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Copyright of Trashumante. Revista Americana de Historia Social is the property of Universidad de Antioquia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala, now known as Antigua Guatemala, held significant importance as a center of Spanish colonialism in the Maya highlands. Over the span of 300 years, serving as the capital of the Audiencia de Guatemala, it hosted a culturally and socially diverse population consisting of European settlers, Maya and Mexican natives, Mestizos, and individuals of African descent. This article offers an exploration of human-animal interactions within this multicultural environment through the zooarchaeological analysis of 11 sites across the colonial town. The findings of this first study on the archaeology of humans and animals in the post-Columbian Guatemalan highlands shed light on the intricate relationships between diverse human communities and animals, along with the changes and continuities in animal utilization among the Maya natives during this particular historical period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1542, with the promulgation of the New Laws, Spanish authorities made a greater effort to eliminate indigenous slavery in America, after the doubts expressed by various missionaries about the treatment given to the indigenous people by Spanish settlers. However, legally sanctioned slavery among indigenous people continued in the border regions of the Spanish Empire. My interest is to demonstrate that the persistence of this practice did not result in a legal contradiction, but rather was a means of sanctioning rebellious indigenous groups, using arguments of Francisco de Vitoria and other School of Salamanca scholars, especially in places where control of sovereignty was in question. Methodologically, I will use original texts from various sources, such as the minutes of the Cabildo of the Audiencia of Guadalajara, as well as reports on the Chichimeca War by various clerics and jurists who witnessed the conflict, such as Guillermo de Santa María, Jean Focher, and Fulgencia Vique. Temporally, I will focus on the discussion of war and slavery against the nomadic peoples of northern New Spain, known as the Chichimecas. The result was that, for many New Spanish clerics, slavery would serve to punish the supposed crimes of these peoples against peace, and also to change their archaic customs and teach them sedentary and civil life. Finally, I argue that the establishment of indigenous slavery in the northern frontier of New Spain demonstrates the limitations of the Spanish Empire in maintaining its most remote borders, especially when faced with peoples who did not have a civil political life with definable centers and hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

King Carlos III of Spain supported numerous scientific and intellectual enterprises in Spanish America during the eighteenth century. One was the compilation, between about 1782 and 1785, of a vast 'paper museum', the 'Codex Martínez Compañón' or 'Codex Trujillo del Perú', in the province of Trujillo, Peru. There, the Bishop of Trujillo, Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón, directed the preparation of hundreds of coloured illustrations of the people, geography and natural history of the region. Included were 17 images of mammals classified as primates from Peruvian forests. In 1789, this compilation was shipped to Madrid where some of these illustrations were copied into an impressive oil painting by Louis Thiébaut under the direction of the bishop's nephew, José Ignacio de Lecuanda. This painting, the Quadro de la Historia Natural Civil y Geográfica del Reyno del Perú (1799), not only included images of almost a dozen primates, but also accompanying descriptions. Forming part of an unusually large painting, these depictions of New World primates served as channels for ideas about exoticism and potential European initiatives in the forested regions of Spanish America before independence. This paper discusses the identification of the primates and some other mammals portrayed in both Martínez Compañón's Codex and in the Quadro del Perú of Lecuanda and Thiébaut. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Araucaria is the property of Araucaria-Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofia, Politica y Humanidades and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Narratives embedded in studies of modern Spanish colonialism have conspired against a deep understanding of colonialism as a global and current issue and have influenced or limited the directions for research. By focusing on particular narratives that separate and disconnect the realities of the colonies from those of the Iberian Peninsula, this article discusses the conceptual divide between the study of colonial and early modern realms, and the tenuous connections between the archaeology of Spanish colonialism developed in America and in the Iberian Peninsula. This paper attempts to counter those insular narratives by offering a view on how even remote settlements in Ibero-America show connections that tell stories of sixteenth-century Spain and pose questions that often cannot be answered due to the lack of shared perspectives between the study of modern Spanish colonialism in America and the Iberian Peninsula. To illustrate this view, a case study focused on Ciudad del Nombre de Jesús settled during the failed Spanish plan for the fortification of the Strait of Magellan at the end of the sixteenth century is provided. The interpretation of the results of archaeological and historical lines of research allows the establishment of material connections among individuals, stories and places of the Iberian Peninsula and America. The implication of this case contributes to considering the role that archaeology can play in questioning the enduring effects of modern Spanish colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Virtual Archaeology Review is the property of Virtual Archaeology Review and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In an effort to promote historical empathy of history students, the author discusses the practice of the mita, the Spanish colonial forced-labor system imposed on its indigenous subjects in the viceroyalty of Peru, now located in Bolivia and Peru, specifically how it was used in the silver mining operations of Potosí and the associated mercury mining operations in Huancavelica. Topics considered include access to primary source materials, contemporary activists who attempted to ban the system because of its inhumane conditions, the health impact of mining on workers, racism, and greed.

In this text, the use of administrative secrecy within the institutions of Spanish America responsible for government, justice, and municipal finance is explored: town councils and royal treasuries. Through the examination of a diverse range of documentary sources, seven distinct thematic groups are identified based on the subject matter, institution, actors, and objectives of the use of secrecy. All of this is contextualized within the broader Spanish Empire, but it is particularly focused on the specific cases that occurred in the Río de la Plata region during the 18th century It is concluded that, indeed, institutional secrecy within the Spanish monarchy was not exclusive to high-level government officials but was also useful, necessary, and practiced at the municipal level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of 3D visualization technologies offers a unique opportunity to reconstruct historical cities that no longer exist or have been substantially modified. In this paper, we use the oldest preserved map of the city of San Cristóbal de La Laguna, created in 1588 by the engineer Leonardo Torriani, as the basis for its 3D virtual recreation. This map shows the first non-fortified Spanish colonial city whose plan provided a model for the colonial cities in America. These distinct features made San Cristóbal de La Laguna a UNESCO world heritage site. In our work, we present a map-based workflow for 3D reconstruction that balances fidelity to the original map with the integration of other historical sources and the current status of the city. This leads to the development of several 3D models from those distinct sources whose integration provides the 3D reconstruction of the city in the 16th century. The results of this project can be applied to other similar maps that were created in Europe at that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship details how consistently Indigenous leaders engaged the Spanish colonial legal apparatus to contest injustices. Such self-advocacy typically centered around particular communities and emphasized the king's paternalistic duties. In the eighteenth century, however, a growing number of Indigenous leaders gained access to higher education and participated in the era's debates over imperial reform. This essay highlights two educated Indigenous petitioners, from Mexico and Peru, who invoked the language of the Hispanic Enlightenment and proposed measures to improve the material and spiritual welfare of America's native population writ large. Their efforts can be considered early expressions of a pan-Indigenous consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Teología is the property of Pontificia Universidad Catolica Argentina and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

There has recently been renewed interest among economic historians in preindustrial inequality, but there are still few case studies on wealth inequality in preindustrial Latin America, particularly involving colonial Spanish America before 1820. This paper presents a study of wealth inequality in Montevideo, an area of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, in the late colonial period. This work addresses the level of wealth inequality, the composition of wealth, and its relationship with social structure in Montevideo in the late eighteenth century. It uses a data set of probate inventories and population records as its main sources, estimating a Gini index, presenting a stylized picture of the social structure, and analysing the differences in wealth between social groups in 1772–3. The main finding is that wealth inequality in Montevideo was similar to that in the English colonies of North America in 1774 and was lower than that in preindustrial economies in Europe in the same time period. Although most of this society was made up of a relatively wealthy middle class, some important assets were strongly concentrated among the elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Quaestio Iuris (QI) is the property of Editora da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EdUERJ) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Varia História is the property of Varia Historia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the eighteenth century, all European colonial empires undertook the task of institutionalising their postal systems. Within the framework of the Bourbon reforms, the Spanish monarchy embarked upon reforming the postal system within the Spanish America with the aim of making transatlantic communications more reliable and regular. These plans, however, were hampered by an ongoing power struggle between all agents with a stake in the circulation of information. This is clearly reflected in the postal office in Cartagena de Indias, which was a key node for the Crown and a point of confluence for the strategies and interests of different local and global powers; the office, therefore, represented the polyhedric reality of postal communication. This paper shows that the institution had its own agency by constituting one of the main power tools, which is a reflection of the close relationship that exists between empire and communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Hidalguía is the property of Revista Hidalguia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The alternativa system in Spanish American religious orders was an early example of deliberate electoral engineering to address the problem of social division. It was subject to criticism, however, for stealing voters' freedom, ignoring the rights of candidates, and restricting access to competent officeholders. Moreover, it often gave disproportionate power to a minority faction. Hence, the alternativa remained, at best, an expedient, short-term solution to the problem of factionalism. Examining the canonists' debate about the alternativa is instructive because it reveals the darker moral side of power-sharing regimes whenever and wherever they occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Trashumante. Revista Americana de Historia Social is the property of Universidad de Antioquia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of IC: Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación is the property of Universidad de Sevilla, Departamento de Periodismo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Universitaria de Historia Militar (RUHM) is the property of Centro de Estudios de la Guerra and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article titled "Materiality. Making Spanish America." presents a review of the book of the same name, edited by Jorge F. Rivas Pérez. The book compiles nine presentations given at the annual symposium of the Mayer Center at the Denver Art Museum, which focused on the materiality of artistic objects in Spanish America. Each chapter of the book addresses different topics related to the materiality of objects, such as the interpretation of pre-Hispanic tocapus, the integration of objects from the Indies into Castilian homes, domestic sculpture in Baroque Lima, global trade in the Spanish colonial empire, the adaptation of European weapons in the New World, indigenous creativity in the Guaraní missions, portraits of martyred Franciscans, the systematization of objects by the Bishop of Trujillo, and the early collections of the National Museum of Colombia. The book offers a recommended reading due to the quantity and quality of the contributions presented. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Mediterranea - Ricerche Storiche is the property of Mediterranea-Ricerche Storiche and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Mediterranea - Ricerche Storiche is the property of Mediterranea-Ricerche Storiche and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Background: The Aztec civilization has been one of the most powerful and organized cultures in the pre-Columbian era in America. Its fall was due to many factors, including the incursion of Spanish colonization and its violent transculturation, associated with the strong influence of its theological traditions and beliefs, which generated a new configuration in its social structure. Methods: Through a qualitative analysis and a systematic review based on the keywords Montezuma and TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury), we found 70 texts of interest, of which 32 were selected for their anthropological and medical content and their relationship with the history of neurosurgery. Results: The traumatic brain injury (TBI) controversy and its consequences on this leader's decision-making capacity and personal and social repercussions is evident. There are basically two versions of the story. That of the TBI was caused by his own people, and the other is the death due to injuries caused by the Spaniards. Historical texts that confirm these findings are presented. Conclusion: There is documentary evidence of TBI in the Aztec emperor, which partly explains his decision making behavior in the face of the invading Europeans. However, there is no forensic evidence to determine the causes of his death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finer things in colonial Spanish America, such as pearl earrings, silver embroidery, and silk stockings, fascinated those who sought to enhance their wardrobes, dazzle passersby, and incite envy in others with foreign and locally sourced luxury. This article focuses on the advent of sumptuary laws in the sixteenth century and examines the peculiar targeting of African-descended women who represented a miniscule percentage of the Spanish American population at the time. I argue that while prosecution largely failed, the legal culture that developed around the concern about African-descended women and finery reveals both Crown and religious concerns about the future of the colonies, their desire for superficial order, and fears of imperial ruin in the early decades of Spanish America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is about the multiple activities of the Society of Jesus, one of the most present -- if not the most -- religious orders in Brazil during the so-called colonial period, in the colonies of the Spanish Crown in America and in various territories to the east, such as Macau and Goa, in addition to the Iberian Peninsula itself, which the studies gathered here focus on. In addition to the major theme -- the multiple activities of the Society of Jesus in Modernity -- addressed in the articles gathered in this Section, there is another aspect that deserves to be mentioned, namely, the affiliation of its authors to the International Society of Jesuit Studies. The SIEJ is an international scientific organization that brings together scholars from the most varied scientific areas whose research interests focus on the production of critical knowledge about the Society of Jesus, in all aspects that concern this Order, throughout its history. of more than 450 years, in different areas of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Teoría y Praxis is the property of Editorial Universidad Don Bosco and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Hipogrifo: revista de literatura y cultura del siglo de oro is the property of Hipogrifo: revista de literatura y cultura del siglo de oro and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article presents a synthesis of regional archaeological investigations in the city and region of Valdivia during the colonial period (1550–1820). Previous studies have traditionally been centered on Hispanic mindsets and the role of conflict, the frontier status of colonial society in southern Chile, and the dispersed character of indigenous settlement. Here local sequences of material culture are reconsidered together with previous conceptual frameworks proposed by historical and anthropological research. Our research is based on new field surveys, the study of standing buildings, and assemblages of finds. These have been linked to different types of sites, including urban centers, fortifications, and mission posts. The results allow us to investigate the intercultural character of local society, settlement patterns, and the role of Valdivia in the context of the Peruvian viceroyalty and the Spanish Empire as a whole. Conclusions reveal the specific colonial processes that characterized the region and the sequence of founding, abandonment, and refounding of the urban center of Valdivia, which, in turn, impacted patterns of indigenous settlement and provoked technological hybridization in local ceramic industries. These changes can be linked to the emergence of an intercultural society, the definition of which proves more complex than that accepted by current binary categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes Cervantes' vision of the Spanish Empire in America and its presence in his work. Cervantes makes references to various aspects of the construction of the Spanish Empire in America, such as the discovery, the conquest of Mexico, the political and administrative organization, the evangelization of the indigenous people, and the wealth that America represented for Spain. However, he does not address the discovery of America or the Christianization of the continent in his work. The article highlights the importance of the conquest of Mexico in Cervantes' work and also mentions references to the conquest of Chile. Additionally, a passage from "El trato de Argel" is analyzed, in which the imperial power of Spain in America is exalted and the conquest and exercise of power over the indigenous people are legitimized. The article also mentions the importance of Seville and Cadiz as communication and trade centers between Spain and America during the time of Don Quixote, as well as the presence of diamonds on a Portuguese ship that indicates their origin and valuable cargo. In general, the panorama presented by Cervantes about the Spanish Empire in America is representative of its historical reality. [Extracted from the article]

Among the influential factors in the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire in the sixteenth century, intelligence played a significant role. Information from field and diplomatic sources proved to have a decisive role in planning combat tactical moves as well as in the diplomatic and political contacts accompanying the military campaign. Both sides realized the importance of intelligence and used it as part of their military and diplomatic policies. This paper explores the types of intelligence sources and information-gathering systems available to the two sides in the fateful events of 1519-1521, and analyses intelligence's impact on the outcome of this momentous milestone in the New World's history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the urgency of a Black liberation project for Black girls to eradicate the legacy of colonialism in South America. Topics discussed include pieces of evidence of the enslavement of Black girls in Colombia, sexualized disciplines and racialized punishment that affect the lives of girls in Buenaventura, Colombia, and the pathways to liberation for Black, young, and feminized bodies.

Missions and indigenous villages are commonly investigated contexts for indigenous responses to Spanish colonialism in the American Southwest. In early colonial New Mexico, colonists' households were also a venue for interaction and exchange of information between Pueblos and Spanish. Using the concept of hybridity, I explore seventeenth-century Spanish ranches in northern New Mexico for the interactions between Spanish colonists and Pueblo wives, servants, slaves, and laborers. The architecture, foodways, and artifacts, show an interplay between Pueblo and Spanish ways of making do suggesting that Pueblo peoples contributed in substantial ways to the nature of these households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is easy to presume that age's legal value rests in the autonomy and rights that accrue to the liberal (male, propertied) citizen who has reached the age of majority. But this is not universally so. In Spain's American colonies, legal age talk involved multiplying privileges rather than exclusionary subtraction. Few indigenous peoples, enslaved people of African descent, or members of the free casta poor tallied the years they had lived in a manner that meets modern standards of precision. Instead, the ages that Spanish American officials set down on paper in criminal trials, censuses, and freedom suits derived from complicated cultural equations, including reconciling local ethno-numeracies with European counting systems. For all its seeming imprecision, age was of critical importance to colonial Spanish Americans, since rather than guaranteeing access to rights, age was a language that colonial subjects used to turn legal incapacities into beneficial protections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "Codex Mendoza" is one of the earliest, most detailed, and most important postconquest accounts of pre-Hispanic Aztec life. Nahuas and Spaniards manufactured the codex through a complex process that involved translations across media, languages, and cultural framings. Translations made Aztec culture legible and acceptable to nonnative viewers and readers by recasting indigenous practices, knowledge, ontology, and epistemology. Following a stratigraphic approach that examines the process through which natives and Spaniards created a transcultural manuscript, the article examines the multiple interpretations and negotiations involved in producing images, books, and information about the indigenous world in early colonial Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers how Africans and their descendants may have expressed their socioreligious identities within the early modern Iberian Catholic world. The author argues that the seventeenth-century Afro-Peruvian mystic Úrsula de Jesús situates herself within both Catholic and Yorùbá orishá religious practice. In a close reading of Úrsula's spiritual diary entries, the author speculates that Úrsula intentionally inflects the meanings of the words poyto to signify a Poitou mule and pollino to refer to a little donkey. In doing so, Ursula reframes an image of mounting that may be read concurrently as a transformed representation of Catholic submission and as an image of Yorùbá ritual spirit possession. Within the transculturated religious space of colonial Lima, the author suggests that Úrsula rearticulates Catholic rhetoric to reframe her Afro-religious practice and perform the role of a spiritual authority. The essay explores how Úrsula de Jesús would have transposed an African past into her religious expression in her Catholic convent to encounter both mystic visions and orishá spiritual possession in a unified religious experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an examination into the literary-theatrical history of Spanish drama of the late-18th and early-19th centuries, discussing their depiction of fatherhood and patriarchy in the Atlantic colonial dominions. Particular attention is given to the manifestation of the socio-political conflict of Spanish imperialism regarding power seen in the subtext of the works. Additional subjects discussed include the legal aspects of the dramas, cross-cultural comparisons to other forms of drama at the time, and contrasts between their reception in Europe and the Americas.

In her study on the configuration of difference in colonial New Granada, Joanne Rappaport contends that many studies "tend to ignore how different practices of distinguishing one individual from another came into play in concrete situations," and as a result they "end up labeling as 'race' something that was much more multifaceted." Subsequently, she urges scholars to interpret colonial subjects and their identities on their own terms. This study responds to Rappaport's call by analyzing the workings of the historical concept of calidad in colonial Spanish America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Noxious airs from trash discards, irrigation canals, marketplaces, hospitals, and plazas vitiated colonial Lima's environment. Using olfactory history, this article examines how residents reacted to their pungent environs. Early modern Iberians believed that foul smells were harmful. Fully understanding this relationship, municipal leaders subjugated the San Lázaro district by relocating its indigenous population and moving noxious trades and institutions to the area. I argue that the concentration of miasmas in San Lázaro represents an environmental conquest. San Lázaro's ethnically and socially diverse population lived with unhealthy airs that threatened their health. By contrast, central Lima enjoyed fresher airs in locations primarily occupied by Spanish vecinos (male, landowning citizens, who were allowed to participate in local politics) in and around the Plaza de Armas, the cathedral, the viceroy's palace, and the municipal hall. The protection of central Lima's airs reveals that environmental management corresponded to social status and political power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent global legal histories argue that jurisdictional competition between authorities, often at the edges of territories, ordered empires and nations. But we still need more concrete, grounded understandings of how local actors understood and produced jurisdiction, and we need clearer methodologies for recovering those understandings from archives that privilege imperial, often European concepts of law, authority, and territory. A single case from southern Mexico, centered on the 1683 arrest of a native man named Juan Matías at a makeshift court built on a wheat field, provides both. Close attention to this case, supplemented with regional and temporal comparison, offers glimpses of how imperial law on the books animated local understandings of jurisdiction on the ground. In turn, in the very act of translating local events and native practices for a Spanish judge, Juan Matías demonstrates how jurisdiction—in this case "Indian jurisdiction," a unique plane of native authority within the Spanish Empire—was not merely captured on the page in legal documentation but produced through it by native judges and legal agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the policy of forced loans, employed in Spain by Charles V to solve the principal financial crises of the Royal Treasury and to fund the main military campaigns of the Habsburg Empire. Specifically, this study is focused on the first requisition of private American treasures—the earliest case of this in European history—which were expropriated in 1523 by the Casa de la Contratación (House of Trade) of Seville to finance the campaign of Fuenterrabía against the French army. The analysis of exceptional archival sources provides details of all the forced loans imposed on the holders of remittances (primarily gold) and the conditions for extinguishing the debts without causing harmful consequences to Atlantic traders. The article challenges the widespread view of the confiscations as an attack on property rights and overly simplistic ideas about the supposedly 'highly absolutistic' or predatory policies attributed to the Crown of Castile in some of the economic historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries people perceived themselves as members of particular ethnic groups and considered dress to be an important marker of, alternatively, similarity or otherness. Whereas the construction of self and other in literary texts and costume books has been widely discussed, relatively little is known about the relevance of "national" dress in social practice. Against this backdrop, this article discusses the extent to which people in early modern Spain and Spanish America were able to recognize foreigners and ethnoreligious others by the way they dressed. Focusing on two groups, moriscos (Muslims converted to Christianity) within the Spanish realms and foreign Protestants, it demonstrates how a person's outward appearance could reveal, but also conceal, his or her origin. Dress served as an important marker of ethnic and religious difference, but it always remained an ambiguous signifier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how informal indigenous slave communication networks developed and were maintained in sixteenth-century Castile, as men and women served as witnesses or sources of information for those indigenous slaves initiating lawsuits to gain their freedom. Based on dozens of lawsuits in the section Justicia of the Archive of the Indies (Seville, Spain), I argue that the distinct oral communication channels formed by indigenous men and women living in different cities and towns of Castile constituted an important element of litigation suits, before, during and after a sentence was reached or the lawsuit ended. In the heart of the Spanish empire -Castile- slaves and freedmen and women inside and outside of the legal "courtroom" engaged with legal discourse about what it meant to be identified or to identify oneself as an indio (person of the Spanish Indies). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Indias is the property of Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista de Indias is the property of Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article discusses an unpublished vernacular Italian New World epic of the 1580s, which narrates the Spanish conquest of Mexico. The work was authored by the traveler, diplomat, and Orientalist Girolamo Vecchietti, and it is dedicated to Ferdinando I de' Medici, grand duke of Tuscany. Vecchietti's poem is striking as a rare epic in terza rima, and as the sole surviving early modern Italian epic to center on the deeds of Cortés, rather than Columbus or Vespucci. It is also intriguing for its ambivalent attitude toward the Spanish colonizing enterprise, portrayed initially as a heroic evangelizing mission, but later shown in a more compromised light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]