2026 Theses Doctoral

Latin Histories of the Americas

Cancino Alfaro, José Antonio

This dissertation examines the impact of Latin on the European understanding of the colonial Americas. Uncovering the relations between European education and the encounter with the New World, it offers a philologically inclined intellectual history of four influential Latin treatises: Peter Martyr d’Anghiera’s De orbe novo decades (1511-30), José de Acosta’s jointly published De natura novi orbis and De procuranda indorum salute (1588), Georg Marcgraf and Willem Piso’s Historia naturalis Brasiliae (1648), and Bernard Havestadt’s Chilidugu (1777). While each chapter advances an argument based on the historical, scholarly, and literary context of each treatise, the dissertation makes the case that Latin education and scholarship developed in specific centers of humanism transformed the European understanding of the New World.

These educational contexts shaped the way early American knowledge was communicated, informing dense texts where indigenous categories were mediated by European taxonomies, including Latin grammars, dictionaries, commonplace books, and more extensive forms of writing. Applied to the new reality, these frames served to organize, classify, and translate the New World, a process that also impacted and transformed the taxonomies mentioned above. Any attempt to fully understand the content of these treatises, many of which are considered by historians unique sources of information, must be fully cognizant of such an, at times uneasy, integration between the Latin literary world and the reality of the Americas.