Knowledge and Writing in the Spanish Colony. The Promotion of Education and Literacy by the Jesuits and internal epistolary communication in the eighteenth-century Province of Paraguay

Abstract

The aim of this contribution is to investigate the role of the Jesuit Order in disseminating education, knowledge and literacy in the historical religious Province of Paraguay, and to explore the extent to which their own writing activity represents the characteristics of the European epistolary discourse tradition. From a socio-cultural point of view, the Jesuits were committed to providing outstanding education in the colonial society through the Colegios which they founded and directed, and they disseminated knowledge and culture through libraries and printing presses. Against this background of increasing literacy in the colonies, a corpus of letters written in the 18th century in historical Paraguay by Jesuits, as writing experts, will be classified and analyzed from a discourse-traditional and pragmatic perspective. The focus will be on the questions of which textual elements of communicative distance of the European epistolary tradition are followed in the corpus texts and in which areas innovations or even linguistic novelties are implemented in the discourse tradition of the letter during the so-called primer español moderno (1675–1825).