This study represents a reconceptualization of the literature and the culture of a period (1680–1740) that falls within the Hispanic Late Baroque. It aims to discover what is modern in the aesthetic, natural philosophy and ideology of authors traditionally characterized as Gongorist and baroquist. I call them humanists, and I argue that they charted a middle course between scholastics and moderns in Spain and Spanish America.

When I began my research, I could not find a rational reconstruction of Hispanic natural philosophy in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that paid attention to poetry, novels and historiography. The analysis of such discourses by historians of Spanish and Spanish- American science has been largely ignored. The tardy dissemination of the new philosophy in Spain and Spanish America has been assumed, and numerous aesthetic and ideological conclusions have been drawn from this false premise. Nor did I come across studies that assumed religious and ethnic consciousness was central to the study of the new philosophy's reception in Spain and Spanish America. I was struck by the fact that the Spanish people as a people (or Nación) have been imaged, at different moments in the history of the West, as black devils and as white devils, and I discovered that such apparently opposed metaphors are part of the same trajectory, irrespective of their ideological and aesthetic moorings. Notions of Hispanic primitivism or antiintellectualism, positive or negative, are still held by many twentiethcentury scholars who are unaware that such notions are extrapolations from the caricatures of the Spanish published two or three centuries ago. The absence of a viable scholarly model, and the justification for my model of Hispanic modernity, are both tied to what I call literary absolutism.

The first development contained in this term is the new philosophy's graduated domination of discourses in the arts and sciences. It is important to stress the graduated nature of this domination: the Church in general placed very few works on natural philosophy or physics on the Index. The Spanish Inquisition reviewers too were particularly relaxed in the years 1640–1707, although natural philosophy, alchemy and magic were subject to stricter censorship guidelines than were mathematics, natural history and geography. In the case of Hispanic humanists it was graduated in another sense: they held fast to the via media while scholastics rejected the new philosophy and moderns or radicals embraced it.