In El edificio de letras, Pedro M. Guibovich Pérez adds two new essays to five previously published articles on the subject of Jesuit education and print culture in colonial Perú. The first two, comprising together almost half the book, concern conflicts among educational institutions; another two address the teaching of Jesuit theater; the last three—which include the two new additions—focus on print culture and library collections. Together, these essays offer precise insights into a colonial moment in which Jesuits greatly influenced the shape of Peruvian education and society.

Jesuits first arrived in the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1569, when the administrative reach of the region covered much of South America. Guibovich’s focus is primarily Lima and Cuzco, the two sites of the major institutional conflicts he recounts. In Lima, the conflict occurred between the College of San Pablo, founded by Jesuits, and the University of San Marcos, overseen by the Dominicans until 1569. Francisco de Toledo, a new viceroy who arrived in Peru in that year, observed the university’s declining state with a critical eye and recommended several changes, including the transfer of certain classes to the Jesuit order. This was the beginning of decades-long dispute between the established university on the one hand, and the Jesuit college, which quickly rose to unexpected prominence, on the other. Guibovich determines that while the debate was heated, at least blood was never spilled, and the result was that Jesuits managed to consolidate “if not a monopoly, then a clear authority in the area of the humanities” (52).

The debate in Cuzco between the College of San Bernardo and the College of San Antonio Abad, taking place some time later in the mid-seventeenth century, has been characterized by other scholars as one hinging on class conflict between the wealthier students of San Bernardo and the less fortunate of San Antonio. Guibovich challenges this view, arguing instead that the conflict concerned the requirements established by the University of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, established in the early seventeenth century. These requirements compelled students to present credentials from prior Jesuit instruction, thereby favoring the students of San Bernardo.

Guibovich’s essays on the teaching of Jesuit theater emphasize drama as a moralizing instrument and a means of supporting ecclesiastical authority. They argue that while theatrical productions were “conceived, written, and produced by the Jesuits as a practical exercise in literary expression, theater also played an important role as a means of institutional propaganda and moral instruction” (115). These are tantalizing suggestions of how theater might have influenced Peruvian society and culture; in general, this reviewer would have enjoyed seeing more of the “society” portion of the three elements mentioned in the book’s subtitle—Jesuits, education, and society. The chapters all signal the importance of Jesuit education and Jesuit intellectual production to colonial culture, but the emphasis is not on how their influence unfolded.

The chapter on “Print, Evangelization, and the Society of Jesus (1584–1620)” complements this line of argument, suggesting that in Jesuit hands, printed materials both assisted the clergy in their conversion efforts and asserted a certain authority on Catholic doctrine: “In the emerging colonial society, the printing press thereby had a dual role as instrument of both communication and control” (117). Guibovich examines closely a relatively obscure location, the Andean town of Juli, on the edges of Lake Titicaca. The project of converting the resident Lupaqa population had been the responsibility of Dominicans, who were expelled from the region in 1573. Viceroy Toledo (once again demonstrating his preferences), transferred this responsibility to the Jesuits. Considering this case allows Guibovich to examine how printing also played a part in the compilation and production of texts in Aymara.

The two final essays consider library collections: first, the library at the College of San Pablo in Lima, and then the Jesuitica collection at the National University of San Antonio Abad del Cusco. In the first case, Guibovich is interested in writing a contextualized institutional history that considers the library as a cross-Atlantic creation. In the second case, the author argues for the importance of the collection to the intellectual life of colonial Cuzco. These essays are a compelling example of how some scholars are able to bridge the historical-archival divide: Guibovich employs historical methods to describe the archives, but the thrust of his argument is about how collections should be preserved and curated—an argument surely directed as much at archivists as historians.

The collection as a whole reflects this sensibility, as with the introduction, which describes the documentary sources and archival history for the subject at hand in greater depth than most similar books. Guibovich recounts the repeated and lamentable loss of document materials to fire and foreign invasion. He also writes pointedly of how in the College of San Pablo he was “greatly surprised to find that the ‘archivists’ had altered all the document bundles by taking apart their seams to separate the manuscripts, all in the interest of creating new document series of highly questionable criteria” (22). Here, too, Guibovich is directing himself to archivists as well as historians.

While there is some repetition among the essays, since many are re-published and have apparently not been revised for the collection, and while in some cases this results in the expected vagaries of narration, with introductory material re-appearing or appearing late, the essays do present a varied set of considerations on the subject of Jesuit education and intellectual culture. This book will be of particular interest to specialists in archival studies and library collections, the intellectual history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and students of colonial Peru—particularly those who focus on the inescapable influence of Jesuits in the viceroyalty.

DOI 10.1163/22141332-00301005-20