Pedagogias da letra impressa: Eugenio Espejo e as Primicias de la cultura de Quito

A doctor and scholar, Eugenio Espejo (1747-1795) was one of the most prominent intellectuals active in the city of Quito in the second half of the 18th century, marked in the Hispanic context by the spread and appropriation of Enlightenment ideas and the implementation of Bourbon reforms. A publiciser and activist of these ideas that would transform the cultural sphere of the province, Espejo, like other thinkers of the time, had to act within the limitations imposed by the model of the modernising, Catholic and monarchist Iberian Enlightenment. Without yet questioning the established order or the colonial pact in force, the ideas disseminated by Espejo would in any case pave the way for the already irreversible emancipation that would be declared on the continent in the first decades of the 19th century. The periodical founded in 1792 by Espejo, Primicias de la cultura de Quito, the first to be created in the Viceroyalty, played a fundamental role in this dissemination