Emily Berquist (California State University, Long Beach) has written an innovative, important, and lovely book on Bishop Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón, who wandered around northern Peru in the eighteenth century. But he wasn’t an idle wanderer–he collected plants; sketched people dancing, farming, rowing, bathing (a woman with leprosy), even removing molars (yes, dentistry); founded new cities; gathered data; and tinkered with mining and envisioned how to change late colonial Peru. As both an artist and observer, Bishop Martínez Compañón provided a wonderful entryway into northern Peru, particularly around Trujillo.
His utopic vision of a more just society was dashed by local realities: power struggles, resistance to change, and deep-rooted mistrust among Peru’s different classes and ethnic groups. Nonetheless, he plotted out fascinating alternative paths and never stopped observing, drawing, and writing.
This splendid biography takes us deeply into his world vision as well as the northern coast that he so appreciated. It’s a biography–never straying too far from Martínez Compañón–but also a thoughtful reexamination of botany, race & space, planning, and other elements of the Enlightenment. The book reminds me of wonderful recent scholarship on another iconoclast, Athanasius Kircher SJ (17th century). Paula Findlen, Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything; Daniel Stolzenberg, Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity.
The writing is spry and the research deep. Highly recommended.
* Emily will be in Davis this week, to give a talk about “Local Botany: Bishop Martínez Compañón and the Products of Utopia in Trujillo, Peru”.
Join us this Friday 30 at 273 Social Science & Humanities, 12.10-1.30 pm. Refreshments will be provided. The event is sponsored by the Heminspheric Institute on the Americas. More information here.
If you want to know more about this fascinating Enlightened Bishop there are two amazing online resources. The first is a group of historical maps of Trujillo. These maps show you the urban evolution of the city, one of the two cities in the Viceroyalty of Peru with a wall surrounding the urban area. Now the city is well known in the country for its vibrant shoe industry. [See maps] The second resource is Martinez de Compañón’s opus magnum, the Codex Trujillo del Peru, a nine-volume masterpiece with 1,400 images. The Codex Trujillo del Peru was declared a World Heritage Site by the UNESCO. [Read the Codex]
And here you can see the book in a shelfie I took a few days ago.
The image in the headline comes from here.
