The historiographical prolegomena to the Franciscan millenarian and mystical (re)construction of the New World: the case of Fray Gerónimo de Mendieta

Abstract

500 years after the arrival of the First Twelve Franciscans in the New World, researchers have studied the literary and rhetorical reception of the Franciscan order within the indigenous communities since its landing in Veracruz in 1524. These works have built multiple lines of research; however, the relationship between the prolegomena of a work and the expected reading horizons has yet to be written. In these spaces, authors and prologue writers interpreted the events narrated therein according to the expectations of their readers. In this sense, our contribution consists of presenting a proposal for analysis in which historiography and literary criticism take up the way in which the history of an order should be understood as part of a broader civilizingplan based on the Historia Eclesiástica Indianaand the hagiographic accounts of Fray Martín de Valencia by Fray Gerónimo de Mendieta. With this research, we hope to strengthen and update a line of investigation that has dealt with the analysis of the rhetorical, literary and hermeneutic parameters lying in the meanings of discursive production of the Indian texts of the second half of the sixteenth century, which were intended to give full notice of the achievements of the Order of Friars Minor to their provincials and to the royal courts of Philip II.