Race, Caste, and Indigeneity in Medieval Spanish Travel Literature

The origins of present-day Ibero-American racialization can be traced to the period when Europe straddled the boundary between the Middle Ages and the era of New World exploration. Focusing on themes of race, caste, and indigeneity in travel narratives, Harney explores this already internationalized world of late-medieval and early-modern Europe.

The origins of present-day Ibero-American racialization, and of associated caste hierarchies in various Latin American regions and societies, are in many ways traceable to the medieval Iberian Peninsula during the era of the so-called Reconquest (eleventh through fifteenth centuries). Focusing on themes of race, caste, and indigeneity during a period straddling the boundary between the Middle Ages and the era of New World exploration, conquest, and colonization (early-thirteenth through mid-sixteenth centuries), this study explores the already highly internationalized world of late-medieval and early-modern Europe as revealed in various kinds of travel narrative. The works surveyed include conquest narratives, touristic and diplomatic diaries, gazetteers, chivalric romances and biographies, pilgrimage accounts, and political essays. Despite their stylistic and thematic variety, Michael Harney shows the works to be linked by a shared compulsion to go forth among alien folk, and by a Eurocentric obsession with ethnicity, status, native identity, and what we would call globalization.