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March - December 2023
Marcos Cortés Guadarrama is holder of a PhD Degree in Hispanic Philology, granted by the University of Oviedo (Spain). His dissertation consisted in the edition and study of the “Flos sanctorum con sus ethimologías”, one of the first incunabula of the Iberian Peninsula, derived from the celebrated Legenda aurea by Jacobus de Voragine. The dissertation received the Premio Extraordinario de Doctorado, awarded by the University of Oviedo (2013). This work has been transformed and edited to become his first book in 2018, Flos sanctorum con sus ethimologhías. Lo maravilloso hagiográfico.
In the last seven years he has moved his research interests in the field of the religious discourse in the Early Modern Medicine, the connection between Alchemy and Religion and the History of the Spiritism of the 19th century. As a result, he has published dozens of articles and, in the 2020, his second book with the prestigious publishing house Iberoamericana/Vervuert, Tratado breve de medicina y de todas las enfermedades, one of the most important books of medicine printed in Mexico and written by Agustín Farfán at the end of the 16th century. He is now a Professor and Researcher in the University Veracruzana (Mexico).
With my project, Narratives of the Early Modernity Medicine and the Spiritism of the 19th century, I aim to investigate popular medical wisdoms from Spain and New Spain (from the 16th to the 18th century) and the development of Spiritism movement and its narratives during the 19th century.
The connection between these two spheres of knowledge: medical narrative in the Early Modernity and the Spiritism, could be establish by the academic study of Esotericism inside of the six categories proposed by Antoine Faivre: 1. The Nature as a totality with a hierarchical organization (with some visible and invisible dimensions). 2. A principle of correlations and analogies. 3. Faculty of imagination as a faculty of access to an intermediate World. 4. The practitioner could experience the intellectual and spiritual transmutation (Gnosis). 5. Praxis of concordance between different traditions. 6. The transmission of the information in the materiality of the writing culture. This allows us to detect the esotericism in the narrativity of the ideas. Nevertheless, Faivre’s theory has a historic counterpart, given the fact that during Renaissance a crossover of different traditions of the Mediterranean Antiquity occurs: Neoplatonism, Hermetism, Alchemy and Cabbala, all of them inside a Christian frame of references. Different groups, organizations, lodges arise from this crossover. This means that the researcher must know an esoteric genealogy in order to understand his/her subjects of study.
Spiritism is one of the most important and probably less studied subjects in the academic field. It is an intellectual movement born in the middle of the 19th century, a mixture of Science and Religion and its theme has to do with the deceased ones in a Secular context. Nevertheless, Spiritism does not ignore and, in fact, in a new way tries to transform the World based on the sacred fundaments of the Cosmos.
Part of the success of the Spiritism movement was the idea of transcendence of the human being without an institutional structure. We see this practice as an historical reflection of the narrative process involved with the intentions of a small group of believers, such as we could see some classic texts written by alchemist and medics in the Early Modern Medicine. But the truth is that the Spiritism was a way to response to the reality of specific problems. In the Romanian culture, Hașdeu himself is an enigmatic intellectual who gathered some of this concerns in his book Sic cogito. His attempt to create an answer is very interesting. Therefore, I see the translation of this book as a very necessary one to be introduced into the Hispano-American Literary Culture.