Book, "Colosso Eloquente", 1748

Book, Colosso Eloquente, 1748
Paper, limp vellum, remnants of ties
8 in. x 6 in.
7252 One of the oldest books in the Bowers Museum’s collection is the Colosso Eloquente, printed in 1748 by Maria de Ribera who ran the Mexico City (then Nueva España) press, Imprenta Real de Superior Gobierno. The book, intended to be educational in nature, describes the favors Spanish King Ferdinand VI and the Catholic Church have made on the Universidad Mexicana, for which the text was printed for. Throughout the text references are made to the greatness of ancient Greece, comparing the magnificence of the King with the Colossus of Rhodes and referring to the university as the Athens of the New World. Other topics covered are the beauty of Ferdinand’s Queen Maria Barbara and the goodness of university officials. (History notes that Ferdinand VI was an unconfident and depressed man and that Maria Barbara was shockingly homely).

The book is written in an old style Spanish. It is full of epigrams, poetical statements that in this case have an educational and moral purpose and anagrams that play with the arrangement of letters. Both of these methods of word play originate in ancient Greece. The Ribera family continually ran a press in Nueva España from the late 16th century until the Maria de Ribera’s publishing of Colosso Eloquente in 1748. Maria de Ribera was the first in her family to receive the special privilege granted by the Vatican and the Spanish Monarchy to print ecclesiastical texts. The printing of such texts was highly controlled and subject to strict supervision by the Church. In this way both quality and content of the material was preserved. This oversight was part of a larger program initiated by the Vatican in the early 17th century that dealt with a massive clean up of all religious documents and the widespread distribution of such texts throughout Europe and especially its colonies.
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