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2022, Colonial Latin American Review
As the royal library of Felipe II at the Escorial, the Simancas archive, and private collections such as that of the Count-Duke Gaspar de Olivares demonstrate – the latter holding more than 2700 printed books and more than 1400 manuscripts – Renaissance Spain certainly matched its European rivals in bibliophilic and archival fervour. In that first age of information, all kinds of data was meticulously collected and organized, on the Peninsula and in the colonies, according to the latest trends and ideas. Yet, as the famous destruction of the library in Don Quixote 1.6-7 demonstrates, libraries and archives were not seen as unequivocally triumphant symbols of enlightened humanism. They were, rather, considered ambiguous labyrinths of information where one could loose one's way and even one's mind if not careful. Thus, in Renaissance Spain, the organization of information in libraries and archives, physical and metaphorical, went hand in hand with the burning of books. Considering this dialectic, it seems entirely logical that the great seventeenth-century bibliographer Nicolás Antonio's Biblioteca hispana nova (1672) and Biblioteca hispana vetus (published posthumously in 1696) should be complemented by his Censura de las historias fabulosas (published 1742). In this fascinating work, Don Nicolás used his enormous erudition to counter the "alternative facts" set forth in the false paleo-Christian chronicles which were allegedly discovered by the Jesuit pseudo-historian Román de la Higuera in the late 16th century and published in 1619 under the title Fragmentum Chronici sive omnimodae historiae Flavii Lucii Dextri Barcinonensis. With its unravelling of historical forgery, the Censura provides an Ariadne thread through the labyrinths of information. What we find in this work is, obviously, a proto-Enlightenment idea of the advancement of historical understanding through the outmaneuvering of credulous "fables". Like the new literary spirit rising from the ashes of Don Quixote's mendacious books, a new conception of historiography emerges from Nicolás Antonio's demolition of the hodge-podge of fact and fiction characterizing not only the false chronicles, but indeed Renaissance historical writing broadly. My paper will analyse the ideas of historical veracity and the truthful organization of information found in the Censura and discuss the different rhetorical, noetic, and aesthetic strategies it uses to stimulate readers' reflection on the nature of historical truth and promote correct decoding and assessment of historical information.
Pacific Coast Philology
Imagining Public Libraries in Sixteenth-Century Spain: Juan Páez de Castro and Juan Bautista Cardona2017 •
This article analyzes two sixteenth-century proposals for a library that would be placed under the control of the king of Spain and accessible to the public. The first is Juan Páez de Castro’s 1556 Memorial, often read as a blueprint for the institution that Philip II eventually founded at El Escorial. The second is Juan Bautista Cardona’s Traza for El Escorial, addressed to the king in 1579, when that project was already in progress. Páez and Cardona dreamed of a library that would overcome the dangers of loss and dispersion associated with collections owned by flesh-and-bone individuals destined to die at some point. This article will show that Páez and Cardona drew inspiration from previous and ongoing projects in Italy, France, and Spain to conclude that the preservation and dissemination of books required the association with a printing press. This was a plan that, to the chagrin of Cardona’s contemporaries, failed to adequately materialize for El Escorial.
Mediterranea. International journal on the transfer of knowledge
'Navigating the Seas of Human Knowledge: Hernando Colón and the New World of Books,' in "Mediterranea. International journal on the transfer of knowledge," 7 (2022), pp. 449–4672022 •
2007 •
History of European Ideas
The rediscovery of the Spanish Republic of Letters2019 •
This article provides a reappraisal of the history of proyectismo. Scholars have employed the concept to categorise early eighteenth-century Spanish authors and reforms, and have thereby severed them from their historical context. This article explores the imperial origins of this political culture by shedding light on the generation of knowledge in early eighteenth-century diplomatic and imperial spaces. The article focuses on the overlooked thinker Álvaro José Navia-Osorio y Vigil, Marquis of Santa Cruz de Marcenado (1684–1732) – long considered to be a proyectista – and his appeal to the Spanish Republic of Letters to assist him in his project for a universal dictionary; an enterprise that predated Chamber’s Cyclopedia and Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Marcenado’s contributions to the establishment of Spanish intellectual connections with foreign thinkers were, moreover, symptomatic of the political approach of early eighteenth-century ilustrados – transterritorial, transnational, and transversal thinkers who drew on the peninsula’s ties with the Flanders and Italy to revitalise the intellectual life of Spain. These thinkers recovered the study of Muslim Spain, and envisioned the establishment of councils and academies in Mexico and Peru. The Spanish Enlightenment, then, originated in the early eighteenth-century from their rediscovery of the Spanish Republic of Letters.
Pacific Coast Philology
Forum: Wars of Knowledge: Iberian Imperial Hegemony and the Assembling of Libraries2017 •
2024 •
This chapter focuses on the works of Martín de Azpilcueta that circulated on the book distribution networks of the Hispanic Atlantic world. Shipping manifests and reports with the titles declared for shipment to the West Indies show which of Azpilcueta's works were present or absent, revealing their distribution via different channels and to different territories in the Americas. 1) To identify the presence of Azpilcueta's texts in the shipping manifests for books dispatched to the West Indies on the fleets of New Spain and Tierra Firme in the period of 1583-1700; 2.1) to analyse the networks of distribution and intermediation that facilitated the delivery of Azpilcueta's books; 2.2) to identify the agents who took part (e.g., booksellers, private individuals, and merchants) and the routes and circuits in active use between Seville and the Spanish Crown's American territories; 3.1) to analyse Azpilcueta's presence in a specific network of booksellers (Diego Mexía and his son Fernando); and 3.2) to gather detailed information on private shipments containing the texts of Doctor Navarrus (as Azpilcueta was also known), especially those of law professionals who set sail for the West Indies with their libraries aboard. An analysis of shipping manifests from the 16th and 17th centuries in the colonial records known as the Registro de Ida de Navíos within the Casa de la Contratación held in the General Archive of the Indies in Seville. The analysis covers in the region of 325 shipping manifests from the 16th century (1583-1600) and 1,586 manifests or other reports with titles from the 17th century (1601-1700). The documents enable us to quantitatively track the shipments of each title (Manual de confesores y penitentes, Compendium, the Opera, and a few other works by Azpilcueta) and qualitatively analyse their presence in certain shipments of booksellers and private individuals. The research has turned up 73 manifests from the 16th century that contain Azpilcueta's books, including 96 entries of different titles by the author. It has also identified 56 manifests from the period of 1601-1650. In shipments sent in the second half of the 17th century, however, Azpilcueta's works are no longer present.
2024 •
ehumanista Journal of Iberian Studies
The Anti-Castilianist Credo of Judezmo Journalist Hizkia M. Franco (1875-1953)2012 •
The International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law
The Anglo-Spanish Dispute over the Waters of Gibraltar and the Tripartite Forum of Dialogue2011 •
2009 •
Zeitschrift für Physik C Particles and Fields
Reactions of muonic hydrogen isotopes1992 •
Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery - Global Open
Cancer Stem Cells in Head and Neck Cutaneous Squamous Cell Carcinoma Express Cathepsins2020 •
2020 •
PREPRINTS-AUDIO ENGINEERING SOCIETY
Distributed mode loudspeaker simulation model1998 •
2022 •
2016 IEEE 84th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC-Fall)
Joint Source-Channel Optimization of Vector Quantization with Polar Codes2016 •