Pensamiento europeo y cultura colonial explores the rich, complex, and yet poorly understood intellectual world of Spanish America. Eighteen papers, uneven in quality and length, vie for the attention of the reader. The editors have divided the contributions of Mexican, Peruvian, French, and German historians into five separate sections
The section “Humanism” begins with an essay by Karl Kohut on Francisco Cervantes de Salazar. Cervantes was part of a vast network of Spanish humanists (including Alejo Venegas, Hernán Pérez de Oliva, and Ambrosio Morales) who in the footsteps of Pietro Martire d’Anghiera followed with great interest news about the orbe novo, in the case of Cervantes so much so that he moved to Mexico. By elaborating the trope of the city of Mexico as a microcosm and by emphasizing the grandeur of the Amerindian past while repudiating contemporary Indians, Cervantes laid the foundations of two of the most enduring themes of Mexican creole patriotism. Sonia Rose writes on the physical and moral written portraits of Moctezuma offered by Cervantes de Salazar, López de Gomara, and Díaz del Castillo. Rose concludes, correctly, that sixteenth-century literature on the indigenous peoples of the Americas should be located within larger contemporary views of the Oriental other, including the Turks. Moctezuma, however, was not cast as a Turkish sultan but as a virtuous monarch, not unlike those described in the Siete Partidas. Articles by Dietrich Briesemeister on Nebrija’s many followers in the New World and by José Anadón on Garcilaso Inca de la Vega tread territories that have already been well surveyed in the writings of Sabine MacCormack and the late Ignacio Osorio Romero.
The section on “Neo-Scholasticism” includes a provocative article by José Rodríguez Garrido that puts the oeuvre of a leading seventeenth Cuzqueño intellectual, Juan de Espinoza Medrano, in the context of Dominican struggles in Cuzco against the Jesuits over the control of higher education. Jean-Pierre Clément writes on Mariano Cornejo y Valcárcel, who in late-eighteenth-century Cuzco managed to turn the “populist” views of Francisco Suárez into the foundation of a theory of absolutist politics. Finally, Concepción Reverte Bernal uses the many plays of Francisco del Castillo as a window through which to study the transition from the Baroque to the Enlightenment in Lima during the first half of the eighteenth century.
The third section, “Neo-Stoicism,” opens with a paper by Peer Schmidt on the followers of Justus Lipsius in the Indies. Schmidt suggests that neostoicism, which in Europe played a leading role in the disciplining of society, failed miserably in colonial Latin America, its many followers notwithstanding. Drawing on the European books of emblems and indigenous codices available to the creole polymath Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora in the late seventeenth century, Helga von Kügelgen reconstructs the iconography of four of the thirteen emblems of Mexica emperors found in Sigüenza’s Teatro de virtudes políticas (1680). In a paper written against Octavio Paz’s interpretation of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Marie-Cécile Bénassy argues that Sor Juana was not silenced into submission but rather withdrew from the world, heeding Seneca’s calls to avoid useless philosophical speculations and to retire before allowing others to witness the decadence brought about by aging.
A fourth section, “Indigenous Societies and Mestizaje,” is odd and superfluous. It includes a very interesting essay on Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo by Louise Bénat- Tachot along with three other contributions that because of their lack of thematic relation to the rest of the book (Nicola Kuhne Heyder’s on the spiritual conquest of the Huasteca; Juan Manuel Pérez Zevallos’s on mestizaje in New Spain; and Sergio Arroyo García’s review of recent Mexican literature on mythography) should not have been included.
The final, fifth section on the impact of America in European intellectual circles features three articles. Building on Ignacio Osorio’s scholarship on Kircher’s impact in seventeenth-century Mexico, Roswitha Kramer argues that the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher was part of a larger circle of German and Italian virtuosi devoted to collecting New World curiosities. According to Kramer, Kircher wrote extensively on American natural wonders. However, he was less preoccupied about Amerindian antiquities and demonstrated great carelessness in his study of Mexican codices, even though he had a network of correspondents who could have informed him better. Gerhard Wawor, on the other hand, explores in a fascinating paper the various modifications that early-sixteenth-century Italian, German, and Spanish humanist circles introduced to Columbus’s letter to Santángel. This section ends with an essay by Jan Lachner on the holdings of Spanish books on the New World in early-modern Dutch libraries.
The book is a welcome addition to the literature on colonial Spanish American intellectual history.
