Release Date 2018
Publisher  Indiana Library, 47
Author(s)  Catalina Andrango-Walker
Summary

 

This volume on the Indian Catholic Symbol (1598) of the Franciscan Creole Luis Jerónimo de Oré (Huamanga, 1554-La Concepción, 1630) raises the need to study this work not only as a text that encouraged the expansion of Catholicism in the Andean region, but also as an early questioning of the imperial constructions of American otherness linked to scientific and philosophical knowledge of the sixteenth century, thus laying the foundations of Creole discourse that will take shape in later decades.

The symbol, which, according to the author, arises from the need to find "uniformity in the way of teaching doctrine", presents pedagogical strategies of "utility [for] the Indians, and profit and help of the religious." Additionally, the work contains a study of the geography, history and ethnography of Peru. Through these heterogeneous disciplines, Oré establishes a dialogue with the vast scientific, philosophical, political, theological and historical discourses that range from Greco-Roman thinkers to contemporaries. These topics, which the author himself presents as complementary to sacred history, actually contribute to show at a very early age the shortcomings of the theories on which Renaissance lawyers based their imperial construction on American otherness.