Online Public Research Colloquium with Prof. Dr. Andrew Laird “Projecting Humanity: Rhetoric and Ethnohistory in the early Americas“

The Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) Mainz cordially invites you to participate online in the public research colloquium titled “Projecting Humanity: Rhetoric and Ethnohistory in the early Americas“ with Andrew Laird, John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities, Professor of Hispanic Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World at Brown University.

Rhetoric was a prominent feature of early modern education and intellectual life. The art of speaking and writing, inherited from classical antiquity, thus had a vital practical role in European debates about the humanity of the peoples of the New World, notably the Valladolid controversy of c. 1550 between Fray Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda.  But did rhetoric have a more fundamental connection with the idea of humanity? What part did it play in the wake of encounters with populations of whom Europeans had had no previous knowledge? This talk will show how rhetoric acquired a new symbolic value in some foundational accounts and representations of newly encountered societies – including those by native authors – from Brazil, Peru and Mexico in the 1500s.