Juan Vázquez de Acuña, Galileo Galilei, filosofo, y mathematico el mas celebre. [Lima, 1650].
This extraordinarily rare biographical pamphlet is significant in many ways. In addition to providing a sketch of Galileo’s life, it discusses his principal publications, calling them more lucid than the works of Johannes Kepler and François Viète. It even examine’s Galileo’s controversial Saggiatore, a dialogue between the rival cosmologies proposed by Ptolemy and Copernicus. That this work was printed in Lima in 1650 signifies that there was a scientifically literate community in Lima familiar with cutting-edge European debates between the geocentric and heliocentric models of the universe. Lima, indeed, was as cosmopolitan as any European city of the time.