Date/Time
Date(s) - 25 Feb 2013
5:15 PM - 6:45 PM
Location
Martin and Margy Meyerson Conference Room, 2nd floor Van Pelt Library
Category(ies) No Categories
Please join us this Monday, February 25, for the next meeting of the weekly Workshop in the History of Material Texts, when we shall hear from another Penn powerhouse and frequent seminar attendee, *Roger Chartier* (Collège de France / Penn History).
We will convene, as usual, at 5:15pm in the Martin and Margy Meyerson Conference Room, which is located on the second floor of Van Pelt Library, diagonally across from the elevators.
Chartier’s presentation is entitled “Materiality and Mobility of a Text: Bartolomé de Las Casas’ “Brevíssima Relación de la Destruycion de las Indias” between Sevilla, Antwerp and London,” and of it he writes:
“This seminar will be devoted to the history of the editions and translations of Las Casas’ famous denunciation of “The Spanish Cruelties and tyrannies, perpetrated in the West Indies termed The newe found worlde.” Written in 1542, and printed in 1552 in Sevilla with seven of Las Casas’ other treatises, the “Brevíssima relación” became fifteen years later a fundamental text in the construction of the Black Legend within the context of the Dutch rebellion against Spain and the French Wars of Religion. The first translations were published in 1578 in Dutch (“Den Spiegel der spaensche tierannije”), in 1579 in Antwerp in French (“Tyrannies et cruautés des Espagnols”), in 1583 in London (“The Spanish Colonie”), in 1597 in German, and in 1598 in Frankfurt in Latin (“Narratio Regionum Indicarurum Per Hispanos quosdam devastatarum verissima”). The Latin edition, by Theodore de Bry, included seventeen engravings that recapitulated and fixed the iconography of the Black Legend. The purpose of the seminar will be to understand how the meaning of Las Casas’ text is transformed by this series of linguistic and cultural appropriations.
“The analysis will be based on the extraordinary collection of Las Casas’ editions in Penn’s Dechert Collection, which allows us to follow the history of the text in the seventeenth century and to focus, for example, on the second translation into English published as “The Tears of the Indians” in 1656 by John Phillips (who also gave us the second English translation of “Don Quijote”).
“The Dechert Collection contains for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries two Spanish editions (1552 and 1646), five French editions (published in Antwerp, Amsterdam, Paris, and Rouen), four English editions (1583, 1656, 1689, 1699), two Latin editions (Frankfurt, 1598, and Heidelberg, 1664), one Dutch edition (Amsterdam, 1620), eight Italian editions (from the first translation in 1626 to 1657), and three editions, in Spanish and French, dated 1822, when Las Casas’ text was used in the context of the Wars of Independence of the Spanish colonies. (A Philadelphia edition came out in 1821, but ironically it seems that the Library does not own it – but the Library Company of Philadelphia does.)”
Roger Chartier is Professor at the Collège de France and Annenberg Visiting Professor in History at the University of Pennsylvania. He has given (too) many Material Text seminars. Two books are based on some of his presentations at Penn: “Cardenio entre Cervantès et Shakespeare. Histoire d’une pièce perdue”, Paris, 2011 (Spanish translation by Gedisa and English translation by Polity Press published in 2013) and the forthcoming “The Printer’s Mind and the Author’s Hand”.