Projektnummer

0060638

Zusammenfassung

"Restoring the Illegible" offers a new understanding of the social role of alphabetic writing and of the materiality of the book in a native Andean society in the 16th and early 17th centuries. Alphabetic writing was introduced in the Americas as a tool of evangelization and colonization and its effects are often referred to by modern scholars as the "tyranny of writing". By combining historical, literary and anthropological approaches, this study argues that writing took an additional and unexpected social function when it was appropriated by natives in the Andean province of Huarochi...