The Peruvian Pedro Peralta Barnuevo (1664-1743) was an author of enormous erudition. Although few of his more than 60 literary and historical writings are readily available, textbooks on colonial Latin America often mention him in cursory discussions of cultural life. Along with several Peruvian scholars, Jerry M. Williams, the first literary historian writing in English since Irving A. Leonard to focus on Peralta’s works, is trying to increase appreciation of the Peruvian’s valuable contributions to colonial literature. This critical edition complements Williams’s 1994 volume, Censorship and Art in Pre-Enlightenment Lima: Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo’s Diálogo de los muertos: la causa académica (Potomac, Md., 1993).
Williams introduces both Peralta’s literary corpus and Peru’s largely ignored early-eighteenth-century literary publications to a broader range of scholars through providing introductions, explanatory notes, and modern, critical Spanish editions of Peralta’s little-known Imagen política del gobierno de don Diego Ladrón de Guevara (1714), Oración que dijo el D.D. Pedro de Peralta Bamuevo y Rocha (1716), El templo de la fama vindicado (1720), and Diálogo político: la Verdad y la Justicia (1724). Peralta wrote these works to honor or vindicate Bishop-Viceroy Diego Ladrón de Guevara (1710-16) and Archbishop-Viceroy Diego Morcillo Rubio de Auñón (1716, 1720-24), both of whom were his patrons. The internal unity of these works, Williams argues, lies in Peralta’s “discourse of loyalty,” an effort to influence public opinion positively toward the new Bourbon monarchy as well as its viceregal representatives.
In making the four tracts accessible to today’s reader, Williams has modernized the orthography and provided Spanish spelling of Latin names, regularized the use of uppercase letters, and employed modern spellings (with the exception of retaining object pronouns linked to conjugated verbs). Peralta’s numerous marginal notes are supplemented by the editor’s copious and extremely helpful critical footnotes at the end of each transcription.
Williams has admirably met his objective of introducing Peralta’s works to a broader audience. Literary scholars can better evaluate the intrinsic merit of the Peruvian’s writings, while historians more accustomed to archival documentation will appreciate the availability of a well-placed contemporary’s commentary on the Universidad de San Marcos and its alumni, political events in Lima during a period of unprecedented French trade with the viceroyalty of Peru, corruption, and viceregal administration.
Because relatively little scholarly work has examined Peru during the years between 1710 and 1724, the early-eighteenth-century focus of this book deserves praise. However, Williams’s bibliography reveals the use of primarily synthetic secondary historical sources and little recent monographic scholarship that would provide a stronger historical context for Peralta’s writings. There is no appreciation, for example, of the extremely prominent role that Peruvian-born officeholders enjoyed in Lima during the early eighteenth century. Williams summarizes without comment Peralta’s position that “Creoles and Indians constituted a disenfranchised class with limited access to political and economic wealth” (p. 15). Both Enrique Tandeter’s examination of Potosí in the eighteenth century and Carlos Daniel Malamud Rikles’s study of trade between St. Malo and Peru offer material directly relevant to understanding more clearly Peralta’s immediate environment.
Williams has clearly established himself as the leading authority on Peralta and deserves credit for making more of the Peruvian’s writings readily available. The publication of this volume, moreover, is an important reminder of both the utility of literary sources for historical research and the amount of investigation remaining to be done on the history of early-eighteenth-century Peru.
