{
  "id": "mercurio-peruano-1791",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "The Mercurio Peruano and the Sociedad Académica de Amantes del País (Lima, 1791)",
  "summary": "A paper printed at Lima from January 1791 by men writing under Greek pseudonyms, whose stated purpose was to dispel the prejudices by which less instructed pens had degraded Peru and its wits from the place they occupy on the map of the universe. Its third tome carries a prize competition judged by thirteen elected voters with the losing papers burnt unread, a subscriber list running from Quito to Potosi, and a discourse about itself reprinted from the newspaper of Bogota.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "americas",
    "peru",
    "enlightenment",
    "printing",
    "books",
    "eighteenth-century",
    "science",
    "spanish-empire",
    "quito"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "alcedo-diccionario-geografico-1786"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "mutis-botanical-expedition"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "universities-of-lima-and-mexico"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "misconceptions-spanish-empire"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "antonio-de-ulloa-platinum"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "real-tribunal-general-de-mineria"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "mercurio-volante-1772"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "unanue-guia-del-peru-1793"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "espejo-reflexiones-viruelas-1785"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "relaciones-de-gobierno-de-los-virreyes"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "colonial-records-as-a-climate-archive"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "semanario-del-nuevo-reino-de-granada"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "diario-de-mexico-1805"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "cosme-bueno"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "cosme-bueno-disertacion-arte-de-volar"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "imprenta-de-ninos-expositos-de-buenos-aires"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "papel-periodico-de-la-havana-1790"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "mutis-arcano-de-la-quina-1828"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "real-sociedad-economica-de-la-habana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "jose-manuel-davalos"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "diario-de-mexico-1806"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "sociedad-patriotica-de-amigos-del-pais-de-quito"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What was the Mercurio Peruano?",
    "Who were the Sociedad Académica de Amantes del País?",
    "Was there a free press or a public sphere in colonial Spanish America?",
    "Did newspapers in colonial Lima and Bogotá read each other?",
    "Was the Mercurio Peruano censored by the Inquisition?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The volume used here is the third bound tome, whose title page reads \"MERCURIO PERUANO DE HISTORIA, LITERATURA, Y NOTICIAS PUBLICAS QUE DA Á LUZ LA SOCIEDAD ACADEMICA de Amantes de Lima. Y EN SU NOMBRE D. Jacinto Calero y Moreira. TOMO III. QUE COMPREHENDE LOS MESES DE Septiembre, Octubre, Noviembre, y Diciembre de 1791. CON SUPERIOR PERMISO\", with the imprint \"Impreso en Lima: en la Imprenta Real de los Niños Huérfanos\". The copy digitised carries the stamp of the Bodleian Library. The tome opens at número 69, dated 1 September 1791, folio 311, so the paper was already 68 numbers old.",
      "sources": [
        "mercurio-peruano-1791-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The introduction to that tome states the paper's purpose in one sentence that is the reason it belongs in a history of ideas rather than of journalism. Having placed the acceptance and help of the public at the foundation of the promises made in its Prospecto, the editors write that they hoped it would favour \"una empresa gloriosa al País y sus habitantes, y propia á disipar las preocupaciones con que han pretendido obscurecer sus brillos las plumas ménos instruidas, degradando al Perú y sus ingenios del privilegiado lugar que ocupan en el mapa del Universo.\" The same page opens by observing that it had given the lie to the gloomy prophecies which announced for the Mercurio Peruano \"una exîstencia efímera y pasagera\".",
      "sources": [
        "mercurio-peruano-1791-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The price of saying that in Lima is printed on the same page, and it is not a small one. In the four months since the previous introduction, the editors write, there had accumulated with greater force \"las sátiras, las invectivas, y todo el aparato de vedadas armas, fabricadas en la oficina de la calumnia\"; nothing had been omitted of what could discredit them; and their private conduct and domestic habits had been the object of published attack, \"como si el ser auctores del Mercurio Peruano fuese un atentado contra la Religion\".",
      "sources": [
        "mercurio-peruano-1791-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The Society ran an anonymous prize competition on the roads of the viceroyalty, and the rules it printed are a piece of eighteenth-century procedure worth reading in full. Thirteen judges of known theoretical and practical instruction in the subject were to award the prizes by vote: six chosen from among the members of the Society, the other seven solicited from \"el cuerpo de sabios de esta Capital\" and named by plurality of votes at one of its meetings, with the election, the names of those voters and the date fixed for the scrutiny to be published in the first Mercurio of March. Other patriots who asked might attend the meeting but would have neither voice nor vote.",
      "sources": [
        "mercurio-peruano-1791-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The same rules protect the losers, and say why. Dissertations that did not meet the object proposed \"se quemarán irremisiblemente, sin que se sepa quiénes las han trabajado\"; in this way those who wrote best would earn the public's praise, and those whose ideas were not apt \"no sufrirán el sonrojo de ver sus nombres en el catálogo de los desechados\". The stated purpose of the precaution is that \"se evitarán á un mismo tiempo las parcialidades y cabalas\". When the voting ended a consulta was to go to the viceroy signed by every individual who had voted, including any whose opinion had not prevailed; and writers from distant provinces were to have their medals sent by the respective posts free of all charge.",
      "sources": [
        "mercurio-peruano-1791-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "In November 1791 the paper reprinted a discourse about itself published in the newspaper of Santa Fe de Bogotá, under the epigraph \"Discurso sobre el Mercurio Peruano dado á luz en la Ciudad de Lima, por una Sociedad de buenos Patriotas, establecida baxo el título de los Amantes del Pais\". The Bogotá writer says that fourteen laborious men of letters had joined there under that title, gives their pseudonyms — Hermágoras, Homótimo, Mindirido, Agelasto, Aristio, Chrisipo, Teagnes, Hypparco, Thimeo, Basílides, Paladio, Archidamo, Cefalio and Hesperiófilo — and observes that Don Jacinto Calero \"es el único que ha publicado su nombre\", the rest still going disguised.",
      "sources": [
        "mercurio-peruano-1791-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The two papers were founded thirty-eight days apart, and the Bogotá writer counts them. His discourse says that it was reserved for the year 1791 to break a silence unworthy of Peruvian spirits, and that \"quando nosotros dábamos á luz el núm. 1. de nuestro Papel, tambien daba el suyo la Corte de Lima\"; a footnote fixes the dates: \"El núm. 1. de aquel salió el 2. de Enero de este año, y el nuestro el 9. de Febrero del mismo: con que solo hubo de diferencia treinta y ocho dias.\" He begins by comparing America at its discovery with America in the present, using for the first the picture drawn by Don Antonio de Ulloa, and ends looking forward to the day when America, \"va sacudiendo la pereza en que yacia\", will make a more decorous figure \"en el Teatro de Minerva\". The Mercurio adds that the same discourse carried notice of a new periodical published at Havana.",
      "sources": [
        "mercurio-peruano-1791-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "The traffic ran both ways: the Mercurio's own review of the Bogotá paper is what these numbers were printing when they quoted it. It records that its author \"trabaja solo, y sin mas auxîlio que algunos pocos\", that he limited himself to the moral, political and economic part announced in his own first number, and that the substance of the work was then five or six discourses — on the true generosity of man, which consists in working for love of humanity out of patriotism; on the bad taste of public studies and the need to reform it; on banishing abstract ideas and the prejudices of the schools from the colleges in order to cultivate the useful sciences; on the project of erecting a public hospicio and establishing a patriotic society; and on \"los verdaderos derechos de la libertad del hombre, ennoblecidos, y conservados baxo el suave yugo de la legítima subordinacion y dependencia.\"",
      "sources": [
        "mercurio-peruano-1791-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "A footnote on that page is the clearest statement in this volume of what such a paper could and could not do, and it is the Mercurio's own. \"Repetidas veces ha suprimido el Santo Oficio en el todo, ú en parte diferentes Periódicos, así extrangeros como nacionales, por contener errores perjudiciales, y sacrílegas invectivas. De este número son muchos Discursos del Censor, como tambien su Corresponsal, el Duende de Madrid, el Observador, prohibidos del todo en el último Auto que se publicó en 27. de Agosto.\" It adds that the publication of those five and other papers of the class had lately been ordered suspended at Court, that the government and the Tribunal of the Faith never neglect to repress productions harmful to religion and the state, and that under the protection of the first and in the hope of not deserving the censure of the second \"han dado á luz, corren, y correrán nuestros Periódicos sin desviarse del principal objeto para que fueron establecidos.\"",
      "sources": [
        "mercurio-peruano-1791-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "The Society corrected the Bogotá list in its own voice a fortnight later, in número 88 of 6 November 1791. Acknowledging the praise as far above its merit, it says that \"la imparcial ingenuidad de los Amantes de Lima\" will not let the public form a mistaken idea of them, and sets out the membership: at the founding, after the first dispersal, only Homótimo, Hesperiófilo, Hermágoras and Aristio came together, with Chrisipo, Teagnes, Hypparco and Thimeo added afterwards; Archidamo and Cephalio are named as socios de mérito and Basílides and Paladio as socios protectores; and the number of those actually working on it still could not be fixed with certainty. It also corrects the guess that Calero was Hesperiófilo, that member being at the time absent on a commission of the royal service.",
      "sources": [
        "mercurio-peruano-1791-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c11",
      "text": "The subscriber list printed at the end of the year shows the paper circulating as an instrument of the American scientific network rather than of one city. Its continuation names, among others, \"La Sociedad Patriótica de la Ciudad de Quito\"; the dean of the cathedral of Santa Fe de Bogotá; \"Señor Doctor Don Joseph Celestino Mutis, Director de la Real Expedicion Botánica del Nuevo Reyno de Granada\"; a commissary of the Holy Office who was parish priest and vicar of the doctrina of Cabanilla in the bishopric of Cuzco; and \"Señor Don Juan Daniel Weber, Director de la Minería y Real Socabon de la Intendencia de la Villa de Potosí\".",
      "sources": [
        "mercurio-peruano-1791-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c12",
      "text": "The paper also published instrumental data as a matter of routine. The tome carries \"OBSERVACIONES METEOROLÓGICAS DEL MES DE NOviembre hechas á las 12 del dia\", tabulated by day of the month in two columns, \"Termómetro de Reaumur\" and \"Termómetro de Farenheit\" — the first of the month at 15° 0′ Réaumur and 66° 0′ Fahrenheit, the twenty-fourth at 18° 0′ and 72° 5′, the twenty-eighth at 15° 5′ and 67° 0′. Confidence is held below the rest because the figures are set in small type with heavy show-through from the facing leaf, and only part of the column is unambiguous.",
      "sources": [
        "mercurio-peruano-1791-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c13",
      "text": "What the same tome says about the peoples of its own eastern forests is the counterpoint, and it is recorded here rather than left out. An article on the missions describes the binding of infants' heads with hemp bands and a board on the forehead until the skull takes an elongated form, remarks that this cannot but alter the functions of the brain, and concludes that those who practise it \"son reputados por estúpidos\", adding: \"En efecto nuestros Indios tienen la nota de ser la gente mas desmemoriada de todo el Orbe.\" The paper founded to answer European writers who degraded Peru and its wits printed, in the same volume, the same kind of judgement on the peoples of the Ucayali.",
      "sources": [
        "mercurio-peruano-1791-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c14",
      "text": "What this source is and is not should be said plainly. It is a periodical speaking about itself: its introduction is an answer to its critics, the flattering discourse it reprints was chosen by its own editors, and its ethnographic articles are unverified reports from correspondents. It is good evidence of what was printed at Lima in 1791, of the rules the Society published for its own competition, and of who appeared on its subscriber list; it is not evidence of how many copies were sold, of how far the ideas travelled, or of whether the competition on the roads was ever concluded — none of which this object claims.",
      "sources": [
        "mercurio-peruano-1791-t3"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "English-language coverage of the Mercurio Peruano, where it exists at all, is a sentence in a survey of creole patriotism, and the standard picture of colonial Spanish America has no room for a public sphere in it. This object argues from the sheets of a single 1791 tome instead: the paper's own statement that it exists to answer the pens that degraded Peru's wits; the rules of a prize competition in which the judges are elected by public vote, their names printed in advance, and the losing essays burnt so that no author is shamed; a subscriber list in which the Botanical Expedition of New Granada, the Patriotic Society of Quito and the mining directorate of Potosí all appear; a table of November temperatures in Réaumur and Fahrenheit; and a discourse about the Mercurio lifted from the newspaper of Santa Fe de Bogotá, which founded itself thirty-eight days later and mentions a third new paper at Havana. Beside all of it, on the same footing, the Mercurio's own footnote listing the periodicals the Holy Office had just suppressed, and its own article calling the peoples of the Ucayali the most forgetful in the world.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-09",
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    "name": "The Mercurio Peruano and the Sociedad Académica de Amantes del País (Lima, 1791)",
    "description": "A paper printed at Lima from January 1791 by men writing under Greek pseudonyms, whose stated purpose was to dispel the prejudices by which less instructed pens had degraded Peru and its wits from the place they occupy on the map of the universe. Its third tome carries a prize competition judged by thirteen elected voters with the losing papers burnt unread, a subscriber list running from Quito to Potosi, and a discourse about itself reprinted from the newspaper of Bogota.",
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    "dateModified": "2026-08-09",
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        "name": "Mercurio peruano de historia, literatura, y noticias públicas que da á luz la Sociedad Academica de Amantes de Lima, y en su nombre D. Jacinto Calero y Moreira. Tomo III, que comprehende los meses de Septiembre, Octubre, Noviembre, y Diciembre de 1791",
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