This edited volume offers new perspectives from leading scholars on the important work of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616), one of the first Latin American writers to present an intellectual analysis of pre-Columbian history and culture and the ensuing colonial period. To the contributors, Inca Garcilaso's Royal Commentaries of the Incas presented an early counter-hegemonic discourse and a reframing of the history of native non-alphabetic cultures that undermined the colonial rhetoric of his time and the geopolitical divisions it purported. Through his research in both Andean and Renaissance archives, Inca Garcilaso sought to connect these divergent cultures into one world. This collection offers five classical studies of Royal Commentaries previously unavailable in English, along with seven new essays that cover topics including Andean memory, historiography, translation, philosophy, trauma, and ethnic identity. This cross-disciplinary volume will be of interest to students and scholars of Latin American history, culture, comparative literature, subaltern studies, and works in translation.

This study of the Comentarios is original both in adopting the perspective of discourse analysis and in its interdisciplinary approach.

Documents the epic conquest of the Inca Empire as well as the decades-long insurgency waged by the Incas against the Conquistadors, in a narrative history that is partially drawn from the storytelling traditions of the Peruvian Amazon Yora people. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

A major new history of the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, set in a larger global context than previous accounts Previous accounts of the fall of the Inca empire have played up the importance of the events of one violent day in November 1532 at the highland Andean town of Cajamarca. To some, the "Cajamarca miracle"-in which Francisco Pizarro and a small contingent of Spaniards captured an Inca who led an army numbering in the tens of thousands-demonstrated the intervention of divine providence. To others, the outcome was simply the result of European technological and immunological superiority. Inca Apocalypse develops a new perspective on the Spanish invasion and transformation of the Inca realm. Alan Covey's sweeping narrative traces the origins of the Inca and Spanish empires, identifying how Andean and Iberian beliefs about the world's end shaped the collision of the two civilizations. Rather than a decisive victory on the field at Cajamarca, the Spanish conquest was an uncertain, disruptive process that reshaped the worldviews of those on each side of the conflict.. The survivors built colonial Peru, a new society that never forgot the Inca imperial legacy or the enduring supernatural power of the Andean landscape. Covey retells a familiar story of conquest at a larger historical and geographical scale than ever before. This rich new history, based on the latest archaeological and historical evidence, illuminates mysteries that still surround the last days of the largest empire in the pre-Columbian Americas.

A social and economic history of Peru that reflects the influence of the convents on colonial and post-colonial society.

Catherine Julien's new translation of Titu Cusi Yupanqui's Relasçion de como los Españoles Entraron en el Peru--an account of the Spanish conquest of Peru by the last indigenous ruler of the Inca empire--features student-oriented annotation, facing-page Spanish, and an Introduction that sets this remarkably rich source in its cultural, historical, and literary contexts.

Historians have long recognized that the classical heritage of ancient Rome contributed to the development of a vibrant society in Spanish South America, but was the impact a one-way street? Although the Spanish destruction of the Incan empire changed the Andes forever, the civil society that did emerge was not the result of Andeans and Creoles passively absorbing the wisdom of ancient Rome. Rather, Sabine MacCormack proposes that civil society was born of the intellectual endeavors that commenced with the invasion itself, as the invaders sought to understand an array of cultures. Looking at the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people who wrote about the Andean region that became Peru, MacCormack reveals how the lens of Rome had a profound influence on Spanish understanding of the Incan empire. Tracing the varied events that shaped Peru as a country, MacCormack shows how Roman and classical literature provided a framework for the construal of historical experience. She turns to issues vital to Latin American history, such as the role of language in conquest, the interpretation of civil war, and the founding of cities, to paint a dynamic picture of the genesis of renewed political life in the Andean region. Examining how missionaries, soldiers, native lords, and other writers employed classical concepts to forge new understandings of Peruvian society and history, the book offers a complete reassessment of the ways in which colonial Peru made the classical heritage uniquely its own.