The Classical and the Archival: Pedro de Peralta’s San Marcos Oraciones (1715, 1716)

Abstract (Lang: English):This essay examines two understudied documents from eighteenth-century Lima: the 1715 and 1716 Oraciones delivered by Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo about his rectorship at San Marcos University. In their construction, both speeches capture colonial bureaucratism, transatlantic self-imagination, and baroque academicism at a mature stage in the development of colonial criollo identity. I examine these dynamics through the analysis of three rhetorical gestures: the use of classical panegyrists to establish critical similarities and differences between ancient academic institutions and San Marcos, the strategic manipulation of Latin citations, and the characterization of the history of San Marcos as a new yet deep archive. Through these strategies, I propose, Peralta suggests two different types of past: a “classical” antiquity rooted in Rome, and an “archival” antiquity that belongs to Lima. The coordination of these two pasts dramatizes the positioning of the criollo intellectual community in the transatlantic Republic of Letters.