THE CRIOLLO INVENTION OF THE MIDDLE AGES

IT WAS A late nineteenth-century commonplace to compare the societies, material culture, mentality, and institutions of Spanish and Portuguese America, before and after Independence, with those of the European Middle Ages. While at the beginning of the century foreign visitors made the comparison, soon Latin American intellectuals began drawing parallels between the Crusade and the Conquest, and between European feudalism and the situation created by the existence of extensive land holdings in Latin America. Here, I am not interested in the several implications that the comparison elicits, but in tracing the origins of the Middle Ages as a new category