Recommendation of a book Historia oculta: Representación de la mujer en la conquista y colonización del Nuevo Mundo

Anna Libánská, a member of the project, participated as co-editor in the recently published book Historia oculta: Representación de la mujer en la conquista y colonización del Nuevo Mundo (Monika Brenišínová, Anna Libánská and Lillyam Rosalba González Espinosa (eds.), Madrid: Iberoamericana Veurvert, 2026). Exploring the history of women in colonial Spanish America, the book traces their stories from the initial encounters between Europeans and the inhabitants of Abya Yala (a term used by some Indigenous peoples of the Americas to refer to the Americas), through to their lives and roles during the colonial period. It also elaborates on the gender dynamics of the era. Through eight chapters and seven case studies dedicated to women and their self-representations — which were often altered and stereotyped — based on various textual and visual sources, the book aims to recognise and reconstruct their voices and agency, both as objects and subjects of historical narratives.  Together with Brenišínová, Libánská wrote the introduction to the book. She also wrote the chapter 'La representación de mujeres indígenas en las traducciones checas de obras viajeras', in which she focuses on representations of Indigenous women in 16th-century Czech texts.

The present volume was published as a result of the research conducted at the Centre for Ibero-American Studies of the Faculty of Arts at Charles University from 2022 to 2024, and entitled 'Hidden History : 'Representation of Women in the Era of the Conquest and Colonisation of the New World' (22-25137S). The project, led by Monika Brenišínová, focused on the representation of women in colonial Latin America and was funded by the Czech Grant Agency. 

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