La dimensión bibliográfica de la reducción lingüística. La producción textual jesuítica en guaraní a través de los inventarios de bibliotecas

• Main Author: Fabián R. Vega
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherches sur les Mondes Américains 2018-12-01
• Series: Nuevo mundo - Mundos Nuevos
• Subjects: Jesuit Missions; History of the Book; Guarani Language; Society of Jesus
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/73946

This article aims to analyze the presence of books in Guarani language within the libraries of the Jesuit Paraguay and, specially, within the reductions of Paraná and Uruguay rivers. For this purpose, the inventories of the goods made after the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Hispanic monarchy (1767) are used as documental sources. After a general presentation of the discussed issues, this article is divided into several sections in which the following aspects are examined: the presence of manuscripts, the organization and classification of the Guarani texts, the place of the printed texts within the libraries and the quantitative information concerning the proportions and print runs of the different books, authors and textual genres. The general hypothesis is that the books in Guarani language were one of the key components in the Jesuit textual culture of the Paraguay and that this role could be explored through the organizational and quantitative dimensions examined here.