The Everyday Life of Galicians in the 18th Century according to «Colloquium of Twenty-Four Rustic Galicians» by Martin Sarmiento

«The Colloquium of Twenty-Four Rustic Galicians», a text written by a Benedictine monk Martín Sarmiento in 1746, is an important source of information about the everyday life of Galicians in the first half of the 18 th century that has a special place in Galician culture and beyond. It is the first text of the modern era written entirely in Galician. For the first time in history the author defends the value and independence of the Galician language in the Spanish-language glossary written for «The Colloquium». This approach is unique because during the so-called «Dark Ages» of Galician literature («Séculos escuros», from mid-15 th to early 19 th centuries), Galician was almost entirely replaced by Spanish in writing. Martín Sarmiento bases his work on his childhood memories, his travels across Galicia, documents from monastery archives and news he received from his Galician relatives. Sarmiento seeks to present reliable facts in the text, still he partly idealizes this area of Spain and its inhabitants. Sarmiento pays particularly close attention to portraying a low-class Galician of the time and describing their life, labour, leisure and traditional values. Martín Sarmiento’s writings were almost completely unknown to subsequent generations of Galician intellectuals. This text has hardly been studied by Russian researchers, hence the author of this investigation aims to analyze its content using descriptive and cultural-historical methods, as well as to identify the particularities of how Galicians’ everyday life is represented in the text. This approach corresponds to the current cultural debate regarding the studies of how to describe the formation of the Spanish national character. In the eighteenth-century text we can find origins of the existing stereotypical image of Galicia, which continues to predominate in the «collective imaginary».