New World orders: Natural history and genre in sixteenth-century New Spain

Natural history has a long and varied history as both a literary genre and an empirical practice beginning with Aristotle and continuing to the present. Thus in order to understand it more fully I re-examine questions of history, science, and literature, as well as genre, and the ways in which these terms have changed over the centuries. By the sixteenth century European ideas about natural history began to change. By considering three natural historical works: the Aztec herbal known as the Codex de la Cruz-Badiano, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún's Book XI of the Universal History and Francisco Hernández's Natural History of New Spain, we come to see how generic forces operated in each work and how each clarifies the changes taking place in natural history at the time.;The Codex de la Cruz-Badiano and Sahagún's Universal History are outstanding examples of the bicultural nature of New World natural history. These works, written at least in part by native Mesoamericans, highlight the generic challenges faced by New World authors and their audiences. Old world models were adapted to suit the needs of indigenous knowledge, and the texts themselves serve as the arena for cultural resistance.;In Hernández's Natural History of New Spain we find a European text composed by an educated member of Spanish society and, in this case, the work collapses on itself under the weight of generic expectations and the overwhelming quantity of information from the New World.;The careful examination of these works in the light of generic constraints and expectations allows us to see the closure of natural history as an all-encompassing text. At the same time they allow us to re-evaluate indigenous knowledge and the resistance to Spanish domination. Natural history continued in other forms-as a discipline, as a way of organizing information and as a style of writing-after this period, and the changes that occurred in sixteenth-century New Spain help us to better understand its fluidity and evolution.