Correspondence

To the editor:

If it were merely a question of taking exception to a censorious review of my book Eugenio Espejo (1747-1795): Reformador Ecuatoriano de la Ilustración (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1969), by Michael T. Hamerly in HAHR, 50:3 (August 1970), 591-592, I would prefer to remain silent in the belief that reviewers in other journals had more accurately gauged its merits. However, Mr. Hamerly’s assertions are of such a nature as to impell me to ask your indulgence so that I may respond to them. Leaving to the reader the task of weighing the reviewer’s gratuitous assumption that the book is an “abridgement” of my doctoral dissertation completed a dozen years before, I have several comments:

1. The reviewer’s magisterial advice, “go to the archives” is deceptively facile. For the bulk of Espejo’s writings there are no manuscript copies available to the scholar. The originals on which Federico González Suárez based his editions are in private possession and have been studied by me. Mr. Hamerly notes that in the Archivo Nacional de Historia: Sección del Azuay I might have found a copy of “Representación de los curas del distrito de Riobamba,” for instance. Surely he must know that the Representación de los curas del distrito de Riobamba, also known as the Defensa de· los curas de Riobamba, was published in 1923 in the third volume of the Escritos del doctor Francisco Javier Eugenio Santa Cruz y Espejo edited by Jacinto Jijón y Caamafio and the same Homero Viteri Lafronte for whom he has such well-deserved praise. (See pp. 109-119 and my bibliography, p. 154.)

2. The reviewer ought not assume that I had not consulted the earliest and best available editions during my researches in the United States and in Ecuador. In one instance Mr. Hamerly refers to the second edition of El Nuevo Luciano de Quito, prepared by Aurelio Espinosa Pólit, as being accurate. A glance at my reference to El Nuevo Luciano would have indicated that I employed both the Espinosa Pólit as well as the González Suárez edition. In another place Mr. Hamerly laments that the latter’s transcription of the Cartas riobambenses is a corruption of the unsatisfactory text prepared by Alberto Muñoz Vernaza. In my own treatment of the Cartas riobambenses (pp. 119-120), the reader will find the correct proper names inserted and the connection between this satirical work and the Representación de los curas del distrito de Riobamba. Incidentally, a note on page 120 refers to an article written by Muñoz Vernaza and published in 1913 in which this Ecuadorian scholar disclosed that he had corrupted the text in 1888, which had led to the subsequent confusion.

3. The reviewer implies that no research on Espejo is viable until the full and accurate canon has been established. Even admitting the textual inaccuracy of the González Suárez edition (a point which Mr. Hamerly exaggerates), it gives a reasonably clear picture of Espejo. However interesting—and desirable- may be the establishment of a pure text and of the canon of Espejo, these problems are only tangential to the stated purpose of my book, which was to furnish details of his life, the extent and character of his writings, and his intellectual achievements.

4. A word about Mr. Hamerly’s characterization of the first chapter on the Enlightenment in Latin America as “a litany of Black Legend generalizations and claptrap.” Nowhere do I assert that Espejo alone expressed the ideas then current in the enlightened circles of the Old World. Also, to equate the man of the Enlightenment with “a modern pagan” creates an unhistorical model, to which very few of the major figures of eighteenth-century France and Spain would conform. To say that Espejo advocated protectionism, protected the Church and therefore was not a man of the Enlightenment is quite beside the point.

St. John’s University, New York

Philip L. Astuto

Professor Hamerly replies:

Philip Louis Astuto has misunderstood my review of his Eugenio Espejo (1747-1795): Reformador ecuatoriano de la Ilustración (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1969). That Mr. Astuto’s book is a shortened reworking of his 1957 dissertation was no assumption. I read both and found the former a condensation of the latter. If Mr. Astuto consulted subsequent scholarship on Espejo eighteenth-century Ecuador, and the Enlightenment, neither his text nor references demonstrate it except in two instances. If Mr. Astuto studied manuscript originals and copies of Espejo’s writings, nowhere does his biographer indicate this.

My advice “go to the archives,” was misleading. I should have written “go to the public depositories and private collections.” Although most of the known manuscript originals and copies of Espejo’s writings are privately owned, this does not make them unavailable to scholars. Mr. Astuto himself now and only now informs us that he was able to study a number of these manuscripts as did this reviewer, who could compare them with the published versions since he owns and has read all three volumes of Espejo’s Escritos. But it is one thing to have been shown said manuscripts, as I suspect the case was with Mr. Astuto, and quite another to have used them.

Nowhere in my review did I imply that Mr. Astuto had not consulted “the earliest and best available editions” of the published versions of Espejo’s writings. My concern was and remains with their textual accuracy. Permit me to return to the “Cartas riobambenses” as republished by Federico González Suárez in the first volume of the Escritos (pp. 101-143), the version used by Mr. Astuto. The name changes made by Alberto Muñoz Vernaza, of which Mr. Astuto was aware are not at issue, what matters is that González Suárez left out 29 words from one sentence in the second letter—a deletion which can hardly be construed as minor—to cite but one example of the archbishop-historian’s editorial incompetency.

In support of my remark that Mr. Astuto’s first chapter “is a litany of Black Legend generalizations and claptrap,” one quotation from him must suffice.

Whether Espejo was a modern pagan as defined by Peter Gay, whom Mr. Astuto should read, or rather caught up in the intellectual ferment of the times to which the pensador contributed in his own way, need not be debated here. The purpose of Mr. Astuto’s biography is at stake, however. To quote from him again, “Este estudio pretende levantar el velo de confusión y de misterio que rodea a este polemista y médico ecuatoriano de la Ilustración en el Nuevo Mundo, determinando los hechos de su vida, obras y actividades” (italics added, p. 17). Given this purpose, Mr. Astuto should have established the full and accurate canon of Espejo’s writings and placed the mestizo medic in historical perspective by doing archival research on eighteenth-century Ecuador and consulting recent literature on the Enlightenment in the Old and New Worlds. That is why I referred the reader to Homero Viteri Lafronte, whose work on Espejo has yet to be superseded by new research. And that is why my message to Astuto remains the same albeit reworded, do your homework.

University of Florida

Michael T. Hamerly