Conclusion
On both sides of the Atlantic medieval and early modern Europeans and Andeans viewed and used animals to imagine and articulate complex concepts and experiences. Beyond their physical and behavioral characteristics, which are much described in European bestiaries and in traditional knowledge long held by Indigenous people, real and fantastical animals were endowed with spiritual and scientific qualities (Beal 2020: 607–36). Beasts linked the human and nonhuman worlds through this relational way of thinking about and knowing the world surrounding both medieval Europeans and pre-invasion Andeans (Wildcat and Voth 2023: 475–83).
For Indigenous people, moreover, the concept of “all my relations” in part signifies the interconnectedness of and kinships binding together the human and nonhuman worlds across time and space (Steeves 2021). Seeing flora and fauna as individuals capable of meaningful exchanges also syncs into a broader epistemological trajectory through which mountains, plants, water, fish, insects, and mammals coexist in a conscious state of being with humans (Wall Kimmerer 2013). This relationality helps to give meaning to the world around us through beings, such as huacas, much as the bestiary strives to do. In both cases, parables, fables, and mythologies function as warnings and invitations that convey virtues and values. The epistemological processes through which the animalian world was understood by medieval readers and Guamán Poma make the bestiary, in whatever form it is expressed, a powerful space of relationality.
Approaching Guamán Poma’s chronicle in this way raises some challenges, first among them the fact that the field of medieval studies traditionally excludes the Indigenous, pre-invasion world, making the attempt to compare worldviews and interpretive practices on either side of the Atlantic have limited value in some scholars’ eyes. Second, this approach requires us to be less concerned about the temporal boundaries that delineate the Middle Ages from modern characteristics associated with the medieval period, being a strain of medievalism. Instead, we should be concerned with the qualities shared in common between two times and places, being in this case the relationality connecting the human and animalian worlds. Decades of scholarship about Indigenous people such as Guamán Poma have also exemplified deep-rooted forms of racism, Eurocentrism, and positivistic assumptions about the development of Indigenous people before and after the European invasion.
For all these reasons, demonstrating how Guamán Poma and the creators of medieval bestiaries in Europe viewed and interpreted animals similarly is important for making space for Indigenous ways of knowing precisely through embodied forms of relationality. When the sharing of knowledge becomes reciprocal and multivocal, in the Quechuan sense of kamayog, exampled by quipus, consulting Elders, and stories renewed through multiple forms of bestiaries (Yates 2020: 589–95), hierarchical forms of knowing are silenced in favor of decolonial knowing, which connects back to the motivations behind Guamán Poma’s chronicle.
The transatlantic trajectory of this chronicle was not realized until well after the author’s death; it now resides in a European library far from the court of the monarch for whom it was intended. But our reading of the chronicle has demonstrated the value and richness of considering non-European interpretations and worldviews embedded within works destined for European audiences. Whether authored by Indigenous or non-Indigenous authors, reception and interpretive practices offer meaningful ways of decolonizing early modern transatlantic studies.