Exemplary Violence

Rewriting History in Colonial Colombia

By Alberto Villate-Isaza

SERIES: Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory

Bucknell University Press

Exemplary Violence explores the violent colonial history of the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia and Venezuela) by examining three seventeenth-century historical accounts—Pedro Simón’s Noticias historiales, Juan Rodríguez Freile’s El carnero, and Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita’s Historia general—each of which reveals the colonizer’s reliance on the threat of violence to sustain order.

Exemplary Violence offers a rigorous and innovative comparative analysis of three key figures in the literary colonial canon in Colombia: Fray Pedro Simón, Juan Rodríguez Freile, and Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita. Using the concept of baroque allegory, this book wisely explores the tension between culture and barbarism that inspired these authors to transform history in their attempt to overcome, in writing, the early crisis of the Spanish colonial discourse. Rubén Sánchez-Godoy, author of El peor de los remedios: Bartolomé de Las Casas y la crítica temprana a la esclavitud Africana en el Atlántico Ibérico

Exemplary Violence makes an important contribution by putting Juan Rodríguez Freile’s El carnero—long appreciated for its salacious anecdotes of sin in colonial society—in dialogue with lesser-known works by Pedro Simón and Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita. Villate-Isaza offers new insights on their efforts to reinforce European cultural values and ideologies even as they grapple with the evident failures of evangelization and colonial government in New Granada. Sarah Beckjord, author of Territories of History: Humanism, Rhetoric, and the Historical Imagination in the Early Chronicles of Spanish America

Exemplary Violence makes an important contribution by putting Juan Rodríguez Freile’s El carnero—long appreciated for its salacious anecdotes of sin in colonial society—in dialogue with lesser-known works by Pedro Simón and Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita. Villate-Isaza offers new insights on their efforts to reinforce European cultural values and ideologies even as they grapple with the evident failures of evangelization and colonial government in New Granada. Sarah Beckjord, author of Territories of History: Humanism, Rhetoric, and the Historical Imagination in the Early Ch

Exemplary Violence offers a rigorous and innovative comparative analysis of three key figures in the literary colonial canon in Colombia: Fray Pedro Simón, Juan Rodríguez Freile, and Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita. Using the concept of baroque allegory, this book wisely explores the tension between culture and barbarism that inspired these authors to transform history in their attempt to overcome, in writing, the early crisis of the Spanish colonial discourse. Rubén Sánchez-Godoy, author of El peor de los remedios: Bartolomé de Las Casas y la crítica temprana a la esclavitud Afri

ALBERTO VILLATE-ISAZA is an assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Georgia, where he specializes in Latin American colonial literature, culture, and historiography, particularly in the New Kingdom of Granada.

Preface
Introduction
PART I Narrative Tensions
1 A Rhetorical Balancing Act
2 Instructing through Negative Examples
3 Nudity Is the Disguise: Political and Moral Instruction
PART II Authority and Evasion
4 The Authority to Displace and Adapt the Past
5 Founding Principles
6 The Constant Threat of Beauty and Wealth
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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