[Sca-cooks] Description of New World Foods 1591

Terry Decker t.d.decker at att.net
Thu Feb 17 13:26:04 PST 2011


I don't recall the name of the historian who wrote that particular critique, 
but Benjamin Schmidt in Innocence Abroad:  The Dutch Imagination and the New 
World, 1570-1670, says, "...Benzoni atill represented the New World in 
tropes, allegories and myths familiar to his readers; yet the myths now 
involved the Spainard as much as the Indian and the myth of Spanish cruelty 
had come to replace the myth of native savagery (or innocence) as the 
foremost theme of the story.  Benzoni introduced many of the elements that 
would feature in the subsequent assults on the Spanish character...". 
Benzoni's position was similar to that of Fra Bartolomeo de las Casas but 
with a deeper anti-Spanish bias which he took back to Europe with him and 
informed his later works.  I should point out that Benzoni was an 
anti-Hapsburg Italian before he went to the New World as a soldier and slave 
trader.

>From the samples posted, Benzoni referenced Oviedo on some natural history 
subjects, but he considered Oviedo one of the cruelest and most corrupt 
Spainards in the New World.  I would hesitate to use such references without 
comparing them to the original

Again to quote Schmidt, "The Mondo nuovo combined all the high-minded 
indignation of Martyr with the luridly "low-brow" details of Staden." 
Essentially, the work has a political bias and fanciful details (somewhere 
between embroidery and fables if I get the Hans Staden reference correctly). 
It was a popular work in it's day in anti-Hapsburg Italy and virtually 
unknown in Spain.

Bear

>
> << I've seen a historian's critique of this with the caveat to trust only 
> what
> Benzoni says he observed.>>
>
>
> Bear: do you by any chance remember who this historian was, where s/he 
> published
> his/her caveat and on what reason and on what evidence such a caveat is 
> based.
>
>
> What did other historians, other authors say about Benzoni?
>
>
> The Italian edition (1572) has been reprinted twice in modern times, the 
> second
> time in 1969 with a long preface. In this preface the editor states, that 
> the
> question of the value of the work is _disputed_:
>
>
> "Im Streit um den Quellenwert des Werkes und der Betrachtung der 
> persoenlichen
> Angaben Benzonis schwanken die Ansichten zwischen Anerkennung [note] --  
> wofuer
> auch die zahlreichen Ausgaben sprechen -- und voelliger Ablehnung (...)"
> (Ferdinand Anders, in the 1969 preface, page XIII).
>
> Even if it is true that Benzoni used sources in an imprecise and 
> uncritical way
> (which was common practice in his days) his book with many editions and
> translations remains an important source of contemporary thinking about 
> the New
> World.
>
>
> I wonder if the Catholic Encyclopedia quoted by Johnna and which is the 
> basis of
> the Wikipedia article on Benzoni is an impartial arbiter in this case. 
> Benzoni
> seems to have been critic of spanish entrepreneurship and of the manners 
> in
> which the natives were treated.
>
>
> I would like to know what modern historians think of Benzoni and his work.
>
>
> E.
>
>
>
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