Little is known about the early years of Bernardo de Balbuena (Valdepeñas 1562-San Juan de Puerto Rico 1627), except that he traveled very young to America where his father had business in Nueva Galicia. Some sources find him in the cities of Guadalajara and Mexico, where he apparently studied arts...

The «Quijote» from America (Second Part) is a homage to Don Quixote (1615) by a group of distinguished specialists from both sides of the Atlantic. It is a way of recognizing, and celebrating, the immediate arrival of the Cervantes masterpiece to America and its deep subsequent impact on many important...

En la provincia de Costa Rica se pusieron en escena, en enero de 1809, tres piezas de teatro breve escritas por Joaquín de Oreamuno y Muñoz de la Trinidad. En la geografía colonial la provincia pertenecía al Antiguo Reino de Guatemala y la representación era parte de una serie de muestras de lealtad...

His contemporaries knew him as El Lunarejo. Juan de Espinosa Medrano (1630? - 1688)  was probably born at the town of Calcauso, part of the Doctrine of the Bishopry of Cuzco that today belongs to the Department of Apurimac. We ignore information about his parents’ biography and formative years. Nevertheless...

The eighteenth century gave birth to a celebrated character of the Peruvian history, whose memory has hardly survived until now, under the shadow of the Tradiciones peruanas (oral tradition stories) of Ricardo Palma, that called him “El Volador” (the flyer). This personage was Santiago de Cárdenas, native of Lima, ingenious...

The Memorias de Trévoux is a particularly curious work: it is an encyclopedic dictionary written collectively by the Jesuits, throughout most of the eighteenth century, in the city of Trévoux, where one of the most important Jesuits colleges was located. As an encyclopedia, it has a secular style different from...

Feijoo is one of the most important Spanish Enlightenment authors of the eighteenth century. His work will have a deep impact in the Spanish society because it is a pioneer effort in Spain to make an encyclopedia that collects extensive information. This effort that was born in France some decades...

One of the topics that has most attracted the attention of Americanist critics has been the European in the  imagination of  America as a chimerical continent that brought together much of the hopes and fears of the Old World, as well as its projects of colonial domination. Such is the...

Louis Moreri was a French scholar of the seventeenth century, author of the historical Dictionary by which he became well known during the seventeenth and the eighteenth. His work was a forerunner of the encyclopedists, because it corresponded with the beginning of the Enlightenment. Like many authors before L'Encyclopédie, Moreri’s...

Santiago de Cárdenas clearly mentions the geodesic expedition of France between its references, information taken not from the authors work, but from the expedition itself. He explicitly names Charles-Marie de La Condamine, its French Director, as well as the Spanish scientists Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa. Although the exact...

Barroco de ambos mundos. Miradas desde Puebla offers a series of interdisciplinary and transatlantic works on various themes and problems of this period, with particular attention to the modalities of the Indian Baroque. The diversity of approaches and reasons addressed, without claiming to be exhaust, allows us to take on...

Abbot Pluche was a French ecclesiastic of the eighteenth century, especially known for his treatise on natural history El espectáculo de la naturaleza, to which Cardenas refers twice. This voluminous treatise, originally edited in eight volumes of nine volumes, was thought as an informative work rather than as a scientific...