Exemplary Violence: Rewriting History in Colonial Colombia

Exemplary Violence explores the violent colonial history of the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia and Venezuela) by examining three seventeenth-century historical accounts—Pedro Simón’s Noticias historiales , Juan Rodríguez Freile’s El carnero , and Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita’s Historia general —each of which reveals the colonizer’s reliance on the threat of violence to sustain order.