Between cockroaches and moths. Reading keys of the Decades of Peter Martyr d'Anghiera (1511)

Abstract

 The Decades of Peter Martyr d'Anghiera have aroused and still arouse the interest of researchers around the oceanic enterprise of the Castilians towards the West. The book, or rather, the collection of letters that comprise it, contains mainly, the stories of the discovery of the lands of this side of the ocean, the conquest and colonization of the American territories until 1525 and the description of the cultural phenomena related to all this process. For this reason, the Decades have been considered one of the founding texts of a writing about discovery and conquest. In this article, we propose a review of the lexico-discursive components of the three paratextual elements that precede the Decades of 1511. This analysis reveals some key reading in the geopolitical context of struggle for the hegemony of information and the power of nations modern that move the axis of operations from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.