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195 chapter 8 Local Nature, Local Histories i n his 1643 update of Pedro Ribadeneyra’s catalog of Jesuit writers, Philippe de Alegambe announced that Cobo had put together a history of the Indies that would be published before long.1 A year earlier, Cobo had returned to Peru after spending a decade in Mexico; despite Alegambe’s announcement, it took him ten more years to finish his Historia del Nuevo Mundo. Cobo died four years later in 1657 without seeing his book in print, and it seems that neither the Peruvian Jesuits nor the superiors in Rome made any efforts to publish it. It is likely that Cobo’s continuous defiance of instructions to stop his research and devote himself to his pastoral and educational duties had something to do with his manuscript remaining unpublished.2 Whatever the reason, in the late eighteenth century Cobo’s manuscript was in Seville, where Juan Bautista Muñoz found it and had it copied for his own collection, a copy that would later be the basis of the first edition of the Historia del Nuevo Mundo, edited between 1890 and 1893 by Marcos Jiménez de la Espada, and reprinted in 1956 by Francisco Mateos in the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles. Although it was the only work penned by a Jesuit in South America capable of rivaling Acosta’s Historia in scope and philosophical insight, Cobo’s book remained unknown to his contemporaries and relegated to oblivion for over two centuries. Thus, despite its ambitious scope, the Historia del Nuevo Mundo had little influence on subsequent Jesuit natural histories of South America. But the greater emphasis on the specificity of the American natural world that Cobo’s book reveals can be seen as part of a major trend that developed in the natural histories written by the Jesuits during the seventeenth century. Although Cobo’s book was the last attempt by a Jesuit to create a totalizing description of America in the seventeenth century, other contemporary Jesuit writers took up their pens to write more restricted, regional histories. By and large, these books focused on the missionary enterprise of the Society of Jesus in South America, emphasizing the hardships and difficulties encountered by the Jesuit missionaries in isolated areas of the continent while showcasing their role in the political and economical suc- 196 Missionary Scientists cess of the regions in which they worked. More often than not, the Jesuits writers who took up the task of lending coherence and narrative form to the information and experience accumulated by the order did so following official instructions. Thus, for instance, Nicolás del Techo started to work on his history of the Paraguayan missions (which appeared in Liège in 1673) at the command of his superiors , who put all the papers and documents of the province at his disposal. Orders such as this did not come exclusively from Jesuit superiors. Sometimes , civil and political authorities requested the expertise of a particular Jesuit writer to compose a local or regional history. In the late 1620s, Luis Fernández de Córdoba, then Governor of Chile, started collecting papers and documents with the declared intention of commissioning the writing of a history of the realm. To this end, he bought the unfinished history left by one Domingo Sotelo Romay and, along with other documents, gave it to the Jesuit Bartolomé Navarro—who, however, failed to write the projected history. The project was forgotten until a royal directive instructed Governor Francisco Lazo de la Vega to arrange for a detailed description of Chile and its military and ecclesiastical history in 1633. Although Lazo de la Vega sent back to Spain short reports on these matters, he apparently commissioned Diego de Rosales, whom he had met during the voyage from Spain, to write a full-fledged history of Chile. Using the documents gathered by Fernández de Córdoba and supplementing them with information from the Jesuit archives housed at the College of Concepción, Rosales finally sent a first draft of his Historia general del reyno de Chile in the mid-1650s to Spain for approval.3 Rosales’s Historia general was more than simply a history of the conquest and colonization of Chile. Although his stated purpose was to perpetuate the memory of the conquerors and their deeds, Rosales in fact wrote a civil and military history that was also a panegyric to the missionary endeavors of the Jesuits.4 As I pointed out...

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