''Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias'' () is an
epic poem written in the late sixteenth century by
Juan de Castellanos.
Description
The work gives a detailed account of the colonization of the
Caribbean
The Caribbean ( , ; ; ; ) is a region in the middle of the Americas centered around the Caribbean Sea in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, mostly overlapping with the West Indies. Bordered by North America to the north, Central America ...
and the territories in present-day
Colombia
Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country primarily located in South America with Insular region of Colombia, insular regions in North America. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Caribbean Sea to the north, Venezuel ...
and
Venezuela
Venezuela, officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, is a country on the northern coast of South America, consisting of a continental landmass and many Federal Dependencies of Venezuela, islands and islets in the Caribbean Sea. It com ...
. It describes the settlement companies and foundation of cities as well as vivid depictions of indigenous cultures, such as the
Muisca, and natural history, making this text an important early chronicle of the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Besides its historical value, it is notable for the use of multiple
Renaissance
The Renaissance ( , ) is a Periodization, period of history and a European cultural movement covering the 15th and 16th centuries. It marked the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and was characterized by an effort to revive and sur ...
-era literary styles, including the
elegy,
epic, pilgrimage tale,
pastoral romance,
chivalric romance
As a literary genre, the chivalric romance is a type of prose and verse narrative that was popular in the noble courts of high medieval and early modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a chivalri ...
and other literary forms.
The book contains one of the earliest descriptions of the
New World species potato
The potato () is a starchy tuberous vegetable native to the Americas that is consumed as a staple food in many parts of the world. Potatoes are underground stem tubers of the plant ''Solanum tuberosum'', a perennial in the nightshade famil ...
(''
Solanum colombianum''), an unknown plant in the Old World before the discovery of the Americas by Europeans.
See also
*
Spanish conquest of the Muisca
The Spanish conquest of the Muisca took place from 1537 to 1540. The Muisca people, Muisca were the inhabitants of the central Andes, Andean highlands of Colombia before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. They were organised in a loose M ...
*
Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, ''
El Carnero''
References
External links
*
''Elegías de Varones Ilustres de Indias'' - Complete text-
Google Books
Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical charac ...
16th-century poems
Colombian books
Spanish conquest of the Muisca
Epic poems in Spanish
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