Cultural identity and the ideologies of translation in sixteenth-century Europe: Italian prologues to Spanish chronicles of the new world

Abstract This effect of the discovery of the New World on Renaissance Europe is among the most difficult problems which face us, and it is one to which I can see no clear answer. Some work has been done, and much more could be done, on the printing and translation of books relating to America in comparison with those on other parts of the globe. But unless we can find more about their readership, the printing statistics, however valuable in themselves, afford only a certain indicator of a highly complex phenomenon.