Fifteen European and American scholars gathered in Seville in 1974 for a colloquium honoring the supposed fifth centennial of Las Casas’ birth. Their papers, presented here in haphazard order, with no index or pedigree of authors, really signal the end of an era in Las Casas studies.
The few biographical pieces are fragmentary, though quite suggestive. Thus, Raymond Marcus speculates on Las Casas’ birthdate, Demetrio Ramos notices the synchronicity of Las Casas’ “conversion” to reform with anti-Columbus events in the Antilles, and Carmelo Sáenz de Santa María presents an unknown clause from Las Casas’ will and some details on the less-known latter part of his career. Fresh documentary data, from Rome, Seville, Simancas, and Paris, already has or shortly will shed considerable new light on all these matters.
Essays on Las Casas’ works are novel and varied, for example, a summary of his writings on the Columbuses, and a technical analysis of his excellent nautical knowledge. And Angel Losada presents a valuable if controversial paper on Las Casas’ Apologia [adversus Sepulvedam], of which he has since published a Spanish translation. But Félix Zubillaga’s talk on an unpublished tract, cited as “Quaestio theologalis,” unfortunately repeats earlier errors of interpretation and entirely misses the sensational import of Las Casas’ “De exemptione eclesiastica,” which will soon appear in an editio princeps.
Three solid presentations, which close the volume, discuss Las Casas’ past reputation: in eighteenth-century France (Charles Minguet), eighteenth and nineteenth-century Peru (Guillermo Lohmann Villena) and, most originally, seventeenth-century Italy (Miguel Batllori, S.J.). And two opening papers, by Francisco Morales Padrón and André Saint-Lu, attempt to end Spanish ambivalence towards Las Casas and what remains of the unscholarly attack by the late Ramón Menéndez Pidal.
But the greater part of the book is devoted to studies of Las Casas’ ideas—on anthropology, human rights, and the just title of Spain to the Indies among others. The most sizeable of these essays, and the outstanding contribution of the entire volume, is Paulino Castañeda Delgado’s “Los métodos misionales en América: ¿Evangelización pura o coacción?” —an a posteriori analysis of three main positions taken by peninsular writers and by missionaries, including Las Casas.
Castañeda Delgado’s study, tracing the thought of the period, points up the character of the collection: a fitting finale to the ideological and background vein opened some four decades ago by Lewis Hanke. More recent work by European and American Lascasistas revives the biographical emphasis of the late Manuel Giménez Fernández and Henry R. Wagner, and focuses on the rediscovery of Las Casas himself.
