The authorization of books in New Spain in the 17th and 18th centuries: censorship as an intellectual exercise

Abstract

Official authorization granting a license for books to be printed became a permanent practice in New Spain in the 17th and 18th centuries, providing an ideal context in which literary criticism could emerge. These paratexts, couched in specific rhetorical and literary terms, serve as testimony to a type of intellectual exercise that characterized this colonial baroque period in Mexican cultural life, when censorship coexisted with the first timid attempts at literary criticism. By analyzing a large corpus of books printed in the 17th and 18th centuries, we aim to approach this critical practice, presenting it as both an intellectual exercise and an endeavor in which censorship played an important role.