Abstract

The Coloquio de Gila by Lope de Rueda, which came to light less than a decade ago, presents the figure of the black woman Sofía with a number of identifying characteristics. Some of these characteristics are already found in poetic texts that contain a noticeable element of dramatisation and were written towards the end of the fifteenth century, such as those by Anrique de Mota and Rodrigo de Reinosa. But it is in the sixteenth century that the ‘black woman’ character type appears in literary works by Jaime de Huete, Feliciano de Silva, Gaspar Gómez de Toledo, Gil Vicente and Diego Sánchez de Badajoz. These works constitute a sufficiently wide repertoire to examine the black woman character type and to establish the characteristics of this type on the basis of the literary texts in which she appears.

Abstract

This paper aims to be an initial approach to the way in which Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo puts up an specific discourse in his work at the time of describing the American city. Concretely, I have been interested in analyzing the ways the first chronicler of the American Indies adapts long-time used formulas from the old continent when he is introducing the reader to the new reality constituted by the American city. That is the case of Santo Domingo, a city to which Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo was especially bounded. It will serve us as an example to study how the chronicler adapts the formula of the panegyric of the city to the New World.