Jun 21, 2016 - Sale 2420

Sale 2420 - Lot 392

Price Realized: $ 715
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
(PERU.) Echave y Assu, Francisco de. Particularitez edifiantes de la ville de Lima capitale du Perou. [90] manuscript pages. Folio, 13 x 8 1/2 inches, unbound; minor toning and dampstaining. Cayenne, 1695

Additional Details

This manuscript is a partial French translation of Echave y Assu's 1688 history of the Catholic Church in Lima titled "La estrella de Lima convertida en sol." The interesting story of its composition is told in the first two pages. The Echave book was among the booty captured by a French privateer off the west coast of South America. The privateer was wrecked rounding the Straits of Magellan, but the book was saved. Because of the difficulty in obtaining works on the Spanish colonies outside of Spain, it was brought to Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana, where it was translated into French.
The text is arranged into 4 sections for each of the first four Archbishops of Lima, but the large majority is devoted to the term of the second archbishop, Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo, from 1579 to 1606. The narrative ends mid-sentence with the events of 1625, but the section on Mogrovejo begins with his 1680 canonization. It does not seem to be a close translation. The format resembles Echave's section on the history of the archbishops, pages 157-166, but the section on Mogrovejo is here much longer. An interesting artifact of two rival empires. Provenance: Purchased from The Owl at the Bridge.