One last post on a great paper I heard in St. Louis. Nicholas Bomba, a Princeton PhD candidate, gave a paper entitled, “The Three Faces of Gonzalo Pizarro,” in which he explored contemporary comments on Pizarro’s rule in Peru and finds that they sort out into three “archetypes,” as he put it, to explain bad rulership. The point was that these were part of the rhetorical and conceptional tools that Spaniards possessed to analyze rulership, at home and away. I’m not doing the paper justice here – it was a sophisticated and nuanced analysis. I had heard Bomba give another paper at the SCSC in Minneapolis last year, and this paper just confirmed that his dissertation and book will be very sharp.
After the jump, Bomba’s own description of his dissertation on the crisis of counsel in the Hispanic world:
“I am studying what I call ‘the crisis of counsel/communication’ in the Spanish realms of Charles V – that is, the intense competition among people from all segments of society to control the flow of information to and from their itinerant and often absent monarch. Interpreting archival documents with reference to philosophy and literature, I examine the rhetorical strategies people used to persuade the Emperor, promote themselves, and disqualify their enemies. In so doing, I hope to redirect the study of political theory/discourse away from its traditional emphasis on jurisprudence and power and toward its true foundations in theology, moral philosophy, and reason.”
