interest to historians. Instead, what really seems to strike them as worthy of debate is the degree to which democratic mores displayed in the texts might be some sort of near-miraculous adaptation by ‘astute Indians’ to the political expectations of their European masters: effectively some kind of elaborate play-acting.59 Why such historians imagine that a collection of sixteenth-century Spanish friars, petty aristocrats and soldiers were likely to know anything about democratic procedure (much less, be impressed by it) is unclear, because educated opinion in Europe was almost uniformly
...more
