Black slavery controversy, and by the scholarly community as an interim report on Las Casas, “Prophet of the New World.”
