The Renaissance of Encounters and the Renaissance of Antiquities

While it is no longer tenable to simply oppose interest in the cultural legacy of ancient Greece and Rome to interest in Europe’s New Worlds, the task of assessing the interpretative lens provided by a humanistic education remains rather tangled. Taking as a starting point some examples from the conquest of Chile and elsewhere in Spanish America, the lecture examines critically how classical models of memorable behavior, and an idea of antiquity that often implied an enhanced sense of cultural distance, strengthened the principle of comparability, shaped imperial self-representation, and affected the interpretation of indigenous agency.