Bartolomé de las Casas

TEGLIA, VANINA MARÍA; ARIAS, SANTA

Oxford Bibliographies Online: Renaissance and Reformation

Oxford University Press

Lugar: NY; Año: 2017; p. 1 - 18

Five centuries of scholarship on the Spanish Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas (b. 1484?d. 1566) validates his crucial contribution to early modern intellectual, cultural, and political history. Born in Seville in 1484, Las Casas witnessed as a child the convoluted expulsion of the Moors and Jews from Spain after the final military campaign of the Reconquista. But soon enough that immediate world of chaos seems to have been transformed with news of the outcomes of the Columbian enterprise?and for Las Casas with the dazzling firsthand stories of the ?Indies? he heard from his father and uncle, who participated in Columbus?s quest. In 1506 Las Casas traveled with his father to Hispaniola, where he came in contact with the first Dominicans to publicly denounce the atrocities of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. His initial exchanges with the friars, and subsequent entrance into the Dominican Order, represents a turning point that led to his active engagement in colonial affairs and provided the grist for his polemical interventions. Las Casas?s writings on Amerindian rights built his reputation as a critical theologian, skilled advisor, and prolific narrator of the early years of conquest and colonization of the Americas. In the context of the tense history of 16th-century Spanish church-state relations, early modern and colonial studies scholarship positions Las Casas as one of the most controversial figures, and as the most significant, in the history of Spanish colonialism. His writings reverberate in the history of polemics and enduring concerns such as war, slavery, and the struggles for human rights, equality, and justice. Scholarship on Las Casas began with his first Dominican biographers, who by collecting the exemplary lives of missionaries also contributed to pioneering the genre of ecclesiastic chronicles of the Indies. Las Casas, deeply imbued with the humanist spirit of the Renaissance, found inspiration in ancient historians and humanist models of civic history that legitimized and shaped political action. His model for history-making with an Aristotelian-Thomistic influence sustained his modern rationality. His claims hinged on theorizations on war, human nature, and natural and civil laws. Deeply concerned about the human condition and fate of Spain, Las Casas?s keen sense of observation enabled him to articulate a comprehensive vision on Spanish colonialism and natural history. Discourses on geography, ethnography, and nature served well his claims on the pervasive destruction of the Americas. This theme ran through all of his work and continued scholarship on his challenge to the imperial mentality that rationalized the unjust treatment of Amerindian societies and conquest of the Americas.