1 - Truth, fictions, and the New World

Summary

As the craze for romances of chivalry and other imaginative literature took hold of readers in sixteenth-century Spain, the popularity of such fictions generated a spate of moralist criticisms attacking them for their lies and impropriety. Strikingly, the first Spanish laws against imaginative literature were directed not at Peninsular readers but at those in the New World, which itself often appeared far stranger than fiction to astonished European eyes. The censorship reveals as much about European anxieties over truth and empire as about metropolitan relations to native readers. In the contact-zone, a delicate armature of romance fictions and religious truths served to assimilate the marvelous, while underwriting Spanish claims to empire. But the fragile equilibrium was disturbed by the irrepressible workings of the romance marvelous. In the Old World as in the New, the beguiling treacherousness of the verisimilar – the careful imitation of the true – made romance representations at one and the same time powerful displays of artistic prowess, inspiring models, and potential weapons of subversion.

In the ebullient first decades after the introduction of the printing press to Spain, the New World (especially areas of intense evangelical activity, such as New Spain) served as a testing ground for problems of reading and interpretation, even as Protestantism – by privileging direct access to texts – attacked the Roman Catholic Church's previous monopoly on truth.