Cuzco's intellectual and artistic renaissance (1632--1688): Juan Espinosa Medrano - 'El Lunarejo,' Diego Tito Quispe and the Jesuits

This dissertation studies how the city of Cuzco, in the seventeenth century, after having endured and assimilated the destruction which conquest brought on and entrance into the new Spanish imperial regime, became an important space in which Andean forms of knowledge and arts saw a renaissance. Scholars have recently begun to consider the survival and redeployment of pre-conquest artistic forms and types of knowledge in seventeenth century Cuzco. However, the importation of Spanish education and artistic models as it occurred in the colegios and universities set up in Cuzco for the education of the Criollo, Mestizo and, Inca elite has not received sufficient attention in English.;My research centers on the emergence of a colonial subject of knowledge and high art in Cuzco. It emphasizes the important role that the descendants of the Inca nobility played in Cuzco's artistic and intellectual renaissance. They were among the students, the painters, the musicians, the builders, the philosophers and preachers at the educational and artistic institutions open to them. In providing a frame of understanding for this phenomenon, I engage fully the problem of cultural translation, the colonization of Andean space and time, as the transfer of the European archive took place in many institutional sites in Cuzco. Relying on archival research, I also demonstrate how Cuzco's Criollo, Mestizo and Amerindian elites were educated in Latin language, humanism, and Castilian letters. Centering on the corpus of the Mestizo theologian and priest, Juan Espinosa Medrano---"El Lunarejo", I show the feuds in which Cuzco's subjects of knowledge were involved and the colonizing effect of Jesuit pedagogy on Inca oral practices. In addition, I demonstrate how native artists appropriated humanist pedagogy and created their post-conquest archive and how they became agents in state and religious functions. Thus, my study allows me to conclude that despite continuous attempts on the part of colonial authorities to destroy various Andean forms of knowledge and memory, they became inseparable from the Criollo lettered city.