Abstract

Women participated actively in the 16th and 17th centuries publishing market. In that context, they acted, among other tasks, as book merchants, who were responsible not just for the book selling but also for finance the printing cost. Despite having developed these roles, in many cases their participation has been remained hidden behind the male name which appeared in the imprints or colophons. This has supposed that we have received a distort image of these women publishing activity. The aim of this paper is to offered a general approach to their work as book merchants through the information offered by the colophons, the historical documentation and the legal and publishing preliminaries. The intention is to propose some methodological lines which allow us to deal with a detailed research about the work of each of these women in order to reconstruct, in a comprehensive way, the scope of the role that they played in the publishing market of the Early Modern Age.

Abstract

Epic poetry has always been considered a masculine genre. The eruption of a group identity, masculine, white, aristocratic and christian, is the result of the representation and the exclusion of the Other, fictitious and singular, but in fact composed of a variety of ethnic groups, origins, sex, genders, religions and different degrees between fiction and historicity. Indeed, in the historical epic poetry which narrated the Conquest, except for the conquistadors listed at length and the indigenous kings and caciques, only few characters are distinguished by a historical individualisation. The Other, Amerindian and female, makes a shy entrance into history, into singularity, into the (historical and christian) truth. It is the case of interpreters: Malinche and India Catalina, only historical native women that appear as part of the narrative plot as well as in the conquest enterprise in the poems of Lasso de la Vega (Cortés valeroso y Mexicana, Mexicana), of Juan de Castellanos (Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias) and of Saavedra Guzmán (El peregrino indiano).