PARAQUARIAE PROVINCIAE: THE ORIGINS OF A JESUIT CARTOGRAPHIC MODEL IN 18TH CENTURY PARAGUAY

Abstract

The Province of Paraguay in the eighteenth century was a cartography lab where Jesuits made mapping subsidized in various sources, from cartas ânuas and maps made by themselves, terrain observations made by these explorers orally narrated and information from indigenous peoples. As researchers have demonstrated in the last two decades, much of the cartographic artifacts generated in this process ended up in European geographers' mapotecs and helped to form the European geographic consciousness of the American continent. The circulation of maps made by Jesuits in their own way may have united them as a collective of missionary-cartographers and even result in a cartographic school. This seems to have happened with the map of the jesuit Juan Francisco Dávila, printed in 1726. In 1753 a map was printed in Rome by another Jesuit, José Quiroga Méndez (1707-1784), whose title and layout suggest to have been subsidized on the map of Dávila. Unlike Quiroga, Dávila is a little-known Jesuit, born in the city of Buenos Aires and who worked at the College of Corrientes and the Procuraduría de las Missiones in Asunción. This research project aims to understand the process of production of the map of Dávila and its influence on the cartography