Tensions between literature, science, experience and history in an intellectual of the Sattelzeit in Spanish America: the prefaces in the scientific prose of Juan Ignacio Molina

Abstract

A study which propounds a review of the prefaces of Juan Ignacio Molina’s
principal works (the anonymous Compendio 1776, the Saggio 1782, translated into Spanish like Compendio in 1788 and the Saggio 1810) in order to demonstrate how certain literary aspects of his scientific prose –in particular, gender issues (essay, compendium), the writing of “Natural History”, the meaning of the narrative and the sense of the subject's experience–– illustrate the tensions inherent in the process of semantic change of the concept of “science” in the frame of the Sattelzeit in Spanish America.