Unpublished manuscript of an epic poem about Columbus’ voyages, discovered in Montserrat
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- A researcher finds the only known manuscript of ‘El Nuevo Mundo’ (The New World), an 18th-century text written by Portuguese diplomat Francisco Botelho de Moraes e Vasconcelos), in the Library of Montserrat.
The manuscript, comprising some 39 folios and containing notable differences from the 1701 printed edition, includes passages that were absent from the text known to date, some of which may have been deleted or modified for ideological reasons. The discovery was made in the course of García-Minguillán’s research, under a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral contract in the Department of Catalan Philology and General Linguistics at the University of Barcelona, a programme that promotes the incorporation of young researchers with profiles of excellence into universities and research centres.
The poem portrays Columbus as a hero of early 18th-century political imaginary and was written at a time of intense dynastic tension, just before the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession. The context in which this work was written – Barcelona in 1701 – is key to understanding the strategy of Botelho de Moraes e Vasconcelos, a figure closely linked to the city’s intellectual and diplomatic scene and connected to pro-Austrian circles. The author participated in the founding of the Acadèmia dels Desconfiats, the predecessor of the current Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona, and made a clear literary commitment to linking Columbus’s exploits with the political ideals of the supporters of Charles of Austria
The manuscript, which will now be the subject of a critical edition and a monographic study, also reveals a unique aesthetic intention: despite being written in Spanish, the composition follows classical epic models that were more common in the Latin and Italian traditions. The choice of Spanish, in this case, reflects a desire to intervene in the cultural and ideological debate of the Spanish monarchy.
The discovery was made possible thanks to a systematic search of the monastic library’s collections and careful work comparing bibliographic references and uncatalogued manuscript materials. According to García-Minguillán, “the manuscript has remained outside the usual research circuits for decades because it had never been digitized or transcribed, and its authorship was not explicitly identified in any modern database.”
The study of El Nuevo Mundo is part of a broader research project supported by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The aim is to reconstruct the political, literary and cultural motivations of Botelho de Moraes e Vasconcelos and shed light on the dynamics of creation and censorship in the literary sphere of Baroque Barcelona.
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