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New World News, Ancient Echoes: A Cortés Letterand a Vernacular Livy for a New King and His Wary Subjects (1520–23)*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Elizabeth Wright
Elizabeth Wright*
Affiliation:
University of Georgia
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Abstract

Empire building converges with print innovations in the rare Zaragoza edition (1523) of the landmark “Second Letter from Mexico” of Hernán Cortés. The Aragonese print shop owned by German immigrant George Coçi advertised what, to its first interpreters, was stunning news from a still mysterious place overseas with woodblocks drawn from their 1520 edition of Livy's History of Rome. An examination of the political, social, and editorial contexts that informed these two books addressed to Charles V casts light on concerns about how the new Spanish king would communicate with his subjects in an age of imperial expansion.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 61 , Issue 3 , Fall 2008 , pp. 711 - 749
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2008

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Footnotes

*

Support for this project came from an Andrew W. Mellon grant at the John Carter Brown Library, a National Endowment for the Humanities grant at the Newberry Library, and a Faculty Research Grant from the University of Georgia Research Foundation. I also thank colleagues who commented on earlier versions of this article as presented in the Newberry Library's Fellows’ Seminar (February 2005), at the Modern Language Association Special Session “Is All Poetics Local?” (December 2005), and the Indiana University Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Studies Research Group (November 2007). I would also like to thank Paul Gehl, Edward Wright-Rios, and Laura Bass for sharing specific insights.

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