Uma fantasia cristã: o Somnium de Juan Maldonado

Abstract

This essay focuses on Juan Maldonado, a Spanish Renaissance scholar who, following the literary tradition of Cicero and Luciano, wrote a dream, the Somniun, in which he visits the moon and the most remote regions of the earth. Dream traveling usually offers the possibility of social criticism and cultural comparison, and in the Somniun, written in latin in the 1530s', Maldonado presents an idealized vision of America and its inhabitants, a vision which dialogues with the proposals of the utopists and the projects and aspirations of the religious thinkers of the American evangelization like Bartolomé de Las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria.