Thehistoire du livre, a field of interdisciplinary study of the role and impact of the printed book in the development of society and culture, has scarcely engaged historians dealing with the viceroyalty of Peru. Until recent times, the image of the colonial society as an obscure and culturally backward world prevailed.1 Such deficiency might be partially explained by the intense dedication and vast knowledge that research on the history of books and ideas requires. This investigation indeed calls for multidisciplinary teamwork to analyze the influx of authors, ideological currents, literary models, technological patterns, and other influences. As Guillermo Lohmann Villena has correctly pointed out for the case of colonial Peru, “the immensity of a task that requires inexhaustible patience and understanding in all branches of knowledge has discouraged researchers from making an exact evaluation of the influx of books and their diffusion.”2
In the early colonial period of Spanish America, one hundred years or so after Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, books still maintained their reputation as infallible sources and testimonies of historical truth. Thus almost all kinds of texts, even fantastic narratives, such as the chivalric romances, could make a firm impression in their readers’ minds. Recognizing that influence, this essay attempts to make a contribution to the history of mentalités in colonial Peru by analyzing 24 private book collections from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Every private library reveals, to a great extent, the spirit of its owner; but this characteristic acquires an even greater significance in the context of early modern times, when the rarity of books and their high prices represented major inconveniences for the formation of any library.3
Books and the Cultural Environment
Though this essay concentrates on the cultural aspects of reading (or simply book collecting), it must be kept in mind that a complete history of the book would involve various other facets of social life, such as commerce, aesthetics, and technology. Indeed, it has been noted that few human artifacts reflect the world around them better than books.4 The history of the book in colonial Spanish America actually touches on such relevant topics as the religious assimilation of the Indians, the growth of institutions of higher learning, the creativity of artists and writers, the transfer of European technology, and the emergence of a national consciousness.
In Peru, the first recorded presence of printed materials corresponds to the earliest phase of the Spanish conquest. Investigation of notarial records has identified private libraries belonging to four of Francisco Pizarro’s companions on his 1532 expedition to San Miguel and Cajamarca. The chronicles of that early period report the picturesque encounter between Atahualpa, the illiterate Inca ruler, and the Dominican friar Vicente de Valverde in the main square of Cajamarca, and specify that the clergyman was holding a book—possibly a Bible or a breviary. The problematic circumstances surrounding that encounter, including the first specific mention of a book in Peruvian history, have been interpreted by Sabine MacCormack.5
A rapidly growing audience formed by lawyers, clergy, and students in the main Spanish towns of the viceroyalty stimulated the formation of a book trade in Peru. Perhaps the pioneering merchant in this field was Juan Antonio Musetti, one of a family of printers from Medina del Campo, who arrived in Lima in 1544 and probably began selling the same works his family was publishing in Castile: poetry of Boscán and Garcilaso, Montalvo’s Ordenamiento.6 For the late sixteenth century, a series of contracts and shipment records provides a good picture of the flourishing book trade among the white and Hispanized Indian population. Most of the publications offered in the Peruvian market were directly imported from Europe, and it has been remarked that considerable numbers of Spanish novels crossed the Atlantic in an astonishingly short time.7
In 1584 Lima received the official permit to open a printing press. Antonio Ricardo, from Turin, who had begun his printing career in Mexico City in the 1570s, was instrumental in disseminating the first 42 books and broadsides published in South America, from 1584 to 1605. Especially notable is that the first book to come out of Ricardo’s press, the Doctrina Christiana, prepared by order of the Third Provincial Council of Lima, was a trilingual work, written in Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara.8 The printing business was continued after Ricardo’s death by Francisco del Canto, also a native of Medina del Campo, and later a large number of printers established their offices in the capital of Peru.
This brief panorama of people and institutions related to the cultural environment would be incomplete without mentioning the University of San Marcos and the Inquisition of Lima. Both received their definitive structure under the administration of don Francisco de Toledo, the “supreme organizer” of the viceroyalty, during the 1570s, thereby coinciding with the establishment of the printing press as well as the advent of the Jesuits and the founding of various colleges.9 Such an agglomeration of events during virtually a single decade suggests—even confirms the traditional view—that the development of culture in colonial Spanish America, at least in the public sphere, was to a great extent determined by politics. As J. H. Parry has pointed out, while Mexico obtained the permit to publish books and found academic libraries much earlier, intellectual development in Peru was slowed by both the turmoil of the civil wars of the conquistadors and the repressive campaigns impelled by the Council of Trent (1545-1563). Academic organizations received support in the southern viceroyalty only after Counter-Reformation religious and ideological patterns had been firmly established.10
Thus the history of the book in the former Spanish dominions evidently is linked to the peculiar connection between the institutions of church and state. Church members, acting as the earliest European educators, scholars, writers, and book collectors, laid the groundwork for the continuous and stable growth of Spanish American culture. Through their printing presses, institutions of higher learning, and libraries, the clergy exercised a constant influence on colonial society.11
The Holy Office, active in Lima from 1570 on, was charged with the task of controlling imports of printed material into the Peruvian territory. Furthermore, the inquisitors were usually called on to judge the acceptability of manuscripts to be published there. The inquisitorial censorship did not only apply to the texts considered heretical and listed in the successive issues of the Index librorum prohibitorum (1551, 1559, 1583, and so on).12 It was also supposed to reject other types of books prohibited from the New World by the metropolitan authorities, such as purely literary narratives, as well as political works that opposed regalism and other fundamental aspirations of the Castilian monarchy.
In spite of those severe regulations, however, much evidence—the symptomatic repetition of prohibitional laws (1506, 1531, 1543, 1575), for example—reveals that many of the books that were officially banned did actually circulate in Spanish America. The inventories of private libraries record various sorts of fictional narrative: chivalric romances, picaresque novels, and pastoral tales, as well as comedias, or popular dramas. It has been asserted, moreover, that some of the censored European publications were even translated into Spanish and clandestinely printed in the colonies. Following the insight of José Torre Revello, it may be observed that the Inquisition’s agents were especially strict in controlling the introduction of heretical,” non-Catholic materials but remained quite tolerant of others, including literary and political texts labeled “pernicious” by the crown. Thus, in reality, neither obscurantism nor strong intellectual persecution prevailed during the era of Iberian colonialism.13
The Research Possibilities
Regarding the principal sources used in this study, inventories of private libraries, it seems quite unnecessary to repeat the conventional caveats. The inconveniences attached to the use of such documents are well known: difficulties in identifying authors and books recorded, uncertainty about the real dimensions of roughly described book collections, indefinite knowledge of which books were actually read, the impossibility of determining what effect the presumable readings had on people, and so on. Nevertheless, the content list of a private library provides unique evidence of books that actually existed in former times. All publications mentioned in those records did effectively circulate in colonial Spanish America— whether in deepest privacy or otherwise—and so far the library inventories constitute an exceptional instrument for reconstructing the mental outillage, or “tool kit,” available during that era.14
When utilized en masse, the inventories of private libraries would provide an extraordinary body of quantifiable data, enabling the researcher to trace numerical and graphic correlations among books that circulated in colonial society.15 A profitable complementary source is the shipment records, especially those pertaining to the archives of the Casa de la Contratación in Seville. These records contain detailed lists of printed material exported to the Indies from 1550 on, supplying much relevant information for studying the evolution and composition of the book trade in the Spanish American world.
Given the difficulties of pursuing these data through the enormous volume of information in the Sevillian archives, only a few studies have been undertaken up to now on the shipment records of the Casa de la Contratación. For the most part, researchers have used these documents simply for sample inspections, examining the traces of a single work or the shipments of a particular fleet.16 Helga Kropfinger von Kügelgen has made the most systematic inroad with her analysis of the cargo in the 1586 fleet bound for New Spain. Her findings uphold the general impression that the greatest part (some 70 percent) of the printed materials transported to Spanish America were theological and liturgical books.17
As for the social reception of the printed texts, the reading public was inevitably limited, not only by considerable illiteracy in the white and Hispanized populations but also by relentlessly high book prices. An early cargo register from 1549, for example, reveals in comparative terms the cost of a group of books sent to Peru: the four parts of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae, in an annotated edition, cost a bit more than a sword; a set of nine chivalric romances—small and relatively cheap pieces—was as expensive as three pairs of boots; and a Dominican missal was equivalent to a shirt.18 These costs, noted at the fleet’s departure from Seville, would usually rise when the merchandise arrived in the Indies. The Peruvian territory (and especially the wealthy mining center of Potosí) was known for having the highest prices on the entire continent.19
In the colonial period the possession of a private library was certainly a class privilege. Book collecting was an activity accessible only to members of the clergy, nobles, professionals (bureaucrats, professors, lawyers, physicians), and some merchants. Even so, it would be wrong to consider the diffusion of European books and ideas as a purely elitist phenomenon, because the literary creations and fundamental doctrines of the most celebrated authors also circulated among lower-class and illiterate people. Poor Spaniards, creoles, mestizos, and even Indians were instructed through proverbs, popular tales, ballads, songs, and tertulias, where some novel passage or moral comment was read aloud.20
The popularity of chivalric romances in sixteenth-century Spain—in almost every social class—proved decisive in achieving the colonization of America. By a subtle process, the idealism and bravery of the chivalrous heroes evolved into the superhuman resolve of the conquistadors, stimulating hundreds of young men to cross the ocean in search of adventure and riches.21 On the other hand, there was a selective minority that plainly rejected those fantastic narratives and adopted instead the humanistic ideals of wisdom and piety, mainly as expressed by Erasmus. In the early phases of the conquest, this group determined to project such ideals onto the newly settled colonies. As Marcel Bataillon remarked, “from Spanish Erasmism emanated a current animated by the hope to found, with the new people of recently discovered territories, a renewed Christianity.”22 But the aspirations of so-called Christian humanism had little chance of success in Spanish America, because they were soon officially rejected by the church, which considered them much too audacious and somewhat heretical. Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, the Counter-Reformation patterns of religion and ideology tended to dominate the entire cultural stage, leaving just a marginal (and illegal) space for any eccentricity.
The Book Collections and Their Collectors
Except for the collection of Fray Vicente de Vaiverde—first bishop of Cuzco and the only one of Pizarro’s companions to have attended university—the libraries gathered from the conquest period to the 1570s were relatively small.23 It was indeed quite complicated for those men—even with their newly acquired wealth from the Inca booty—to collect the few books they chose for their professional training, spiritual devotion, or personal enjoyment. Before the advent of the local book trade and printing press, all printed materials had to be personally transported or directly ordered from the Peninsula. In this regard one might wonder if humble soldiers such as Diego de Narváez and Francisco de Isásaga were not guided in their book collecting by some priest or personal confessor.24
In any case, historical evidence confirms José de la Riva-Agüero’s assertion that “not all conquistadors were illiterate, and not at all their children.”25 Nevertheless, a comparison of the known book collections from New Spain in the first half of the sixteenth century shows the modest bibliographical attainments of Peruvian collectors. Nothing matches the four-hundred-volume library gathered, with official financial aid, by Bishop Juan de Zumárraga in Mexico City. Likewise, nothing compares to the book shipment made by the first Mexican viceroy, don Antonio de Mendoza, or to the academic library founded in 1536 at the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco.26
Our analysis of 24 private colonial book collections begins with Valverde’s library, inventoried in Lima in 1542. Not all these collections actually resided in Peru, but all were owned by people somehow related, through their official posts or private activities, to Peruvian colonial society. The original data come from inventories of goods and a few shipment and purchase records (sometimes with price estimates) in various archives of Lima, Cuzco, Huancayo, Madrid, and Seville (see appendix 1). Notarial protocols, judicial files, inquisitorial records, and proceedings for the distribution of inheritances represent the main sources of those documents. Appendix 1 lists the 24 collections analyzed for this study.27
The majority of the collectors held positions in the clergy and the upper bureaucracy. They included both eminent urban prelates and humble provincial priests; viceroys, judges of the audiencias, officials in the fiscal administration, and members of the Holy Office. The list also includes such peculiar characters as a disloyal notary condemned to death for betraying the king, and a heretical lawyer, punished by the Inquisition with forced public reconciliation at an auto-da-fé and the loss of all his property, including his excellent library. Another unusual case concerns the Indian chieftain Milachami, who lived in a remote village in the Andean Mantaro Valley and devoted his leisure time to reading mystical treatises, Spanish chronicles, and Lope de Vega’s comedias.28
The last item in appendix 1 constitutes a double exception. First, the book collection owned by the convent of Nuestra Señora de la Almudena in Cuzco is the only one not belonging to an individual. Second, the very small size of that library—184 volumes—contrasts to the large bibliographic holdings religious communities usually had in colonial Spanish America. Monasteries and convents were known for ordering great lots of printed material from the Old World. Their intention was not only to supply the monks and nuns with convenient instruments for devotion, liturgy, and evangelization, but also to stimulate the learning and eventual debate (inside the convent walls) of the latest publications on theology, philosophy, history, and politics.29
The first book collections formed in Peru by conquistadors and pioneering bureaucrats up to the 1570s were extremely small—their qualification as “libraries” is rather symbolic. The complications of transporting the books and the unsettled social climate during the civil wars prevented the early colonizers from more readily assembling materials for the cultivation of their intellect.
With the cultural changes of the 1570s under the administration of Francisco de Toledo, the book-collecting trend received a boost, judging from the size of the private libraries dating from that period. Between 1575 and 1590, for instance, both Lima and Cuzco housed the respectable book collections of cultivated men like lawyer Valenciano de Quiñones, treasurer Antonio Dávalos, viceroy don Martín Enríquez, fiscal Cristóbal Ferrer de Ayala, and inquisitors Serván de Cerezuela and Juan Alcedo de la Rocha. Most of these may be considered medium-sized libraries, according to the parameters proposed by Maxime Chevalier for Spain.30 The most outstanding of these collections belonged to Dr. Quiñones; with its more than 350 volumes, it was renowned even among his contemporaries as “the best library in the country” (la mejor biblioteca del reyno). Thanks to the inventory made in 1576, when the books were confiscated in Cuzco by the local agents of the Inquisition, we know their exact contents in civil and canonical law, religion, humanities, medicine, and other subjects.31
Private book collections continued to proliferate in the seventeenth century, as the creole society became firmly established and its capital, Lima, swelled with residents who brought a rich cultural background and a desire to keep in touch with the latest European intellectual and spiritual currents. The peak of scholarly dedication seems to have been reached by Dr. Francisco de Avila. The private library of the famous idolatries extirpator and canon of the cathedral, inventoried after his death in Lima in 1647, comprised 3,108 volumes, including 45 manuscripts. From the evidence so far, this should be considered the greatest private book collection in the viceroyalty of Peru—indeed, in all of the Americas—up to the mid-seventeenth century.32
The complete identification (and publication) of this neglected library may eventually deepen the general interest in Avila’s personality and work. This mestizo clergyman, a native of Cuzco, has already drawn notice among scholars for his legacy as keeper of the indigenous ethnographic tradition from the province of Huarochirí.33 For now, the precise inventory of his book collection—an authentic intellectual universe—enables us to search more deeply into Avila’s bibliographical sources and academic training.
A rough division of this library distinguishes three categories: books on theology, law, and humanities; books on scientific and technological matters; and books on American and Peruvian topics in particular. Among these are José de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias, Antonio de Herrera’s Historia general de las Indias, Juan de Castellanos’ Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias, Juan de Torquemada’s Monarquía indiana, Juan de Solórzano Pereira’s Política indiana, Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios reales de los incas, Diego González Holguin’s Arfe y vocabulario en la lengua quichua, and various catechisms and compilations of sermons in indigenous languages. Far exceeding the average size and composition of colonial book collections, Avila’s forms a real milestone in the cultural development of the New World.34
A complementary aspect of the Spanish American book trade is the evolution of prices. It is obvious (and it was legally arranged) that the value of the printed materials was estimated higher in the colonies than in Spain, because of the higher cost of living and the need to cover the transport expenses. Furthermore, the data recorded in this investigation also suggest the inflationary effects of the so-called price revolution that swept the Iberian peninsula, and to a lesser degree the Spanish dominions in the New World, throughout the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century.35 Based on library inventories as well as shipment and purchase records, Table 1 shows the development of book prices in average figures.
Regarding the exceptionally low prices of Juan Bautista de Monzón’s books (10.8 reales per volume on average), it must be noted that the valuation was made after the oidor’s death in Madrid in 1594, at the end of a long and complicated public life. His books might have been heavily used or even damaged, and thus may have depreciated. On the other hand, the seventeenth-century collections belonging to Archbishop Hernando Arias de Ugarte and Bishop Manuel de Mollinedo y Angulo show radically higher average prices. This might be explained by the effects of inflation, a progressive refinement in the art of typography, and an exquisite taste among the wealthy prelates for collecting luxury objects. Arias de Ugarte’s library, inventoried at the beginning of his ecclesiastical career in 1614, included such expensive editions as a 28-volume law compilation titled Tractatus diversorum doctorum (2,400 reales), the 12-volume Anuales ecclesiastici by Cesare Baronio (1,600 reales), and the large-folio cartographic masterpiece of Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum orbis terrarum (1,200 reales).36
Printing presses multiplied throughout Spanish America especially during the Bourbon era, and the entire colonial period saw an estimated 17,000 titles published in the Indies. During the earlier centuries discussed in this study, however, most of the books recorded in Peruvian collections came from the Old World. Besides Spanish publishing centers like Salamanca, Alcalá de Henares, Medina del Campo, Madrid, Zaragoza, and Toledo, books also usually originated from Antwerp, Lyon, Venice, or Cologne. Though there is no statistical confirmation, perhaps 80 to 85 percent of the materials identified in Peruvian libraries were actually imported from Europe; a lesser proportion were printed in Lima or Mexico City.37
This difference reflects not only the limited early local intellectual and publishing activity but also the relative value of book collecting to the Spanish colonizers and the creole residents. Books were perceived essentially as an instrument to assimilate and harmonize with the contemporary trends in European technology, culture, politics, and morals. A deeper examination of this fundamental characteristic would be a desirable target for any further sociological approach to the reading habits of colonial Spanish America. Correlating the data from the bibliographical records with other elements of the cultural climate of that time may reveal more about the prominent book collectors, the materials they read, and the reasons for their changing preferences for one or another genre.
The Dissemination of Ideas
No conclusive statistics exist to describe the proportional content of private libraries in the viceroyalty of Peru. Nevertheless, Irving A. Leonard —basing his observations on evidence collected mainly from shipment records—has estimated that some 70 percent of the books circulating in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New World dealt with religious matters.38 Treatises on morality, theological studies, liturgical manuals, and hagiographies filled the educational needs of the clerical communities and supplied responses to the most profound Christian questions. The remaining 30 percent consisted of poetry, drama, and fiction (chivalric, pastoral, picaresque, and courtly novels) as well as more serious scholarly works. Among these were studies in law, history, politics, linguistics, classical humanities, and medicine.
A tentative overview might be achieved by summarizing the results obtained by Carlos A. González Sánchez from sampling the printed materials that embarked in the 1605 fleet to Mexico and Peru. Covering a total of 2,098 volumes, González Sánchez assigns 25.1 percent to ascetical and mystical books, 16.2 percent to various theological works, 13.7 percent to catechisms and doctrinal instruments, 11 percent to poetics and fictional narratives, 10.8 percent to ecclesiastical regulations, 4.8 percent to hagiographies, 4.5 percent to miscellaneous nonreligious subjects (for example, law), 3.1 percent to humanistic disciplines, and so on.39 These numerical values varied according to evolving reading fashions and book demands in the Indies.
Contrary to Leonard’s and González Sánchez’ characterizations, our research on Peru reveals an extraordinary predominance of juridical works. This can be explained by noting that most of the libraries analyzed in the present study belonged to people involved in government and the judiciary: a viceroy, a notary, two lawyers, two treasurers, three Inquisition officials, and five judges of the audiencias. The predominance of law materials can be considered a phenomenon unique to Peru and not applicable generally to the rest of the continent. Other sources, such as shipment records or inventories of bookshops, certainly would confirm the predominant presence of religious texts, destined mostly for the well-endowed libraries of the convents.40
It must be taken into account that throughout the Spanish empire in the early modern period, political and judicial responsibilities were closely linked. Law was studied as part of the basic intellectual training required for all bureaucrats involved in public administration.41 Moreover, in scholarly works as well as bureaucratic reports, every social or economic problem was examined with reference to its legal context.
In sixteenth-century Europe the prevailing juridical trend was the jus commune (literally, common law), a forerunner of the modern civil law system. This body of doctrine was derived from the Justinian code of the Holy Roman Empire, in which ecclesiastical and imperial powers coexisted, and so did their respective canonical and civil regulations. Throughout the Middle Ages, compilers and commentators developed the legal structure leading up to the jus commune, a system conceived to be perfect and generally valid for the whole of Christianity. Its dissemination on the Continent represents a unique cultural phenomenon: learned and assimilated by professionals of almost every country, the derecho común, as it was known in Spanish, facilitated relations among Christian nations by stimulating the construction of an ideal common body of legal precepts.42
The Peruvian private libraries examined for this study typically contain well-organized compilations of the fundamentals of both the Corpus juris canonici and the Corpus juris civilis (Gratian’s Decretum, the Decretals, the Clementinae, the old and new Digest, the Infortiatum, the Codex Justinianus, and the Institutes). Large annotated editions and commentaries on these works, prepared mostly by Italian scholars associated with the University of Bologna, form an important part of the collections. Bartolo da Sassoferrato, master of the Bolognese school of commentators, enjoyed great popularity among legal professionals in the Indies. His works were complemented by those of other medieval jurists, such as Baldo degli Ubaldi, Niccolò de Tudeschi, Giovanni d’Andrea, Pietro d’Ancarano, Domenico da San Gemignano, Guido de Baisio, Francesco Zabarella, Cino da Pistoia, Paolo de Castro, Andrea d’Isernia, and Bartolomeo Saliceto. Monographs by these authors were also found in voluminous anthologies. Such compilations were published, especially from 1500 on, with the purpose of widening the dissemination of Roman law.
The contents of the Peruvian libraries also reflect the evolution of that legal system during the Renaissance. The modernization of the Derecho común is characterized in book form by a specialization in legal matters or branches, a monographical treatment of institutions and problems, a study of specific paragraphs or chapters of the classical norms, more attention to mercantile and financial questions, and a certain particularization by countries and towns. In order to keep the old masters’ teachings in circulation, many compilations, such as indices, dictionaries, anthologies, and catalogues, were also published.43 The presence of all these trends and works reveals the rapid intellectual dissemination that took place from European metropolis to colonial outpost.
In addition to general European law, Spanish American bureaucrats and jurists manifest through their libraries a special interest in Castilian legislation. This is present because the laws that governed the Peninsula were also supposed to apply in the overseas dominions whenever no specific standards were stated in the Derecho indiano (legislation for the Indies). Apart from legal texts and official standard compilations—for example, Siete partidas, Ordenamiento real, Leyes de Toro, Nueva recopilación—the colonizers usually consulted the commentaries and practicae of Spanish magistrates, as well as a series of monographs on problems ranging from corregidor administration and chancery practices to contracts and restitutions. Among the most frequently cited monograph authors were Alfonso Díaz de Montalvo, Gregorio López de Tovar, Diego Pérez de Salamanca, Diego del Castillo, Gaspar de Baeza, Juan López de Palacios Rubios, Antonio Gómez, Diego de Covarrubias, Juan Bernardo Díaz de Lugo, Rodrigo Suárez, Gabriel de Monterroso, Pedro de Dueñas, Juan de Medina, Tomás de Mercado, Pedro Núñez de Avendaño, Francisco de Avilés, and Fernando Vázquez de Menchaca.
Religion, the Humanities, and Science
Religious texts form a second major group in these collections, contrary to the case generally. They include the Scriptures; works on morality, theology, liturgy, and hagiography; and evangelization manuals. The propensity for such doctrinal and ascetic literature stems from the intense spiritual concerns of sixteenth-century Christianity. Readers were on a quest for responses to problems like the redemption of sin, justification by faith, security in the face of death, and salvation of the soul.44 At that time, both Catholic dogma and the opinions of church leaders underlay virtually every aspect of intellectual life, thereby fueling the continual demand for clerical readings.
The Holy Scriptures usually appear in these book collections accompanied by the so-called concordantiae (concordance) and various exegeses by saints and prelates (Augustine, Gregory the Great, John Chrysostom, Franz Titelman, Johann Wild, and others). The most common liturgical instruments were breviaries, missals, and books of hours. Many of the library inventories specify that these corresponded to the devotio moderna or nuevo rezado; that is, they had been written to conform to the Counter-Reformation guidelines issued by the Council of Trent. Most of them were published by Philip II’s official typographer, Christopher Plantin, in Antwerp. Moral orthodoxy was basically modeled on Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae, a voluminous work of which numerous copies were to be found in the viceroyalty of Peru. Its model treatment of spiritual questions was imitated in the texts of other popular theologians, such as Angelo de Clavasio, Silvestris de Prierio, Juan de Pedraza, Domingo de Soto, and Cardinal Tommaso de Vio (a personal opponent of Luther).
For the mystical and ascetic currents, a notable example is Fray Luis de Granada’s Libro de la oración y meditación. This suggestive treatise, a call for the renewal of inner spirituality, was one of the most popular books in colonial Spanish America and perhaps the most influential in the religious sphere.45 Other theological reflections by Spanish authors dealt with topics like human vanity, confession, penitence, heresy, and the contemplation of nature. The curious Malleus maleficarum by the German inquisitor Jacob Sprenger, a collection of episodes from the medieval persecution of witchcraft, supplied the colonizers with a model for handling people who belonged to alternative, nonofficial cults, such as the Indians.
As already noted, Christian humanism, mainly through Erasmus of Rotterdam’s argumentation, played an important role in the conception of utopian models for evangelization in the New World, especially during the conquest of Mexico. During the first decades of the Iberian presence, both Erasmus’ Enchiridion militis christiani and the Sevillian preacher Constantino Ponce de la Fuente’s Suma de doctrina cristiana were among the most frequently recorded texts in colonial libraries. These readings stimulated the longing for ecclesiastical renovation and radical evangelism in America.46 By the time the inquisitorial index of 1559 was published, however, both texts had been officially banned, and later they faded from public circulation, as the documents consulted in the present research testify.
The humanities, the third major group of readings, were represented principally by modern editions of Greek and Roman classics. In Peru, as in sixteenth-century Europe, neo-Platonic philosophy was combined with a revitalization of Latin studies. The bibliographical inventories testify to the extensive circulation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Livy’s History of Rome, Aulus Gellius’ Noctes Atticae, Cicero’s linguistic and political treatises, Virgil’s poems, Terence’s comedies, Plutarch’s biographies, and Flavius Josephus’ histories. Such a flourishing of Renaissance editions reflects not only the simultaneity of European and Spanish American cultural developments but also many colonizers’ formal training in classical languages.
Linguistics, lexicography, ethics, and historiography complemented the humanistic component. Antonio de Nebrija has been recognized as one of the most frequently consulted “authorities” during the colonial era; among the best-sellers in the Spanish American book trade were his Latin grammar, his Latin-Spanish dictionary, and his dictionary of legal terms.47 Ambrogio da Calepio’s multilingual Dictionarium, a sort of rudimentary encyclopedia in up to 11 languages, is also frequently cited in the book inventories. The moralistic trend was popularized by compilations of proverbs, letters, and “emblems” (allegorical pictures with moralistic verses or sayings); Antonio de Guevara, Juan Luis Vives, Paolo Giovio, Andrea Alciati, and Baldassare Castiglione essentially personified this literary genre. Most of the historical writings dealt with the evolution of European people and personalities. Among the most prominent were a history of the popes (by Gonzalo de Illescas), of the Roman emperors (Pedro Mejía), of ancient Spain (Florián de Ocampo), and of the Catholic kings (Hernando del Pulgar).
For Spanish belles lettres of both the Middle Ages and the early Siglo de Oro, sixteenth-century libraries commonly included chivalric romances—their exact titles not always specified—as well as the Marquis of Santillana’s proverbs, Jorge Manrique’s coplas (verses), and the richly lyrical poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega, which introduced Petrarchan metrical structure into Spanish literature. Nevertheless, it might be stated that the most popular literary work of the time was Fernando de Rojas’ novel La Celestina, a vivid portrait of sentimental affairs in the Castilian society of the early modern period. Later, during the seventeenth century, literary preferences gradually changed, simultaneous to the declining popularity of the knightly romance. Among the new top items in the book trade were Cervantes Don Quijote (exported to America en masse from the princeps edition of 1605 on), Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache, various poems and satirical essays of Francisco de Quevedo, and Lope de Vega’s popular comedias on subjects from everyday life, which were read and staged throughout the South American continent.48
A final group in the inventories is formed by scientific and technological works. Medical knowledge in colonial society was based chiefly on the classical Greek compendium of Dioscorides, which circulated in the Spanish version edited by Andrés de Laguna. As a complementary work, the Historia medicinal by the Sevillian physician Nicolás Monardes promoted the medical use of American plants, herbs, and fruits. Regarding cosmography, the most often consulted books were those by the Englishman John Holywood (“Sacrobosco”), the Spaniard Jerónimo de Chaves, and the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius, whose steadily enlarged Theatrum orbis terrarum rightly deserves its recognition as the first modern atlas. The classical natural history of Pliny and a compilation of Avicenna’s treatises concerning animals, astronomy, logic, and metaphysics were also among the most frequent scientific readings, together with various mathematical, logical, botanical, and veterinary texts.
Technological diffusion mainly involved metallurgy, with an extensive series of books—Juan de Belvederi Libro general de las reducciones de plata y oro and Juan de Arfe Villafañe’s Quilatador de la plata, oro y piedras in first place—dealing with the extraction, refinement, and coinage of precious metals. These titles reflect the somewhat materialistic orientation of Peruvian colonial society—which could be justified, considering that its greatest revenues came from the export of silver and gold. Finally, another technological branch, related to military and naval logistics, was also represented in the viceregal book collections: Pedro de Medina’s Arte de navegar was the most appreciated contribution to this field.
The Cultural Link
Even if it is impossible to provide definite statistical descriptions of these collections, it seems more important to emphasize that the Spanish colonizers enjoyed, through the book trade, a direct communication with the intellectual circles of Europe. Modern embellishments on the Roman law, crucial ecclesiastical debates, erudite Renaissance editions, popular literary genres, and the latest technological advances spread on the other side of the Atlantic with remarkable speed. Disregarding the legislation issued by the Hapsburg monarchy, the inhabitants of the overseas dominions managed to read and even clandestinely reproduce some censored publications—Holy Scriptures in various vernaculars and some of the works by Erasmus, Ponce de la Fuente, Granada, Tommaso de Vio, Juan de Avila, and Denis Rickel—which had been banned for supposed “heterodoxy” by the reactionary ecclesiastical authorities. Indeed, as Torre Revello observes, “to deny that the most cultivated people in America during the colonial era possessed the necessary cultural instruments is to neglect the reality of the facts.”49
What can be observed about the gaps in these bibliographical records? There is a notable scarcity of chronicles and studies of the American continent—its pre-Columbian civilizations, its languages and customs, its natural resources, its condition under Spanish rule. Such a deficiency is not to be explained simply by the predominance of imported European books or the restricted activity of the creole presses, but chiefly by the fundamental concept that guided book collecting at the time. Printed materials were used principally to keep in touch with European culture and ideology, not to amass a more scholarly knowledge of the reality that colonizers confronted in everyday life. Convents and individuals therefore made great efforts to form rich and up-to-date collections of texts directly imported from distant metropolises.
The history of the book in colonial Peru may be undertaken from at least three different viewpoints. One perspective, which this study has assumed, emphasizes ideology, considering books to be a reflection of colonial mentalités; its object of analysis is the diffusion of European texts and ideas, especially by means of library inventories and shipping records. Another perspective is the commercial, which concentrates on book production and circulation, tracing the routes of the texts from the printing press to the readers’ hands. A third viewpoint is the technological, focusing on the development of typography, examining the reception of European models as well as the original methods introduced by colonial printing presses.50
In addition, it would be interesting to explore the impact of learned texts and literary images on colonial painting—frescoes in the churches are generally full of textual references—as well as on the literature produced in the Indies. These various avenues, all open for researchers to come, could lead to an ideal, global representation of the role of the book in viceregal culture and society.
This study has focused on inventories of private libraries and shipment records from the Hapsburg period relating to the viceroyalty of Peru. It should be enlarged by complementary research on other archival sources and facets of the cultural milieu. Among the supplementary documents would be inventories of bookshops, academic libraries, and collections of religious communities; lists of properties confiscated by the Inquisition; ordinances and syllabi for universities and colleges; proceedings of academic examinations, graduations, and competitions; reports of personal merits and services, and so on. Further research should also take into account the literature produced in the Indies by local authors, and the realm of iconography. Only after covering this body of information will it be possible to formulate some definitive assertions about the influence of the diffusion of European books and ideas on the social and cultural development of colonial Peru.
At the current stage of investigation, however, a rich variety of evidence enables researchers to delineate a provisional characterization of mentalités in colonial society. In spite of numerous crown regulations purported to censor the importation and circulation of texts, well-supplied private libraries and a very active book trade thrived in Lima and other Spanish towns of the viceroyalty. In their attitude toward printed materials, the white colonizers and the Hispanized population—including Andean lords—demonstrated an extraordinary curiosity and ideological openness. Thus it was possible for them to harmonize with the scientific, political, moral, and social patterns prevailing at the time in Spain and neighboring European nations.
This paper was written during a stay at the University of Cologne’s Institute of Iberian and Latin American History, thanks to a research fellowship provided by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. I am grateful to both institutions for their solicitous support. I am also indebted to the managing editor and the two anonymous evaluators of the HAHR for their valuable, suggestive remarks on the earlier versions of this essay.
Identified Private Libraries in Colonial Peru
The following collections are listed by collector, number of volumes, source that identified the collection, and source’s archival repository. Names of the archives are abbreviated as follows:
Archivo Arzobispal del Cuzco (AAC), Archivo Departamental del Cuzco (ADC), Archivo General de Indias, Seville (AGI), Archivo General de la Nación, Lima (AGN), Archivo Histórico de Protocolos de Madrid (AHPM), Archivo Histórico Riva-Agüero, Lima (AHRA), Archivo de la Notaría Zevallos, Huancayo (ANZ), Archivo de Protocolos de Sevilla (APS), Biblioteca del Palacio Real, Madrid (BPR).
Fray Vicente de Valverde, bishop of Cuzco, member of the conquest expedition. Book collection of 178 volumes. Inventory of goods, Lima, 1542 (AHRA, Papeles de don Sancho de Castro y Ribera).
Diego de Narváez, vecino of Cuzco, member of the conquest expedition. Book collection of 30 volumes, estimated at 476 reales. Shipment record, Seville, 1545 (APS, Oficio XV, 2d book of 1545, fol. 784).
Alonso Riquelme, treasurer of New Castile (Peru), member of the conquest expedition. Book collection of 15 volumes. Inventory of goods, Lima, 1548 (AGI, Justicia, leg. 425, no. 4).
Dr. Lisón de Tejada, oidor of the Audiencia of Lima, perished on the way to Spain. Book collection of 22 volumes. Inventory of goods, Lima, 1549 (BPR, ms. 1960, no. 12).
Toribio Galíndez de la Riba, notary of Lima, executed for rebellion against the crown. Book collection of 8 volumes. Inventory of goods, Lima, 1554 (AGI, Justicia, leg. 471, fol. 1043).
Francisco de Isásaga, encomendero of Carangas, member of the conquest expedition. Book collection of 38 volumes. Inventory of goods, Lima, 1576 (AHRA, Papeles de la Hacienda Carabamba).
Dr. Agustín Valenciano de Quiñones, lawyer, condemned for heresy by the Inquisition. Book collection of 354 volumes. Inventory of goods, Cuzco, 1576 (AGN, Inquisición, Contencioso, leg. 1).
Dr. Gregorio González de Cuenca, oidor of the Audiencia of Lima, later president of Santo Domingo. Book collection of 349 volumes. Inventory of goods, Santo Domingo, 1581 (AGI, Escribanía de Cámara, leg. 846-B, fol. 1084).
Antonio Dávalos, treasurer of New Castile (Peru), vecino of Lima. Book collection of 97 volumes, estimated at 1,698 reales. Shipment record, Seville, 1582 (AGI, Justicia, leg. 483, fol. 7367).
Lic. Serván de Cerezuela, inquisitor of Lima, perished on the way to Spain. Book collection of 105 volumes. Inventory of goods, Cartagena, 1583 (AGI, Contratación, leg. 222, no. 2, ramo 1).
Don Martín Enríquez, viceroy of New Spain, later viceroy of Peru. Book collection of 70 volumes. Inventory of goods, Lima, 1583 (AGI, Contratación, leg. 479, no. 3, ramo 6).
Lic. Juan Alcedo de la Rocha, fiscal of the Inquisition of Lima. Book collection of 116 volumes. Inventory of goods, Lima, 1586 (AGI, Contratación, leg. 927, ramo 4).
Lic. Cristóbal Ferrer de Ayala, fiscal of the Audiencia of Lima. Book collection of 266 volumes, estimated at 4,950 reales. Purchase record, Lima, 1590 (AGN, Protocolo 142, siglo XVI, fol. 558).
P. Alonso de Torres Maldonado, doctrinero of Leimebamba (Chachapoyas). Book collection of 60 volumes. Inventory of goods, Leimebamba, 1591 (AGI, Contratación, leg. 249, no. 6, ramo 4).
Lic. Juan Bautista de Monzón, fiscal and oidor of the Audiencia of Lima, perished in Spain. Book collection of 46 volumes, estimated at 495 reales. Inventory of goods, Madrid, 1594 (AMPH, Protocolo 2525, fol. 335).
Lic. Tomás de Solarana, fiscal of the Inquisition of Lima, book collection of 100 volumes. Inventory of goods, Lima, 1606 (AGI, Contratación, leg. 279-A, no. 3).
Dr. Hernando Arias de Ugarte, archbishop of Bogotá, Charcas, and Lima. Book collection of 640 volumes, estimated at 30,598 reales. Inventory of goods, Lima, 1614 (AGN, Protocolo 2004, siglo XVII, fol. 475).
Dr. Cipriano de Medina, lawyer, rector of the University of Lima. Book collection of 746 volumes. Inventory of goods, Lima, 1635 (AGN, Protocolo 818, siglo XVII, fol. 496).
Dr. Juan Hurtado de Vera, clergyman, canon of the Cathedral of Lima. Book collection of 691 volumes. Inventory of goods, Lima, 1636 (AGN, Protocolo 871, siglo XVII, fol. 1418).
Dr. Francisco de Avila, extirpator of idolatries, canon of the Cathedral of Lima. Book collection of 3,108 volumes. Inventory of goods, Lima, 1648 (AGN, Protocolo 468, siglo XVII, fol. 1027).
Don Pedro Milachami, cacique of the Cañaris of Luringuanca. Book collection of 16 volumes. Inventory of goods, Concepción, 1662 (ANZ, leg. 3, fol. 362).
Dr. Alonso Bravo de Paredes, doctrinero of Quiquijana (Cuzco). Book collection of 258 volumes. Inventory of goods, Quiquijana, 1670 (AAC, Sección Colonial, IV, paquete 4, no. 77, fol. 130).
Dr. Manuel de Mollinedo y Angulo, bishop of Cuzco. Book collection of 696 volumes, estimated at 31,928 reales. Inventory of goods, Lima, 1673 (AGN, Protocolo 1457, siglo XVII, fol. 379).
Convent of Nuestra Señora de la Almudena, transferred to the Bethlemites of Cuzco. Book collection of 184 volumes. Inventory of goods, Cuzco, 1698 (AAC, Colegio de Ciencias, carpeta 19, leg. 13, no. 3).
Information Sources on Private Libraries in Colonial Peru
The private libraries listed in appendix 1 have been described and analyzed in the following publications.
See Felipe Barreda Laos, Vida intelectual del virreinato del Perú, 3d ed. (Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1964). He asserts: “El pensamiento nació esclavizado en la Colonia, incapaz de romper el yugo que desde el siglo XVI lo ahogó. Desde entonces, el pensamiento peruano colonial vivió aislado del resto del mundo” [Thought was born into slavery in the colony, incapable of breaking the yoke that had smothered it since the sixteenth century. From then on, Peruvian colonial thought lived isolated from the rest of the world] (p. 106).
“Lo ingente de una tarea que requiere dosis inagotables de paciencia y de conocimientos en todos los ramos del saber ha retraído a los investigadores de practicar una ponderación exacta del influjo de los libros y de su difusión.” Guillermo Lohmann Villena, “Libros, libreros y bibliotecas en la época virreinal,” Fénix 21 (1971), 20.
See Pedro Guibovich Pérez, “Las lecturas de Francisco de Isásaga,” Histórica 10 (1986), 191.
Laurence Hallewell, Books in Brazil: A History of the Publishing Trade (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1982).
Sabine G. MacCormack, "Atahualpa y el libro,” Revista de Indias 184 (Sept.-Dec. 1988), 693-714.
Teodoro Hampe-Martínez, “Presencia de un librero medinense en Lima (siglo XVI),” Revista Histórica 34 (1983-84), 103-12.
Pedro Guibovich Pérez, “Libros para ser vendidos en el virreinato del Perú a fines del siglo XVI,” Boletín del Instituto Riva-Agüero 13 (1984-85), 85-88.
Antonio Rodríguez-Buckingham, “The Establishment, Production, and Equipment of the First Printing Press in South America,” Harvard Library Bulletin 26 (1978), 350-52.
See Roberto Levillier, Don Francisco de Toledo, supremo organizador del Perú. Su vida, su obra (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1935), 107-28; and Rubén Vargas Ugarte, Historia del Perú. Virreynato, 1551-1590 (Lima: La Prensa, 1942), 217-34.
J. H. Parry, El imperio español de ultramar, trans. Ildefonso Echevarría (Madrid: Aguilar, 1970), 140.
Julie Greer Johnson, ed., The Book in the Americas: The Role of Books and Printing in the Development of Culture and Society in Colonial Latin America (Providence: John Carter Brown Library, 1988), 3.
See J. M. de Bujanda, Index de l’Inquisition espagnole, in Index des livres interdits, vol. 5 (Sherbrooke: Université de Sherbrooke, Centre d’Etudes de la Renaissance, 1984).
José Torre Revello, El libro, la imprenta y el periodismo en América durante la dominación española (Buenos Aires: Jacobo Peuser, 1940), 47. See also Agustín Millares Cario, Bibliotecas y difusión del libro en Hispanoamérica colonial: intento bibliográfico,” Boletín Histórico 22 (Jan. 1970), 25-26; and Lohmann Villena, “Libros, libreros y bibliotecas,” 20.
See Maxime Chevalier, Lectura y lectores en la España de los siglos XVI y XVII (Madrid: Turner, 1976), 41-43.
Francisco de Solano, “Fuentes para la historia cultural: libros y bibliotecas de la América colonial,” in Ensayos de metodología histórica en el campo americanista, ed. Fermín del Pino Díaz (Madrid: CSIC, Centro de Estudios Históricos, 1985), 69–71.
See Guillermo Lohmann Villena, “Los libros españoles en Indias,” Arbor 2 (1944), 221-49.
Helga Kropfinger von Kügelgen, “Exportación de libros europeos de Sevilla a la Nueva España en el año de 1586,” in Libros europeos en la Nueva España afines del siglo XVI (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1973), 11-16.
Teodoro Hampe-Martinez, “Los primeros libros en el Peru colonial,” Fénix 28/29 (1983), 84, 90.
See Guillermo Aulet Sastre, “Precios autorizados de libros españoles en Indias,” Revista de Indias 24 (Apr.-June 1946), 311-12. Prices of imported books varied according to the distance from Seville and the affluence of each province.
For the case of France, this problem has been superbly investigated by Roger Chartier, Lectures et lecteurs dans la France d’Ancien Régime (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987), 353–54. See also Chevalier, Lectura y lectores en España, 19; and Solano, “Fuentes para la historia cultural,” 69.
Irving A. Leonard, Los libros del conquistador, trans. Mario Monteforte Toledo (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econòmica, 1953), 22, 36-37.
“Del erasmismo español se derivò hacia América una corriente animada por la esperanza de fundar con la gente nueva de tierras nuevamente descubiertas una renovada cristiandad.” Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y España. Estudios sobre la historia espiritual del siglo XVI, trans. Antonio Alatorre, 2d ed. (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1966), 816.
See Teodoro Hampe-Martínez, “La actuación del obispo Vicente de Vaiverde en el Perú,” Historia y Cultura 13/14 (1981), 110-12.
Guibovich Pérez, “Las lecturas de Francisco de Isásaga,” 207.
“Todos los conquistadores no eran analfabetos, ni menos lo eran sus hijos.” José de la Riva-Agüero, Estudios de literatura peruana. Del Inca Garcilaso a Eguren, in his Obras completas (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1962), 2:594.
See Guillermo Tovar de Teresa, “Las bibliotecas mexicanas de la primera mitad del siglo XVI,” in his Ciudad de México y la utopía en el siglo XVI (Mexico City: Espejo de Obsidiana, 1987), 65-70.
In addition, the private library belonging to a celebrated Peruvian writer, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, has been thoroughly examined by José Durand, “La biblioteca del Inca, Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 2 (1948), 239–64. Garcilaso’s collection of some two hundred volumes, inventoried in Córdoba in 1616, has not been included in the present study because it originates mainly from the long period when he resided in Andalucía.
Teodoro Hampe-Martínez, “Los libros del cacique,” El Comercio (Lima), Mar. 21, 1989, p. A-2.
See Lawrence S. Thompson, “The Libraries of Colonial Spanish America,” The Library Binder 138 (1963), 6-13; and Ignacio Osorio Romero, Historia de las bibliotecas novohispanas (Mexico City: SEP, Dirección General de Bibliotecas, 1986).
Chevalier, Lectura y lectores en España, 39.
Teodoro Hampe-Martínez, “Una biblioteca cuzqueña confiscada por la Inquisición,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 45 (1988), 283-96.
For a comprehensive review of private libraries known from colonial Spanish America, see Millares Carlo, Bibliotecas y difusión,” 25-72, which contains a bibliographical list of 188 items. For the mid-seventeenth century, Millares Carlo especially points out the book collection belonging to Melchor Pérez de Soto in Mexico City, which comprised (no more than) 1,592 volumes, according to the inventory made in 1655 by the Inquisition.
See Antonio Acosta, ‘Francisco de Avila,” in Ritos y tradiciones de Huarochirí. Manuscrito quechua de comienzos del siglo XVII, ed. Gerald Taylor (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos/Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 1987), 551-616.
Teodoro Hampe-Martínez, Universo intelectual de un extirpador de idolatrías: la biblioteca de Francisco de Avila” (Paper submitted to the 46th International Congress of Americanists, Amsterdam, July 4-8, 1988).
Renate Pieper, La revolución de los precios en España, 1500-1640. Sus causas y efectos (Barcelona: Ancora, 1987), 43-54.
Teodoro Hampe-Martínez, “La biblioteca del arzobispo Hernando Arias de Ugarte: bagaje intelectual de un prelado criollo,” Thesaurus 42 (1987), 339.
It must be noted that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries only four towns in Spanish America enjoyed the royal permit to establish a printing press: Mexico City (beginning in 1539), Lima (1584), Puebla de los Angeles (1640). and Guatemala City (1660). The activity of all these publishing centers has been studied by José Toribio Medina in four classic works: La imprenta en México, 8 vols. (1907-12), La imprenta en Lima, 4 vols. (1904-7), La imprenta en la Puebla de los Angeles (1908), and La imprenta en Guatemala (1910) (all, Santiago de Chile: en casa del autor).
Leonard, Libros del conquistador, 99-100.
Carlos A. González Sánchez, “El libro y la carrera de Indias: registro de ida de navios,” Archivo Hispalense 220 (May-Aug. 1989), 96-97.
See Josep M. Barnadas, “La biblioteca jesuita de Quito en el siglo XVII: breve panorama analítico,” Ibero-Americana Pragensia 8 (1974), 151.
José M. Mariluz Urquijo, “El saber profesional de los agentes de la administración pública en Indias,” in Estructuras, gobierno y agentes de la administración en la América española (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, Seminario Americanista, 1984), 252, 259. See also J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469-1716 (London: Edward Arnold, 1963), 165-66; and Parry, Imperio español de ultramar, 167.
Bartolomé Clavero, Temas de historia del Derecho. Derecho común, 2d ed. (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1979), 80-81.
See Teodoro Hampe-Martínez, “La difusión de libros e ideas en el Perú colonial: análisis de bibliotecas particulares (siglo XVI),” Bulletin Hispanique 89 (1987), 74-76.
Cf. Ruggiero Romano and Alberto Tenenti, Los fundamentos del mundo moderno: Edad Media tardía y Renacimiento, 7th ed. (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1977); and Bartolomé Bennassar, La España del Siglo de Oro (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1983).
Aurelio Miró Quesada, “Fray Luis de Granada en el Perú,” Revista de la Universidad Católica 11/12 (1982), 18-19.
Bataillon, Erasmo y España, 527-40.
Torre Revello suggests that Nebrija, particularly through his Latin grammar, was the most widely read author in the Spanish American dominions. Libro, imprenta y periodismo, 207.
See Lohmann Villena, “Los libros españoles en Indias,” 233-44.
“Negar que los hombres más ilustrados de América durante la era colonial carecían [sic] de los necesarios elementos de cultura, es negar la realidad de los hechos.” Torre Revello, Libro, imprenta y periodismo, 132-33.
I am very grateful to Carmen Castañeda of Guadalajara for her critical suggestions on this topic.
