The 13 manuscripts that constitute Juan Basilio Cortegana’s Historia del Perú make up a unique and diligently prepared work that tells the history of the country from the Inca period to 1827, the year of the first presidential election and the second Constitutional Congress. Cortegana emphasises the formation of the republic, a foundational process in which the author was a witness and actor. Cortegana, from Cajamarca, was a soldier in Junín and Ayacucho and an empirical historian who created a work with many links and intertextualities, but he expresses passionately an affirmation for an independent Peru as well as the country’s continuities with the past. This round table is called on the occasion of the publication in five volumes of the Historia del Peru, a selection of texts written by Cortegana, a publishing project promoted by the BBVA Foundation and the National Library of Peru, supervised by Marcel Velazquez and Carmen McEvoy. They will talk about the meanings of historical memory, the workings of these writings, with their framed voices and the declaration of the manuscripts as Historical Heritage of the Nation. With the essayist Marcel Velazquez, the historian and writer Carmen McEvoy and the Institutional Head of the National Library of Peru, Fabiola Vergara.
