Guaman Poma and His Illustrated Chronicle From Colonial Peru

A survey in English and in Spanish of recent research into Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala´s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615), published on the occasion of the opening of the full digital facsimile of the autograph manuscript on the website of the Royal Libary, Copenhagen.

Written and illustrated by a Christianized native Andean of Southern Peru, several decades after the Spanish conquest, the Nueva corónica is a complex and unique mixture of historiography and utopianism. On the one hand, it contains an entirely original framework for Andean historical self-understanding, as an alternative to the colonial viewpoint. On the other hand, based upon vivid written and graphic descriptions of Andean daily life and sufferings under colonial rule, Guaman Poma formulates far-reaching proposals for reform aimed at turning the chaotic viceroyalty into a dynamic self-governed kingdom within the Spanish empire. Guaman Poma envisioned this new order as Christian, but organized in accordance with Andean economic, social, and cultural tradition. The manuscript has been preserved since the 18th century in the Royal Library, Copenhagen. ""Rediscovered"" by modern scholarship in 1908, it was included in UNESCO´s ""Memory of the World"" list in 1999.