Medieval and modern in iberian colonization

• Autor(a) principal: Domingues, Beatriz Helena
• Data de Publicação: 1997
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Estudos Históricos (Rio de Janeiro)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.fgv.br/reh/article/view/2052
• topic: América Latina

The paper examines the distinctive points of Iberian colonization in America, especially in comparison with the English one, emphasizing the different insertion of England and of Spain and Portugal into Western modernity at the turn of the 16th century. In the two early national states of the Iberian Peninsula, modern characteristics like humanistic anthropocentrism, coexisting with medieval thomism, allow us to speak of a "medieval modernity'. The Iberians would embrace modern philosophy and science only at the 18th century, inspired by enlightenment, but even then the result would be an eclectic approach. The same characteristics, though not in the same form, are present in colonial Iberian America, with its political and administrative institutions and its selective reception of Descartes' and Copernicus' ideas. They can also be seen in the eclecticism of Iberian America's Enlightenment, and they even influenced the political emancipation of the Iberian colonies at the beginning of 19th century.