In approximately the last 40 years, few historians writing in English have devoted significant attention to the Enlightenment in Spanish America; and since a series of publications by Irving A. Leonard dating back to the 1930s, no one has examined what Jerry M. Williams refers to as the “pre-Enlightenment” in Peru. Consequently, Williams’ extensive introduction to the little-known, brief work by the Peruvian encyclopedist Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo, “Diálogo de los muertos: la causa académica,” is an informative and useful reminder that Lima had an academic and literary community before the well-known Mercurio peruano of the 1790s.
Williams’ book provides a lengthy introduction to Peralta and his cultural and literary environment, a discussion of cultural perceptions of criollos and the use of censorship, a facsimile of “Diálogo de los muertos” followed by a heavily annotated translation, and a catalogue of Peralta’s numerous published and unpublished works. The “Diálogo” will be of greatest interest to students of Spanish American literature, but historians will find the introduction, especially the discussion of Peralta’s life and milieu, valuable.
Particularly instructive is Williams’ examination of the literary academy established in Lima in 1709 by Viceroy Marqués Castell-dos-Rius, which flourished until the viceroy’s death the following year. Much like the Mercurio peruano and its principal writers, the academy comprised both peninsulares (seven) and criollos (four). Peralta, one of the criollos, subsequently founded an Academy of Mathematics and Eloquence. These academies and others in Lima provided a meeting place for intellectuals as well as poetasters. The poetic contests they sponsored produced verse reminiscent in style and substance (or lack of same) to that described by Leonard in Baroque Times in Old Mexico (1959). The comparisons of Peralta with Father Benito Feijóo in Spain and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora in Mexico place the study’s focus in the context of a broader intellectual movement.
Williams is a specialist in Spanish American literature, and consequently more knowledgeable about literary sources, arguments, and theories than about the history of eighteenth-century Peru. Thus he advances arguments, notably about creoles’ lack of opportunity in early eighteenth-century Lima, that historians swept away nearly two decades ago. In addition, he pays inadequate attention to chronology. For example, the introduction to the “Diálogos” implies a connection between Peralta’s work and his brushes with the Inquisition. Those run-ins, however, occurred after the time Williams claims he wrote the “Diálogos” (between 1725 and 1731).
This book is a useful introduction to intellectual life and conditions in early eighteenth-century Lima. Literary specialists, rather than historians, students, or general readers, will form its principal audience.
