A PERUVIAN MEMBER OF THE FICTIONAL ‘ACCADEMIA DEGLI AMFISTILI’: NO COPY IN US LIBRARIES. 4to. (16) including frontispiece signed by the Parisian engraver Guillaume Vallet, 169 pp, (7). Bound in 18th century Spanish tree-calf with gilt title on spine; all edges stained blue. A very good copy. With a highly detailed manicule on p. 12 and a few manuscript notes to scattered leaves. Extremely rare sole edition of this curious work by a Peruvian intellectual resident in Rome, celebrating the recent (1655) public apostasy of Christina of Sweden. Campuzano was deeply interested in such narratives and the conversion of infidels more broadly; his earlier work, Planeta Catholico, had supplicated Philip IV for assistance in the wholesale evangelization of the Moxos Indians of Perù. All of Campuzano’s works are impossibly rare in census; OCLC shows just a handful of copies of the present work in European libraries, and none in the US. The digitized copies at the Bibliotheca Casanatense and the National Library in Rome, for example, are both lacking the engraving. “Not even known in seventeenth-century Peru, the Augustinian Baltasar de Campuzano Sotomayor y Pe?aloza was one of the most active and controversial personalities of the Peruvian Province of his Order. Born into Limenian creole nobility in 1605, he had a brilliant scholarly career within his Order. We know he studied with the Jesuits at the San Martin School in Lima and entered the Augustinian cloister in 1620, ratifying his vows five years later, being just twenty years old. Not much is known of his life in the next twenty years but he should have been very active in Lima, working on a network of influences that secured for him the much desired positions of Prior of his monastery in Lima and calificador (judge) of the Inquisition, sometime in his early thirties. In 1642, being thirty-seven years old he was elected to go to Madrid and Rome as proctor of his Order. He stayed for the next twenty-four years in Europe, dying in the Papal court in 1666.” (Gálvez-Peña). Queen Christina was just 28 years old when she chose to renounce the Swedish throne and travel Europe; a year later, she publicly converted to Catholicism at the feet of Pope Alexander VII. This high-profile apostasy became a cause célèbre throughout the continent, and is delightfully captured in the present frontispiece. In somewhat dense and mystical language, rife with symbolism and allegory, Campuzano holds up Christina and her conversion as proof of the infallibility of the Catholic Church, as well as examining similarly illustrious conversions through history. For reasons yet to be elucidated, Campuzano writes here under his usual pseudonym, ‘Francisco de la Carrera y Sanctos’, describing himself on the title-page as an ‘Academico de los Amphystilos de Roma’ – i.e. belonging to an entirely fictional ‘Accademia’. Wilkinson’s Iberian Books attributes the present work to Campuzano, with no explanation; but the Biblioteca de Escritores de la Provincia de Guadalajara [the birthplace of his father], pp. 45-46 gives a good account of the evidence for ‘Francisco de la Carrera’ being the nom-de-plume of this Lima-born man of letters – including a dedicatory sonnet found in the present work. The Ensayo de una biblioteca ibero-americana de la Orden de San Agustin (Vol I, pp. 569-70) also agrees, and presents similar evidence. Iberian Books and the USTC confirm no American copies; nor do we find any auction records of any of Campuzano / Carrera’s works. * Santiago Vela & Moral, Ensayo de una biblioteca ibero-americana de la Orden de San Agustin Vol I, pp. 569-70; Simo?n Di?az VII-3932; Iberian Books 70818; Palau 45259; Antonio, Bibliotheca Hispana Nova, Vol I, p. 181; Carlos Gálvez-Peña, Writing History to Reform the Empire: Religious Chroniclers in Seventeenth-Century Peru (D Phil thesis, Columbia, 2012); and cf the excellent entry on Campuzano by Rafael Lazcano González in the DBE of the Real Academia de la Historia.