Libraries

There were many quills that narrated the wonderful life of Rosa de Santa María. The prototype of all these worthy narrations is the highbrow work of Fray Leonardo Hansen, which has numerous editions and translations. This allowed different Dominican authors – around the world – such as Lorenzo Lucchesini (Italy), Andrés Ferrer de Valdecebro (Spain) and José Manuel Bermúdez (Peru), to collect data, virtues and providential acts of the Saint from Lima.

However, the real initiator in dealing with this issue was fray Juan de Vargas Machuca, who published La Rosa del Peru (1659) in Seville. Unfortunately, the symbolic or allegorical style of this author belittled his work in the eyes of the public. Likewise, the enormous amount of classical and patristic quotations with which Vargas Machuca sustains the facts of Rosa’s life and his own opinions draws attention. Even though this original sacred life remains a bibliographic rarity of the Sevillian presses, its narrative content is what Leonardo Hansen later used for his composition. Meanwhile, the work of Vargas Machuca surprises for its rhetorical beauty and the figures he weaves, from the body of a flower to a hagiological building of the Ciudad de los Reyes of Lima.