The University of Barcelona announced Tuesday that a post-doctoral researcher uncovered the only known manuscript of the epic poem El Nuevo Mundo in the library of the Benedictine Abbey of Montserrat, a find scholars described as “completely unpublished” and of historical value.
Claudia García-Minguillán, working under a Juan de la Cierva contract in the university’s Department of Catalan Philology and General Linguistics, located the 39-folio volume after cross-referencing the abbey’s uncatalogued holdings with obscure bibliographic notes. “The manuscript had remained outside the usual boundaries of research for decades because it had never been digitized or transcribed, and in no modern database was the authorship clearly identified,” said García-Minguillán, according to La Vanguardia.
The document, dated 1701, bore the hand of Portuguese poet and diplomat Francisco Botelho de Moraes e Vasconcelos and contained passages absent from every printed edition. Scholars said printers likely altered or removed parts of the text for ideological reasons, so the Montserrat copy offered an unfiltered version of the author’s intentions.
El Nuevo Mundo presented Christopher Columbus as its hero and linked him to Austriacist supporters of Archduke Charles of Austria during the War of the Spanish Succession. The recovered stanzas strengthened that political alignment, casting the navigator as a symbol against Bourbon rule.
Preliminary comparison with the 1701 print showed divergences across about 40 pages. Some stanzas never appeared in print, while others displayed vocabulary that hinted at later censorship. Although written in Spanish, the poem followed classical epic conventions more typical of Latin and Italian works, giving it a distinctive place in Iberian Baroque literature. The manuscript is now stored under climate-controlled conditions, and the full text has yet to be released.
Botelho, active in diplomatic and intellectual circles in early-eighteenth-century Barcelona, used Spanish verse to intervene in the ideological debates of the Hispanic monarchy. He helped found the Acadèmia dels Desconfiats, precursor to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Barcelona, and allied himself with Austro-British sympathizers in the city.
A critical edition and monographic study are underway as part of a project funded by Spain’s Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The effort aims to reconstruct Botelho’s political and literary motivations and to examine mechanisms of creation and censorship in Baroque Barcelona.
García-Minguillán’s appointment through the Juan de la Cierva program illustrated the initiative’s capacity to generate primary sources for new scholarship. Experts predicted that the forthcoming edition would draw historians, philologists, and Golden Age specialists interested in the ideological uses of Columbus and the intertwining of politics and literature on the eve of the War of the Spanish Succession.
The preparation of this article relied on a news-analysis system.