Books of the Brave: Being an Account of Books and of Men in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth-Century New World - Tapa blanda

Since its original publication in 1949, Irving A. Leonard's pioneering "Books of the Brave" has endured as the classic account of the introduction of literary culture to Spain's New World. Leonard's study documents the works of fiction that accompanied and followed the conquistadores to the Americas and goes on to argue that popular texts influenced these men and shaped the way they thought and wrote about their New World experiences. The study combines Leonard's text with a selection of the documents that were his most valuable sources - nine lists of books destined for the Indies. These lists provide the documentary evidence for what is perhaps Leonard's greatest contribution: his demonstration that royal and inquisitorial prohibitions failed to control the circulation of books and ideas in colonial Spanish America. Rolena Adorno's introduction signals the lasting value of "Books of the Brave" and brings the reader up to date on developments in cultural-historical studies that have shed light on the role of books in Spanish American colonial culture. Adorno situates Leonard's work at the threshold between older, triumphalist views of Spanish conquest history and more recent perspectives engendered by studies of native American peoples.

Irving A. Leonard is Professor Emeritus of Romance Languages and Hispanic American History at the University of Michigan and the author of many works on colonial Spanish America. Rolena Adorno is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. She is the author of Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru (1986) and co-editor of Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century (California, 1991).