The Word as Object in Colonial Spanish South America: Juan María de Guevara y Cantos's Corona de la Divinissima María (Lima, 1644).

This article centers on the devotional volume Corona de la divinissima María, published in Lima in 1644. This volume primarily takes the form of an extended exegesis of the words spoken by the Virgin Mary as recorded in the Bible, while also exploring the power of the Virgin's name and narrating the author's search for her true lived physical appearance. The book includes 37 engraved illustrations. One of these engravings reproduces a painting the author commissioned of the Virgin's true appearance; the rest diagram or emblematically illustrate powerful words. Indeed, the entire book, called a Corona, or crown, itself shapes an extended metaphor in which the words of prayers directed at the Virgin materialize as spiritual crowns, represented three times in the engraved illustrations. This article argues that, within the 1644 Corona, words have material presence and bear power in multiple ways: as diagrams, as typographic objects, and as spiritual forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]