Early New World Animal Descriptions As Transitional Texts

University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-2020 Monkey See, Monkey Do: Early New World Animal Descriptions as Transitional Texts Kyrie Miranda University of Tennessee Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Recommended Citation Miranda, Kyrie, "Monkey See, Monkey Do: Early New World Animal Descriptions as Transitional Texts. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2020. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/6818 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Kyrie Miranda entitled "Monkey See, Monkey Do: Early New World Animal Descriptions as Transitional Texts." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Spanish. Millie Gimmel, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Harrison Meadows, Chad Black, Anne-Hélène Miller Accepted for the Council: Dixie L. Thompson Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Encounters with Animals in the New World A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Kyrie Michaelynn Miranda August 2020 Copyright © 2020 by Kyrie Michaelynn Miranda. All rights reserved. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Millie Gimmel, for all her guidance in the creation of this dissertation, and for her unflagging support throughout this painstaking process. The many hours she spent looking over the many drafts of each chapter, her no-nonsense approach to my use of the passive voice, and her willingness to push me out of my comfort zone have contributed directly to this dissertation. In addition, I would like to thank the members of my committee who so patiently waited for me to finish the final draft: Drs. Chad Black, Harrison Meadows, and Anne-Hélène Miller. My thanks are also given to the Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures Department faculty and staff, who have helped foster an environment dedicated to scholarship and teaching. Finally, I am grateful to my family for their unending support and love: to my brothers, Richard, Peter, Sean-Jonas, and Thomas Welty; to my beloved mother, Linda J. Welty; and, most of all, to my loving and patient husband, John Farnell. Without all their support, this dissertation would not have been possible. iii ABSTRACT This dissertation investigates the zoological representations created in New World texts by early European explorers working for the Spanish Crown from 1492 – 1557 CE. It examines the cultural frameworks and social knowledge of the human-animal relationship that impacted these writers before and after their arrival in the Americas, and how that knowledge influenced their own descriptions of indigenous fauna. Through my analysis of a variety of original texts, both written in Europe and in the Americas, I delineate the ever-evolving perception of the human-animal relationship through the depictions of New World animals by these Pre- and Early-Modern European writers. While I base my analysis in Ecocriticism, specifically Critical Animal Studies, my aim is to contextualize these authors as a bridge between the medieval and early modern understanding of fauna, and the subsequent representation of New World animals. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Animals Represented through Classical, Medieval, and Modern Perspectives………………………………………………….………………….……….1 Chapter 1: Animal Semiotics and Symbolism Found in the Writings of Christopher Columbus ……...…………………………………………………………….…………51 Chapter 2: Paradoxographical Descriptions of New World Animals in Fray Ramón Pané’s Relación…………………………………………………………….……….....118 Chapter 3: Hunting the New World through Hernán Cortés’ Correspondence from Tierra Firme.………………………………………………………………………………….155 Chapter 4: Beyond Natural History: Animal Descriptions in Gonzálo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés’ Historia general y natural de las Indias……………………….......205 Conclusion…………………………...………………………………………………...248 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………...255 Vita………………………………………………………………………………….…266 v Introduction: Animals Represented through Classical, Medieval, and Modern Perspectives For much of human history, our curiosity has been piqued by the animals that inhabit the world with us. Our Neanderthal ancestors attempted to capture their numbers and movements in their cave paintings; early civilizations tried to tame them and use them for food, labor, and companionship; early philosophers tried to determine how humans and animals were both alike and different. Before Aristotle’s Historia animalium and his De mirabilibus auscultationibus1 (fourth century BCE), other ancient writers, such as Ctesias and Scylax, traveled the known world, from Europe to India and Egypt, collecting information about the natural world and the animals that inhabited it (Romm 86). Animals were mostly depicted in Classical and Medieval Western European literature in legal documents, translations of Classical natural histories, and fables2 (Salisbury 26). However, as animal literature evolved, animals were described in both real-world and metaphorical terms, giving animals material and allegorical literary representations. The early explorers and writers of the New World3 were faced with an interesting contradiction: while geographically and empirically moving forward, their animal 1 History of the Animals and On Marvellous Things Heard; all translations in this dissertation are mine unless otherwise noted. 2 The fable is a genre that originated in Antiquity and evolved over a millennium and was incorporated into a variety of religious faiths and cultures as didactic texts to teach social norms. 3 I realize that the terms “New World” and “Old World” can be viewed as pejorative and antiquated, much like using the terms “Dark Ages” and “Renaissance” in place of Pre- and Early Modern. For this dissertation I have chosen to include the stylizations of “Old World” and “New World” as they were the terms that were contemporary to these authors; they also enable me to generalize literary references of the various fauna that were located in both the Eastern and Western hemispheres. 1 descriptions were often formed from genres that had saturated European literature for generations. In this dissertation, I analyze the animal descriptions in the works of several New World writers and I show how this New World animal representation was influenced by the animal literature available during the medieval period. Ultimately, I use this information in my conclusion to answer these questions: what is the value of these early New World animal representations and the use of various animal genres, and what implications might they have in the context of Ecocriticism, specifically, Critical Animal Studies? Outlining zoological literature that was available to Europeans at the end of the fifteenth century is specifically germane to my literary analysis, as the representation of animals by each of the four writers analyzed in this dissertation shows influence from Classical and Medieval sources. In this Introduction, I present the field of Ecocriticism and its offshoot, Critical Animal Studies, in order to frame the four zoological genres on which I focus that were available in the medieval period. Then, in Chapter One, I examine Christopher Columbus’s Diario de a bordo del primer viaje and a sampling of his letters from and about the New World and compare the animal descriptions found in them to the bestiary tradition that was popular in the late Middle Ages (twelfth-fourteenth centuries CE). Next, I dissect the animal representation found in Ramón Pané’s text Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios to show its connection to the marvelous descriptions found in the paradoxographies. In Chapter Three, I deconstruct zoological descriptions in the Cartas de relación written by Hernán Cortés within the context of the hunting manual tradition. Finally, I analyze the animal representations 2 found in the Historia general y natural de las Indias by Gonzálo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés to show their correlation to the natural history tradition. In each chapter, I show the literary, cultural, and educational conditions that influenced these writers and their manner of representing New World animals. Each of these four writers travelled across the Atlantic for different reasons and brought with them a cache of cultural and educational resources which influenced how they viewed and described the world. Zumthor and Peebles note that, “Every author, every traveler, constructs his object by virtue of his culture, his experience, the circumstances of his life”. While the literary inclusion of animals by early European invaders offers the reader an idea of how these writers viewed, valued, and contextualized New World fauna, these representations of animal bodies also gives scholarship further insight into the overall European perspective of the human-animal relationship. The use of various

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