BOOKS OF THE BRAVE BY IRVING LEONARD

This edition of Books of the Brave by Irving Leonard, with  an introduction by Rolena Adorno, presents valuable information related to the emergence of print culture in Spanish America and “establishes the circulation of books and ideas between Spain and her ultramarine possessions as a cultural-historical topic of importance” (Adorno x). In her introductory words, Rolena Adorno makes reference to some of the issues laid out by Leonard such as the circulation and censorship of popular fiction, the readers to whom the fiction was intended, the interpretation of literature by its audience, and the role that popular reading has played in history (x). According to Adorno, the idea of bringing out Books of the Brave is to transcend the old thought that the “steamroller of Inquisitorial censorship” prohibited creative developments (xxv). She adds that Irving Leonard's meditations on the relationships among life, literature, and creativity have endured precisely because of the evocative, rather than demonstrative, character of Books of the Brave.

In the body of the book, Irving makes several important points concerning the ideological features of the Conquest. “Why were the Hispanic peoples singled out to be the first instruments of history in the Europeanizing of the globe through the discovery, conquest, and colonizing of many of its unknown parts?,” the author asks. Later, he questions why Spain attained such greatness as to achieve a historic destiny unequaled in human experience (Irving 2). According to Irving, perversity and dehumanized behaviors were not traits unique to the Conquistador as deviations could also be found among other people. Only because Spain was politically dominant and feared by other nations of Europe who envied the spoils of conquest, the Spaniard became the symbol of the collective cruelty of the European peoples engaged in the westernization of the world (Irving 10). In addition, Irving presents an account of the democratization of reading with the rise of the so-called “romances of chivalry” in the fifteenth century. These romances represented the first type of popular literature that demonstrated the commercial possibilities of the recently invented printing press (Irving 13). Irving states that “this literary fashion spread like a contagion into the neighboring countries of Europe and also crossed the ocean to the New World” (13). These fictional narratives stimulated the Conquistador, identified as “the energetic and adventurous element of Spanish society” (Irving 25).

Many other issues are explored in Books of the Brave. There is a reference to the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire and its neighboring territories in the 1520's (Irving 54). Irving also mentions the unproductive efforts of the clergy, the moralists, and even the monarchs of sixteenth-century Spain to destroy the passionate devotion of the reading public to more undemanding forms of fiction (76). The author points out that the end of the period of high adventure and stirring conquest in the New World occurred at the close of the sixteenth century “when Spain had clearly passed the zenith of its power and the era of tremendous expansion was over” (Irving 241). To conclude, Irving highlights “when the commanders of the annual fleets sailed from Spain to the Indies in the spring and early summer of 1605, they were probably unconscious of serving as instruments for the introduction into the New World of one of the greatest literary works of all time, Don Quijote de la Mancha written by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra” (270).
 
References:

Leonard, Irving A. Books of the Brave: Being an Account of Books and of Men in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth-Century New World. 1949, 1967. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1992.