The Bishop's Utopia: Envisioning Improvement in Colonial Peru (The Early Modern Americas)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.73 (932 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0812245911 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 320 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-06-28 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Emily Berquist's work on Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón is worthy of its determined, dynamic, enlightened subject. Each of its seven chapters is written in language as vibrant as the color plates that adorn the interior.. The book is equal parts biography, history of science, and visual, intellectual, and social history. This is no small featAny historian of this bishop must be as much of a polymath as he was, and Berquist Soule more than rises to the occasion
Emily Berquist Soule recounts the reform agenda of Martínez Compañón—including the construction of new towns, improvement of the mining industry, and promotion of indigenous education—and positions it within broader imperial debates; unlike many of his Enlightenment contemporaries, who elevated fellow Europeans above native peoples, Martínez Compañón saw Peruvian Indians as intelligent, productive subjects of the Spanish Crown. He imagined that the collection and the watercolors not only would contribute to his quest to study the native cultures of Northern Peru but also would supply valuable information for his plans to transform Trujillo into an orderly, profitable slice of the Spanish Empire.Based on intensive archival research in Peru, Spain, and Colombia and the unique visual data of more than a thousand extraordinary watercolors, The Bishop's Utopia recreates the intellectual, cultural, and political universe of the Spanish Atlantic world in the late eighteenth century. To accompany this collection, the Bishop had also commissioned from Indian artisans nine volum
lively study of a reforming bishop in 18c Peru A splendid short monograph, colorful, well-illustrated, and well-written, about an enthusiastic improving bishop in late eighteenth-century Peru. Balthasar Jaime Martinez Companon, a Basque cleric who was called to Lima in 1768 and subsequently became the Bishop of Trujillo in northern Peru, seems to have been an exceptionally good bishop, one who navigated a complex racial situation and protests against government corruption and Spanish oppression of the Indians by instituting myriad reforms, especially the founding of towns and schools, in his bishopric. He also had an ambitious (though unrealized) program to