A New World of Latin: Renaissance Humanism and the Early Americas in Peter Martyr’s De orbe novo decades (1511-30)

Before and after vernacular histories of the early Americas, the New World was widely read about in Latin. In this talk, I will present and examine Peter Martyr de Anghiera’s De orbe novo decades (1511-30), the first substantial European history of the New World. Written by an Italian humanist based in Spain, the Decades are an eight-book account that covers events between 1493 and 1524, including the conquest of modern-day Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica, and Guatemala. The Decades were published and republished broadly throughout the early modern period, significantly shaping Europeans’ perceptions of the New World. Despite its relevance, the work is rarely the object of sustained scholarly study, not least because scholars have found it difficult to ascertain Martyr’s methods. He has been seen as writing in a rushed, journalistic style in response to the ever-growing availability of information about the novelties of the Americas. The fact that he entitled his work as “Decades” has also led to the commonplace, yet unexamined, assessment that Martyr wrote following the model of Livy. 

Moving away from these labels, I will argue that the Decades are a humanistic inquiry into American societies that was inspired by, and developed alongside, the humanistic investigation of Mediterranean antiquity and languages. Focusing on the first three Decades, which cover the exploration and conquest of the Caribbean and Central America, I will show that Martyr utilizes Latin both as a linguistic/philological model for approaching and describing indigenous languages and as a guide to making the societies of the Americas legible to his readers. The resulting account is not a surface description but instead an in-depth investigation of the Americas and its indigenous societies. The Decadesinaugurate a tradition of indigenous American philology based on Latin as well as reveal Martyr’s understanding of these indigenous societies’ own antiquity. Attention to Martyr’s work in its intellectual context, I contend, not only has the potential to illustrate a fundamental episode of the afterlives of ancient authors and their colonial uses; it also offers new avenues to explore the early modern understanding of the New World.

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