Katrina B. Olds

“The Picaresque Enlightenment” examines the history of ideas and of irreligion in the eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic through the life of Joaquín Muñoz Delgado, a charlatan who claimed at various points to be a watchmaker, mining engineer, magician, and physician. His trial on charges of heretical blasphemy and atheism produced over two thousand pages of Inquisition testimony which enabled scholars to reconstruct his life story, while also recovering voices of diverse and little-known historical actors from across late-colonial Spain, Cuba, and Mexico. The case illuminates the history of ideas “from below” through a study of lived experience and popular culture, and contributes to the history of science, medicine, and religion in the Spanish and Latin American Enlightenment.