Dr. Zebulun Q. Weeks is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Brigham Young University-Hawaii. He completed his Ph.D in Rhetoric and History in the Classical Tradition at Boston University in 2007.
2012 0-7734-2641-8 Juan Cristobal Calvete de Estrella (c. 1510/20-1593) was a Spanish humanist with close connections to the courts of Charles V and Philip II, to the latter of whom he was a tutor. Among his many works in Latin and Spanish was De Rebus Indicis, a Latin history of the accounts of chroniclers, used documents probably supplied by the family of Cristobal Vaca de Castro, Francisco Pizarro’s successor as governor. The book is commonly thought to be the longest continuous history of its subject in Latin.
It tracks down and compares the primary sources drawn upon for De Rebus Indicis, in so far as these are accessible, and then determines the nature of Calvete’s use of these sources, both in Spanish and Latin, as he sought to transform them into a work of art suitable for a European audience.
This book endeavors to do two things. First, it tracks down and compares the sources of content for De Rebus Indicis, and discovers that Calvete was more concerned with causation than other historians. He also interprets facts, rather than merely reporting on them, and provided more information about the capture of Atahualpa than any other historian past or present.