| Résumé: | Written by Dominique Cristóbal Mariano Coriche of Puebla, Oración vindicativa del honor de las letras y de los literatos (1763) is an essay conceived in New Spain as a reply to a discourse published a decade earlier in France. This discourse maintained with the passage of time intellectual activity had brought moral corruption to mankind. Coriche’s writing tries to oppose such an idea, defending the practice of knowledge as a virtue, not only from an intellectual standpoint, but also from the point of view of faith. In this paper, I propose that Coriche develops his own conception of the Republic of Letters and of the ideal intellectual in an effort to demonstrate that the fusion of Catholic faith with the development of knowledge is the true basis of human progress.
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