La tradicion clasica en el Peru virreinal, and: La formacion de la cultura virreinal. Vol. 1: La etapa inicial (review)

La tradición clásica en el Perú virreinal. Edited by Teodoro Hampe Martínez. Lima: Fondo Editorial Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos; Sociedad Peruana de Estudios Clásicos, 1999. Plates. Bibliographies. 344 pp. Paper.

La formación de la cultura virreinal. Vol. 1: La etapa inicial. Edited by Karl Kohut and Sonia V. Rose. Textos y Estudios Coloniales y de la Independencia. Frankfurt: Vervuert; Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2000. Illustrations. Tables. Bibliography. Index. 439 pp. Paper.

In 1656 the civil and religious authorities of Lima organized a parade to dedicate the city to the Immaculate Conception. Images of Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, and Archemedes led the procession; the impresas and floats that followed sought to draw moral connections between pagan deities, such as Mercury and Minerva, and the Virgin Mary. As the festivities continued, the cathedral chapter signed a contract with a leading ceramist to put tiles depicting the naked Bacchus and Ceres on the walls of the chapel to the Immaculate Conception, where they can still be seen. The theologian in charge of the designs, Vasco de Contreras Valverde, thought that Bacchus stood for the spiritual intoxication experienced by mystics. Ceres, the goddess of agriculture who went to the netherworld searching for her daughter Proserpine, symbolized the bread of the Eucharist as well as the Church of Peru's willingness to scour the underground for improperly converted Indians. As the learned drafted laws, ruled polities, designed cloisters and cathedrals, studied and manipulated nature, investigated local antiquities, and thought of God, they turned to the ancients for inspiration.

Teodoro Hampe Martínez has edited a volume on the reception of classical texts in colonial Peru. In the 15 essays that make up the La tradición clásica en el Perú virreinal we learn that in colonial Peru the texts of authors such as Ovid, Terence, Cicero, and Aristotle seemed to have been as ubiquitous as the vultures and open sewers that greeted travelers upon arrival in Callao. In sixteenth-century Huamanga, Huncavelica, and Potosí, for example, a visitor could have found along mitayos working in mills, mines, and haciendas a local intelligentsia busily translating the works in Latin and Italian of Petrarch and Francesco Patrizi. Limeño booksellers, printers, and clerics briskly traded new European editions of ancient texts as they went on to produce their own. While seeking to apply classical learning and genres to the realities of the New World, the members of Lima's Academia Antártica in just a few years churned out such titles as Miscelánea Antártica (1586), Arauco domado (1596), Miscelánea Austral (1602), Discurso en loor de la poesía (1608), Parnaso Antártico (1608), Armas Antárticas (1608), and La Cristiada (1611). Huge libraries featuring the classics appeared early on all over the land. Acquaintance with the ancients continued unabated throughout the colonial period and beyond.

This is a composite picture of what is in the book, but the individual essays offer more detailed images. Thus we learn that Herodotus, Pliny, and Annius de Viterbo's pseudo-Berosus proved fundamental in shaping most natural and civil histories, and that the histories of the Incas, particularly Garcilaso's, were modeled after those of Rome (Franklin Pease); that Plato's Timaeus prompted many chroniclers to claim that the natives had arrived via Atlantis (Luis Fnrique Toral); that clerics and bureaucrats were educated in the many medieval and early-modern versions of the logic and metaphysics of Aristotle, and that many colonial commentaries of Aristotle's works have remained unopened, gathering dust in Peruvian libraries (María Luisa Rivara de Tuesta and Teodoro Hampe Martínez); that classical notions of the body helped justify the hierarchies of ancien régimeSpanish America (Rafael Sánchez-Concha Barrios); that European editions of the classics were...