Lepanto in the Americas: Global Storytelling and Mediterranean History

This paper reveals the voices, logics, and consequences of sixteenth-century American storytelling about the Battle of Lepanto; an approach that decenters our perspective on the history of that battle. Central and South American storytelling about Lepanto, I argue, should prompt a reconsideration of historians’ Mediterranean-centered storytelling about Lepanto—the event—by studying the social dynamics of its event-making in light of early modern global connections. Studying the circulation of news, the symbolic power of festivities, indigenous responses to Lepanto, and the autobiographical storytelling of global protagonists participating at that battle, this paper reveals how storytelling about Lepanto burgeoned in the Spanish overseas territories.