Lima News-Sheets: 1700-1711 (Diario de Lima)

in the Shop of Royal Printer Joseph de Contreras y Alvarado

This website is a platform for the study and dissemination of scholarly research on early modern Spanish-American textual culture. The focus is on the city of Lima and the South American and Transatlantic networks behind the production of printed news-sheets, pamphlets and accounts.

As a digital humanities platform, it promotes scholarly editions, visualizations, data mining and auxiliary material for the reconstruction and understanding of the textual and material culture of the extended Hispanic world.

How news moved in South America?

This is a map of selected news and their circulation in one year (1700-1701), showing their routes and speed as they traveled within South America and flow into the Contreras's print shop in Lima. (Generated with R)

The first known periodical news-sheets printed in the Americas were released from the workshop of Joseph de Contreras y Alvarado in Lima, capital of the viceroyalty of Peru, between the years of 1700 and 1711. Approximately every two months, “outstanding news” from the city of Lima along with a selection of news coming from Europe in gazettes and manuscript letters, would be printed in quarto by Contreras. It took several weeks or months for all this information to complete the transatlantic trip on Spanish galleons and to travel the complex South American postal routes up to the administrative and cultural center of Lima. The news-sheets are an invaluable testimony of the vast circulation of people and information –coming from printed, manuscript and oral sources— between Europe and Peru, and within South American regions and cities.

On the printed page, the Lima news are organized by months and day numbers, which, in part, explains the Spanish title of “diario” (diary or daily news). In the same years, the Contreras’s workshop also printed many “relaciones de sucesos” or accounts of events that can be considered supplements to the information contained in the news-sheets. All this printed material circulated as pamphlets and was, therefore, ephemeral in nature and hardly kept by libraries or archives. Fortunately, around 1712, the printer himself –we believe-- or perhaps his brother Jerónimo collected in one bound volume more than one thousand pages of news-sheets and pamphlets, including the complete collection of the Diario from 1700 to 1711. This unique miscellaneous volume bears its own printed cover-page and a new title, that clearly indicates that the life of the city was the unifying theme: Diarios y memorias de los sucesos principales y noticias más sobresalientes en esta ciudad de Lima, corte del Perú [Daily news and memoirs of the principal events and outstanding news in this city of Lima, court of Peru]. Since the 19th century, when the volume was purchased by the New York Public Library --where is now kept in its Rare Books Division--, it has received minimum scholarly attention.

The Contreras’s volume reflects the work of the royal printer and other notable residents of Lima, presumably Criollos, to reaffirm their loyalty to the new Bourbon king Philip V, in the context of the Spanish War of Succession. Therefore, the Diario de noticias sobresalientes en Lima y Noticias de Europa (1700-1711) should be understood as an official, government-supported publication and an organ of propaganda during war in Europe. However, the news-sheets also contain a wealth of information and narratives on the daily life of the city of Lima and the extended vice-royalty of Peru. Although many of the local news might seem totally disconnected from European politics, the very same structure of Contreras’s printed pages highlight the elite connections (and network) and the impressive circulation of people and information throughout the Hispanic world. Ultimately, the Diarios show the centrality of the city of Lima as the administrative and cultural capital of South America.

A basic graph (adapted from our introduction to our 2017 edition) illustrates the distribution of the printed material within the Contreras 1712 volume, divided into three categories: Diarios (news-sheets, mostly from Lima), Noticias (European news) and Varios (miscellaneous pamphlets, mostly descriptions of festivities in Lima). The graph shows the amount of pages printed per year in each of these categories:

FACSIMILES

The reader will find on this website, in separate PDF files, the facsimiles of all news-sheets published regularly in the city of Lima, between 1700 and 1711, in the workshop of the only royal printer in the vice-royalty of Peru in that period: Joseph de Contreras y Alvarado. These facsimiles are intended to serve as an appendix or companion to our modernized two-volume Spanish annotated edition published in 2017 and 2023, under the title Diario de noticias sobresalientes en Lima y Noticias de Europa (1700-1711) [Diary of Outstanding News in Lima and European News] (New York: IDEA, Serie Estudios Indianos, 2017). The books are open access academic publications that can be downloaded in PDF format here: volume 1 and volume 2 . See also our new web page here.

Our edition breaks the Contrera's publishing production in two volumes, each of six years: from 1700 to 1705; and from 1706 to 1711. This time division also reflects the pivotal role that viceroy Count of Monclova played in the initial release of the news-sheets. It is reasonable to presume that he, considering the tense situation in Spain in 1699, was the Lima news-sheets promoter and initial sponsor. The Diario served as in instrument to secure local alliances with the new Bourbon regime.

The first volume of our edition is an invaluable source of information and narratives about Lima during Count of Monclova's last years, until 1705. He was followed in government by the Royal Audience during times of great instability in Lima and Madrid, particularly in 1706. Our second volume is dominated by two different figures in power: viceroy marquis of Castell dos Rius, who came from Europe to Peru in 1706 accompanied by a large collection of French books, and bishop viceroy Diego Ladrón de Guevara, who had lived two decades in America, was appointed bishop in Guamanga in 1698 and promoted to Quito in 1705, and made viceroy of Peru in 1710, to replace marquis Castell dos Rius, who died in Lima that year.

The page numbers on the PDFs correspond to the paging in brackets on two volume edition. In some cases, for example in Noticias 6 (European News 6), the document starts in [p. 5] because our analysis of the imprint shows that this issue was released as a continuation of the Diario 15, containing 4 pages. The Contreras bound volume does not always reveal what was printed as one issue or what can be reasonably counted as a separate document. In this case, we treat the Diario 15 and the Noticias 6 as separate documents, although we give them consecutive page numbers. In most cases, each new issue of the Diario de Lima or Noticias de Europa starts in [p. 1] .

The dates encompassing each issue of European News are not as precise as the ones in the Diario de Lima. The European news reproduce different sources that would arrive in different dates, and they relate to events occurred in a span of months or even a year.

For a more in depth study of the Lima news-sheets and the available bibliography, see our Introductions to volumes 1 and 2 (currently available in Spanish only).

Thanks to the Rare Book Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation, for allowing us to reproduce, in different formats, the unique copy of the Diarios y memorias de los svcessos principales, y noticias mas sobresalientes en esta ciudad de Lima.

Paul Firbas (Stony Brook University)

José A. Rodríguez Garrido (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú)

Visualizing City Networks 1700-1705

This maps shows the cities most frequently mentioned in the news-sheets printed by Contreras in Lima from January 1700 to December 1705. It represents my first approach to visualize the textual circulation and the transatlantic network of cities (and printers) from the perspective of a Lima print shop.

NOTE

We would like to thank the librarians at the New York Public Library for all their help in the reproduction of the Contreras’s volume. The project started in 1998, when Paul Firbas, with the support of Firestone Library at Princeton University, requested a (positive) copy of the NYPL master microfilm. Unfortunately, the low quality of those images made the text almost unreadable. We requested authorization to digitally photograph the volume, but it was denied, and the book was sent to restoration. Finally, thanks to research grants from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and Stony Brook University, we obtained in 2007 a negative reproduction of the master microfilm, which was sent to Lima to be digitized. Once we had clean digital images, we started our transcription, annotation and study of the documents and the volume.

In 2016, the NYPL published online a new high-quality colored digital reproduction of the whole volume, done directly from the imprint. However, our back and white facsimiles still have value, because they differ in two aspects from new reproductions: 1) they shows the state of the volume before the modern binding of 2000, which narrowed the pages; and 2) most importantly, our facsimiles of the Diarios and the Noticias de Europa are presented in separate issues, with date numbers and page numbers that directly match those used in our modernized printed book. This facilitates the consultation of the material.

Our thanks to Stony Brook University and the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú for the research and publication grants that made this long project possible, and to the Universidad de Navarra (GRISO) and the Universidad del Pacífico (PEI) for their assistance in publishing our modernized editions.

Paul Firbas (Stony Brook University)

José A. Rodríguez Garrido (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú)

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