"Hernando de Tapia in the Ruins of Rome, 1529"
Wednesday, February 19th, 4:45 PM
Goldwin Smith Hall G22
Abstract
In 1521, the sacred city of Tenochtitlán was sacked by a coalition of Central Mexican anti-Aztec warriors and their European allies. Six years later, across the Atlantic, another sacred city--Rome--was also invaded, looted, and occupied. In 1529, a man from the first (Hernando de Tapia) traveled to the second as part of a Nahua embassy to Pope Clement VII. Much has been written about the rebuilding of bombed European cities after World War II, but studying processes of urban reconstruction five centuries ago presents very different challenges. Surprisingly little has been written about the urban history of Rome from the Sack of 1527 to the start of Pope Paul III's urban transformations in the mid-1530s. Researching a new history of the Nahua embassy has been a catalyst for simultaneously researching an unwritten chapter in the urban history of Rome.
Biography
Byron Ellsworth Hamann is an editor of Grey Room; author of the history-of-the-book The Translations of Nebrija: Language, Culture, and Circulation in the Early Modern World (2015), the inquisitorially-focused Bad Christians, New Spains: Muslims, Catholics, and Native Americans in a Mediterratlantic World (2020), and the architectural-media archaeological The Invention of the Colonial Americas: Data, Architecture, and the Archive of the Indies 1781-1844 (2022); and co-editor (with Felipe Rojas and Benjamin Anderson) of Otros pasados: Ontologías alternativas y el estudo de lo que ha sido (2022). He is currently the Hanna Kiel Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. He received a PhD in Anthropology and History from the University of Chicago.
