Presenças da Bíblia na obra de Diego Durán: implicações para a compreensão de uma crônica quinhentista sobre a Nova Espanha

Abstract

The dissertation presented here has as its central object the work of Diego Durán, Historia de las Indias y islas de tierra firme, written in the second half of the 16th century. This chronicle, along with others of the same period, is a document produced at a time when hispanicamerican societies were formed, marked by the interculturation process that has taken place since the spanish conquest of the territories where Mexico is today. Diego Durán grew up in New Spain and as a religious found that indigenous groups had not abandoned old religious practices. His work is written with the intention of alerting the missionaries to their permanence in the daily life of that society, so that evangelization could happen effectively and the old religion could be definitively extirpated. In his reading of the mexica culture he produces approximations between the indigenous culture and the judeo-christian tradition, using the Bible as mediation. He interprets the mexica culture through biblical narratives. The research seeks to analyze the mechanisms used by the dominican fray in which the Bible serves as a model of interpretation of the mexica culture, in order to ascertain how Diego Durán produced a differentiated reading of the many found in the period.