ABSTRACT
European intellectuals in the eighteenth century held strikingly different views on the accuracy of indigenous historical sources. The great intellectual, cultural movements of the modern world—such as the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism—are often presented as European inventions, passively and derivatively consumed everywhere else. The Amerindians were millenarian inhabitants of the continent who, as a consequence of the flood that destroyed the New World, had become humid and insensitive, incapable of feeling passion and sexual urges, which, in turn, explained why, upon arrival, Europeans had found an allegedly sparsely populated continent. The figure of the intolerant, greedy, cruel Spaniard, dedicated to killing Amerindians and Dutchmen, came to life in the hands of Protestant printers. Complicating the picture of different documents for different audiences, there stood the additional problem of the nature of the logograms and ideograms used by Amerindians to record their annals.
