Diego González Holguín. Gramatica y arte nueva de la lengua general de todo el Peru llamada lengua Qquichua, o lengua del Inca. Ciudad de Los Reyes (Lima): Francisco del Canto, 1607.
Diego González Holguín arrived in Peru in 1581 as a member of a Jesuit mission, and then lived in different regions of the viceroyalty. His Gramatica y arte nueva was the result of twenty-five years of studying popular spoken language in Cuzco and critically revising earlier studies on the subject like the Quechua vocabulary prepared by Fray Domingo de Santo Tomás (Valladolid, 1560).
Holguín was also the author of Vocabulario de la lengua general de todo el Peru, published in Lima in 1608, which is a continuation of the Gramatica. It includes more words than previous vocabularies and an innovative orthography (the Durand Collection holds two copies of this valuable first edition, and Notre Dame retains a third in its Rare Book Collection). In 1579 the University of Lima created the chair of Quechua studies and it was decided that priests, bachelors and licentiates were obliged to study the "general language."
Books written by González de Holguín were published by the second printer to work in Lima, Francisco del Canto (son of his namesake who was also a printer in Medina del Campo, Spain, from 1555). These books produced during the first years of printing in Peru (from 1584) are extremely rare.
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