The European and Ibero-American Academy of Yuste Foundation presented the book El cacereño Juan Blázquez Mayoralgo. Contador y preceptista en Nueva España, by the professor of Latin Philology at the University of Extremadura, Manuel Mañas Núñez. This book is the fifth volume of the collection “Extremeños en Iberoamérica”; a collection which the Foundation dedicates to recover and enhance key figures in the history that Extremadura shares with America.
The director of the European and Ibero-American Academy of Yuste Foundation, Juan Carlos Moreno, its academic director, César Chaparro Gómez, and the mayor of Cáceres, Elena Nevado along with the author of the book, have presented it this afternoon in Cáceres.
This work is the first monograph dedicated to the life and work of Juan Blázquez Mayoralgo, a figure from Cáceres who left to New Spain as de Accountant of the Royal Estate of New Veracruz and continued in his post for more than twenty years.
During that time, he was not only vigilant in meeting his bureaucratic duties, but was the most direct witness of the vicissitudes and problems that New Spain was going through, while still finding moments of leisure to satisfy his literary inquisitiveness with the processing and publication of his main work: La perfecta razón de Estado, a history and political theory book about King Ferdinand the Catholic.
Throughout its almost 500 pages, Mañas writes about the life and work of Blázquez Mayoralgo as of his circle of Novohispano friends in American soil, but above all, he studies and analyses “The Perfect Reason of State”, including it in his political-literary context and analysing the historical and political content of each one of the books that it comprises.
The work has an added value as it combines the historiographic rigour of a scientific work with the novelistic story of its main character’s vital steps as well as of those of the characters that appear in it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Manuel Mañas Núñez is a tenured lecturer of Latin philology (accredited professor) at the University of Extremadura, having taught and carried out research in the past at the Universities of Nantes (France), Coimbra (Portugal), and Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid, Spain).
He is the author of numerous books and scientific articles on classic Latin and medieval literature (rhetoric and Ciceronian philosophy, Horacian poetics and Latin fable), textual criticism and the edition of humanistic Latin texts and the receipt of the classic legacy (grammar, rhetoric, poetics and philosophy) in the Latin Humanism of the Renaissance.
Specialist in the Latin work of famous humanists, such as El Brocense, Erasmus and Justo Lipsio, his last books are the following: Erasmo, El ciceroniano (Madrid, Akal, 2009); Justo Lipsio, Sobre la constancia (Cáceres, UEx, 2010); Enrique Cornelio Agrippa, Declaración sobre la incertidumbre y vanidad de las ciencias y las artes (Cáceres, UEx, 2013); El obispo Galarza y las monjas de Cáceres: estudio y edición del libro ‘De clausura monialium controversia’ (Cáceres, Diputación, 2014).
