Cartas eruditas y curiosas, Vol. I (1773)
- Language:
- Spanish
- Status:
- Selection or partial work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Some scanning errors (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand) · 2 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~170,000 words · 785 passages
Cite this work
- APABenito Feijoo. (n.d.). Cartas eruditas y curiosas, Vol. I (1773). Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/benito-feijoo/cartas-eruditas-y-curiosas-vol-i-1773
- MLABenito Feijoo. Cartas eruditas y curiosas, Vol. I (1773). Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/benito-feijoo/cartas-eruditas-y-curiosas-vol-i-1773.
- ChicagoBenito Feijoo. Cartas eruditas y curiosas, Vol. I (1773). Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/benito-feijoo/cartas-eruditas-y-curiosas-vol-i-1773.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The first volume of Feijoo's letters: short essays in epistolary form with which he tried to put science and critical judgement within reach of the eighteenth-century Spanish reader.
Context and history
Feijoo was a Benedictine and a professor at Oviedo, and he wrote in Spanish rather than Latin precisely because he wanted to reach those who had no Latin. The letters continue his 'Teatro crítico universal' with the same purpose: to take apart superstitions — miraculous cures, divination, folk remedies — to explain what European physics and medicine were discovering, and to defend positions that were costly at the time, such as the intellectual capacity of women. His method is always the same, and it is what makes him modern: faced with a claim, ask what the evidence is. This is one of the doors by which the Enlightenment entered Spain, and he had readers enough that the king forbade attacks on him.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
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