Diego de Baños y Sotomayor, an uncle of the historian, became bishop of Caracas. Educated in Bogotá, he was instrumental in bringing some rays of intellectual light into Caracas after decades of obscurity. He founded the Colegio Seminario de Santa Rosa, and left as evidence of his literary activity the _Constituciones sinodales del obispado de Venezuela_, published at Madrid in 1698. Another writer bearing the name Oviedo, but of a family distinct from the foregoing, has left a long list of volumes on ecclesiastical subjects. This was Vicente de Oviedo. He studied at the college of San Bartolomé in Bogotá, and for more than forty years was parish priest in various towns of the viceroyalty of New Granada. Efforts to secure the publication of his encyclopedic work in eleven volumes met with the insurmountable opposition of the Spanish government, the grounds of this opposition being utterances unfavourable to the dignity of the monarchy.[154] [Sidenote: Medrano’s _Granada_] To the period embracing the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century belongs the _Historia del nuevo reino de Granada_, by Francisco de Medrano, of the Franciscan order. But these were unfruitful years in the literary history of New Granada. The principal literary products were chiefly such as were especially demanded by readers in the colonies, sermons and lives of saints.[155] III [Sidenote: Cisneros of Venezuela] The publisher of the “collection of rare and curious books treating of America” issued in 1912, as the twenty-first volume of the collection, Joseph Luis Cisneros’ _Descripción exacta de la provincia de Venezuela_. The editor of this reprint sets forth his conclusions concerning the author, which he holds were justified by the text of the work itself. These are that Cisneros was born in Venezuela some time between 1710 and 1715; that he was a trader and, as an agent of the Royal Guipuzcoa Company, for a period of twenty-five years traversed and retraversed the province of Venezuela, buying and selling a great variety of commodities; that he made a number of visits to the island of Curaçao, the province of Maracaybo and Santa Marta in New Granada; that he made three trips on the Orinoco to the Dutch towns of Essequibo and Surinam; and that his book was published at Valencia in Venezuela, in spite of the opinion of Arístides Rojas that the Valencia announced on the title-page as the place of publication was the Valencia of Spain, not the Venezuelan city.