The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization.

Over the years Walter D. Mignolo has composed numerous stimulating articles on the nature and impact of the spread of literacy in colonial Spanish America and on the perspectives of sixteenth-century Spanish writers, particularly on the character of the Native American peoples. In this book he pulls many of these writings together, sometimes in a more developed form, into an important synthesis of the meaning and role of literacy - broadly conceived especially in early colonial Spanish America. The work is a pleasure to read and replete with insights, though it is not as cohesive or inclusive as the author pretends in his preface.

The reader should not be put off by the book's moralistic title nor its introduction, in which Mignolo seeks to locate his writings in the most recent literary theories. The six substantive chapters, grouped into pairs, are quite straightforward and accessible to those already familiar with the author's themes. The first chapter examines the growing formality of written Spanish in the sixteenth century and how colonial writers strongly associated written language with civility. This view, of course, disadvantaged even the indigenous high cultures of the Americas, for Europeans did not recognize their scripts as true writing, but as mnemonic systems. Mignolo describes this in its many aspects, adeptly placing its development in the Western historical tradition.

The next chapter nicely expands the subject by looking at what Spanish writers understood by the term "book" and how they classified what the native peoples had produced, including codices, chronicles, and quipus (Andean knotted cords). The author here devotes considerable attention to the dimensions of the Mexica (Aztec) spoken tradition and how early colonial writers, especially friars, regarded it. Several championed its discursive achievements. The following two chapters are devoted to the concept of history among these literary and nonliterary societies and to the European efforts to classify the new knowledge that gushed forth with the discovery of the New World. Mignolo again displays his broad knowledge of European literary and historical traditions. In discussing the colonial Spanish American period, he emphasizes Boturini (as a disciple of Vico) and several Creole writers. Separate sections consider the ways in which Peter Martyr and Fray Bernardino de Sahagun gathered and organized their information about the New World and its peoples, showing how they drew on distinct traditions in the classification of knowledge. A separate part examines the composition and function of early colonial Mayan books, relating both their continuation of certain pre-contact traditions and certain adaptions to the colonial world.

The final two chapters on cartography range widely through time and across the globe, though they remain centered in European expansion in the Americas. They offer a revealing examination of European cartography and how and why it changed as the West incorporated knowledge of other major regions in the world. Here Mignolo also considers non-western cartographic traditions, including those of Mesoamerica and the Andean region.

Readers familiar with Mignolo's previous writings will find this volume a very satisfying synthesis and elaboration of themes that he has often visited. Those new to his work will find it authoritative and provocative, making clear many unanticipated connections and distinctions. This book constitutes a major contribution to Renaissance intellectual history, particularly to how the West responded to the unexpected civilizations and issues brought to their awareness by overseas expansion.

JOHN E. KICZA Washington State University