Theses Doctoral

Repleta est Terra: Connected Worldscapes and Entangled Chronotectures of Early Modern Andean Historical Cosmography (1550s – 1650s)

Garzon Mantilla, Juan Carlos

This dissertation explores Early Modern cosmographical imagining and historical writing in the Andean region of the Americas. Following the European invasion of the Americas in the sixteenth century, prominent Western cosmographical and historical treatises like Sacro Bosco's de Sphera Mundi and the Nuremberg Liber Chronicarum became outdated regional works that lacked any information about American landmasses and indigenous people.

The voids shown by these previously authoritative sources create a need for new ideas.In this dissertation, analyzing written and visual sources, I investigate how Indigenous, mestizo, and European scholars in the Early Modern Andes from the 1550s to the 1650s reinvented cosmographical and antiquarian practices to envision the world as an integrated entity in time and space. They combined non-written pre-Columbian structures, ruins, fossils, monoliths, megaliths, mythical landscapes, and indigenous narratives with ancient Biblical and Classical knowledge. By doing so, they established a new archive that became the foundation for further antiquarian and cosmographical knowledge, and revealing the that the so-called New World was full of history.

I examine how innovative imaginings of historical time and cosmographical spaces were created in the Early Modern Andes. Authors demonstrated how the world was one since the very beginning of time by tracing connected world landscapes (worldscapes) to explain the geographical unity of the different continents and entangled chronological architectures (chronotectures) that linked the ancient ages of various societies, including places and people previously unthought of as part of the same world history.

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More About This Work

Academic Units
Latin American and Iberian Cultures
Thesis Advisors
Russo, Alessandra
Degree
Ph.D., Columbia University
Published Here
July 12, 2023