Feijoo operated from his convent cell in Oviedo, shunning the limelight while ensuring that his words reached a growing readership. A parallel figure, Gregorio Mayans (1699-1781), after a period as Royal Librarian in Madrid, retired to Oliva in Valencia to continue editing and publishing, while influencing scholarly friends via private letters. Mayans’ idea of intellectual reform derived from classical humanism, and his main areas of activity were history, literature, and education, in particular through the editing of texts and compiling of manuals on such subjects as rhetoric. Mayans’ reformism is based on the recovery of past intellectual virtues, being in that sense backward-looking and less concerned to explore the new or embrace progress.
Both Feijoo and Mayans survived into the 1760s, coinciding with the reign of Carlos III (reigned 1759-1788), when economic upturn favored bolder action. The revolutionary innovation of the period was the intellectual periodical, several being modeled on the English Spectator (1711-1714) and Tatler (1709-1711) of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.
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298 The Enlightenment and Neoclassicism
An earlier, short-lived, intellectual journal, the Diario de los literatos de Espan˜ a (“The Spanish Review of Books,” 1737–1742), had provoked the wrath of various authors, including Mayans, who saw their publications submitted to rigorous critiques. El Pensador (“The Thinker,” 1762–1767), edited by Jose´ Clavijo y Fajardo (1728–1808), was by contrast witty and amusing, while also being intellectually provocative. It borrowed and naturalized without acknowledgment texts by Rousseau, Steele, and Swift, making them applicable to Spain, but mainly comprised new materials in the same spirit, reaching eighty-six issues in all, many confessedly not written by the editor. Subject matter ranged over literature, social behavior, relations between the sexes, philosophy, religion, upbringing and education, and differences between nations, mostly conveyed in a light, conversational, ironic style. Formal preferences included argument and response, dialogue, dreams, essays, invective, and letters, all designed to question and provoke. Multiple points of view were common and the desire to stimulate discussion seemed paramount. Responses to El Pensador ranged from slim pamphlets to whole new periodicals, ostensibly the product of thinkers, male and female, from Cadiz, Salamanca, and even, supposedly, Heaven.10 Other rival periodicals featured commerce, foreign news, literary criticism, religion, and textual miscellanies, but most were short-lived, with few surviving the political and economic instability of the mid 1760s.11
Not until the 1780s was there a revival, but some of the new titles were intellectually weighty. Publications with a miscellaneous content, appearing once or more a week, with articles usually unsigned, contributed to an intellectual effervescence whose quality and range is extraordinary. Recognized at the time by some as the boldest was the essay-periodical El Censor (“The Censor”), edited by the lawyers Luis Garc´ıa del Can˜uelo (1744–1801/2) and Luis Pereira (1754–1811), yet incorporating anonymously texts by Gaspar Melchor Jovellanos, Juan Mele´ndez Valde´s, Fe´lix Samaniego, and others hitherto unidentified. Over a six-year period (1781–1787) El Censor published 167 numbers, being suspended twice before final closure. Though it appeared to enjoy royal favor, evident in a loosening of censorship in 1785, the motives behind its demise were never clarified, but its articles tackled sensitive areas such as legislation, government policy, ecclesiastical matters, the economy, and moral and philosophical issues usually the preserve of the Church. Subjects were treated from a variety of perspectives, always designed to provoke, and sometimes resorting to stylistic subtlety and obliquity in order to evade
10 Francisco Aguilar Pin˜al, La prensa espan˜ola en el siglo XVIII. Diarios, revistas y
Prono´ sticos (Madrid: CSIC, 1978).
11 Paul-J. Guinard, La Presse espagnole de 1737 a` 1791. Formation et signification d’un
Genre (Paris: Institut d’Etudes Hispaniques, 1973).
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Persecution. A government inquiry into authorship ensued in 1789, following Inquisitorial condemnation of many numbers.
The Correo de los ciegos de Madrid (“The Madrid Post,” 1786– 1791) was a miscellany, with articles frequently stretching over many numbers. Jose´ de Cadalso’s extensive meditation on Spain, Cartas mar-ruecas (“Moroccan Letters”), first appeared anonymously in its pages in 1789, as did radical texts by Manuel de Aguirre. The tone was often very serious, with many articles political in outlook, but it ranged widely over history, philosophy, and social behavior. Current literary activities received coverage, and overall it appealed to serious intellectuals, as subscription lists testify. The Esp´ıritu de los mejores diarios literar-ios que se publican en Europa (“Epitome of the Best European Cultural Journals,” 1787–1791) contained largely translated material, although articles by Spanish authors were included. Coverage embraced political, economic, and social matters, and enabled Spanish readers ignorant of foreign languages to keep abreast of intellectual life elsewhere in Europe. The monthly Memorial literario (“Literary Record,” 1784– 1808) was a cultural miscellany, including reviews of plays performed in Madrid, accounts of new books, among them translations, and reports of academies and public lectures; it covered the Madrid Economic Society’s debate on women’s entry (they were denied full membership), but was generally uncontroversial, except on drama.
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