Since high intellectual history is something of a niche interest compared to ethnohistory and more recently Afro-Latin American history, it is rare for historians of colonial Latin America to place their work in the context of the “Republic of Letters.” This is a pity, since—as this book shows—scholars in the eighteenth-century Viceroyalty of New Spain were, both in practice and in terms of their self-professed identity, members of a distinguished local branch of a wider Republic of Letters. While much less well known than its French or even British North American counterparts, this Novohispanic corner of the learned world participated in wider neo-European scholarly trends from Scholasticism to satire as well as pursuing certain common themes in locally specific ways, such as pre-Columbian antiquarianism. From this, José Francisco Robles concludes that letrados (borrowing Ángel Rama's terminology) had triple citizenship in imperial Spain, the Republic of Letters, and the Catholic Church,...
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