Calvo State

THE STATE OF THE DISCIPLINE
The Politics of Print

!
The Historiography of the Book
in Early Spanish America
Hortensia Calvo
The history of book studies for early Spanish America (14921820s) has
followed a different path from that of northern Europe and the English-
speaking world. Rather than stemming from the methods and concerns
of the Annales school of social history in the 1950s and 1960s, modern
approaches to the book in Spanish America can be traced to the 1930s, or
perhaps earlier, when research into the institutional context of the trans-
atlantic book trade altered prevailing conceptions of cultural life in the
Spanish colonies. Since that time, most scholarship on the printed word
for this period in the region has largely expanded on the Wndings of the
modern founders of the discipline. With some notable exceptions, research
into the social impact of printing or evolving trends in print culture has
not been a major focus. Instead, the literature centers primarily on docu-
menting the exportation of books from Spain to the New World and assess-
ing the role of printed works in the dissemination of European ideas. In
the past decade, new theoretical perspectives in the Weld of early Spanish
American studies have generated a healthy critique of the cultural authority
of the Western book in the New World. Alternate avenues of inquiry seek
to capture more fully the range of printed and nonprinted forms of com-
munication in colonial Spanish America, including those of native origin.
278 Book History
The purpose of this essay is to survey recent scholarship on the book for
early Spanish America while sketching out some historical contours for
understanding the present state of the discipline.
I. Historical Contours and Foundations

When considering book studies for the region as a whole, some preliminary
observations on the establishment of printing and the nature of print cul-
ture during the Spanish American colonial period are in order. Printing was
established in different parts of the region over the course of four centuries.
The printing press was brought Wrst to Mexico City (1539) and then to
Lima (1581), which remained the only two printing centers in the Spanish
territories of the New World until one hundred years later, when the Wrst
presses were brought to Puebla (1640) and Guatemala (1660).1 The rest of
the region did not have printing presses until the eighteenth century: in the
remote Jesuit missions of Paraguay, printing began in 1700, when a press
was constructed with local materials by native Guaran laborers who had
converted to Christianity. The Wrst Havana imprint is from 1707, and in
Santaf de Bogot printing did not begin until 1736, exactly two hundred
years after the city was founded. Most Spanish colonial cities, such as Quito
(1759) and Buenos Aires (1780), did not have presses until the latter half of
the eighteenth century. Printing began in Caracas (1808) in the early nine-
teenth century; a press functioned briefly in 1776 in Santiago de Chile but,
like San Jos and most Central American cities, printing was not established
permanently until after independence from Spain. Thus the bulk of research
on colonial books concerns sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico City
and Lima, the two cities with the longest typographical traditions.2 As the
cultural and political epicenters of the Spanish empire in the Americas until
the mid-eighteenth century, Mexico and Lima were also the major distrib-
ution points for imported European books.3 Very few studies have focused
on the social history of print in the eighteenth century and the Wrst decades
of the nineteenth century on the eve of independence, as we shall see below.
In the colonies, the printing press served the ideological, political, and
administrative purposes of Spain. The Wrst presses were brought to Mexico
City and Lima for the explicit purpose of aiding missionaries in the Chris-
tianization of native populations. Thus multilingual catechisms, instructional
religious tracts, grammars, and vocabularies of Amerindian languages were
the main products of early colonial presses. As the sixteenth century wore
on, the Crowns initial preoccupation with the moral and spiritual welfare
of Amerindians shifted toward the education of increasing numbers of
The Book in Early Spanish America 279
European settlers in the viceregal capitals. By the mid-seventeenth century,

colonial printing primarily served the purposes of peninsular administra-
tors and reflected the growing prosperity and intellectual needs of lettered
urban criollos, Europeanized white or mestizo colonists. In New Spain,
for example, from 1539 to 1600, more than 31 percent of locally produced
imprints were in native Indian languages, while in the following century
published works in these languages diminished signiWcantly, accounting for
only 3 percent of total output.4 In the seventeenth century, in both Mexico
and Lima, religious works and ofWcial publications such as printed sermons
for funerals and religious celebrations, hagiographies, chronicles of religious
orders, royal decrees, and other legal provisions, as well as ofWcially sanc-
tioned histories of the New World, chronicles of local events, and works
on military topics predominated, reflecting the social and political uses of
printing among urban elites.5
Book production and the circulation of printed works in the Spanish
colonies were circumscribed by a series of practical and legal restrictions
as well as by the nature of scholarly culture in the region. These factors,
in turn, have historically contributed to shaping approaches to the study of
books in the period. Paper was largely imported from Europe, and the high
costs of imported machinery and other supplies, coupled with the Crowns
monopoly on the book trade, constituted the main commercial obstacles
to local publishing.6 Other restrictions stemmed from ideological concerns
and were enforced, to a greater or lesser degree, by ecclesiastical and civil
authorities. The perceived threat of heresy stemming from Reformation
Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, in the eighteenth
century, the fear of French and British sociopolitical philosophies resulted
in a succession of laws and decrees designed to curtail the free flow of local
presses and the circulation of books.7 Moreover, strict control of licenses
and authors rights as well as the prohibitive costs of publishing ensured
that the production and circulation of printed works remained an option
for only a small fraction of the population.
Despite these restrictions, however, a thriving transatlantic book trade,
through which European works were imported legally or illegally, supplied
the bulk of reading material in the colonies. An examination of the politi-
cal and social context of colonial publishing in light of recent research into
the nature of scholarly culture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New
Spain has led Magdalena Chocano Mena to observe that the printing press
did not develop as an agent of change during this period.8 Rather than gen-
erating conditions for questioning established authority, as has been widely
noted for Europe, the printing press served to consolidate the status quo in
Mexico. This was due not primarily to ofWcial censorship of unorthodox or
radical perspectives but rather to the fact that the sociopolitical dynamics
280 Book History
of viceregal societies tended to inhibit the development of independent

intellectual enclaves and literary circles outside the patronage of church
and state.9 Centrally engaged in the civil and ecclesiastical bureaucracies of
the colonies, and thus ultimately employed in the service of the metropo-
lis, colonial lettered elites used the printing press to gain social ascendancy
and wield power. Moreover, the Crowns control of local publishing kept
colonial scholars heavily dependent on European presses for publication
of original works, many of which circulated in manuscript form. For all of
these reasons, until well into the eighteenth century, printed works were
less a means for intellectuals to articulate relationships to local realities
than vehicles that kept them connected to Spain and Europe.10
The social and political coordinates of colonial printing sketched out
above suggest the role of the Western book in colonial Spanish America as
a powerful tool of European culture and domination. Emblematic of the
connection between the Western book and Spanish efforts at cultural dom-
ination is the fact that the same peninsular ofWcial who brought the Wrst
printing press to New Spain, Bishop Juan de Zumrraga, is also remem-
bered, rightly or wrongly, for the mass destruction of native Mesoamerican
painted manuscripts.11 Thus the historiography of the Western book in
early Spanish America has historically been shaped, either tacitly or explic-
itly, by changing perspectives of the role of Spain in the Americas and the
legacy of colonial institutions.
The Spanish legacy was, in fact, one of the most passionately debated
issues among nineteenth-century historians, after the processes of inde-
pendence were complete in most of the region (c. 1820s). Throughout the
century, efforts to reconstruct national cultural traditions resulted in a suc-
cession of bibliographic works documenting the intellectual production of
the past. Largely compiled as part of the broader project of nation build-
ing of the newly formed republics, these bibliographic catalogs played a key
role in constructing a collective foundational history.12 Among liberal and
positivist historians, there was a generalized indictment of Spain for keep-
ing the colonies culturally isolated from Europe. By inventorying the limited
output of printing presses in the colonies and uncovering records of legis-
lation concerning metropolitan control of books and reading, nineteenth-
century bibliographers seemed to provide solid documentary proof for this
view of Spanish institutions as repressive mechanisms that had stifled intel-
lectual life in the colonies.13
One major concern among scholars engaged in constructing national lit-
erary traditions was the meager presence of imaginative works, particularly
novels, in colonial bibliographic inventories.14 The scarcity and perceived in-
adequacy of colonial Spanish American literary production was especially
distressing when contrasted to the profusion and quality of peninsular
masterpieces produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the so-

called Golden Age of Spanish literature, which included the likes of Miguel
de Cervantes, Flix Lope de Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, Luis de Gngora,
Pedro Caldern de la Barca, and many others. In particular, two royal
decrees, of 1531 and 1543, prohibiting the importation of Wctional litera-
ture to the colonies were repeatedly invoked as evidence that Spain had
effectively cut the colonies off from all but the most orthodox religious
ideas from Europe. As one literary scholar writing in 1867 lamented, No
books except of a certain kind ever came to the colonies, which were so
jealously guarded; they wanted to make us a race of hermits but instead,
they made us a race of revolutionaries.15
The work of Jos Toribio Medina (18521930), the towering Wgure of
Spanish American bibliography, played a key role in cementing this vision
of the regions cultural past. The scope of Medinas work was formidable,
encompassing his native Chile as well as the rest of the former Spanish
overseas empire, including the Philippines. An indefatigable traveler to all
the major archives of Europe and the Americas, a proliWc scholar on a wide
variety of disciplines, from the exact sciences to literary history, Medina
was the author, editor, or translator of more than 350 books during his
Wfty-seven years of professional life, many of them published in his own
printing press in Santiago de Chile.16 He also edited a number of unpub-
lished works of the Spanish American colonial period and was himself an
avid collector of rare editions of books, prints, stamps, maps, and manu-
scripts from the period. His most important and lasting contributions,
however, were his efforts to document the establishment and development
of printing in thirty-eight American cities during the centuries of Spanish
domination.17 Building on regional bibliographies, Medinas monumental
seven-volume Biblioteca hispano-americana (14931810) and numerous
works on colonial literary production, the Inquisition, and other topics
cemented the foundations of modern critical studies of the book in the
region. Medina also uncovered a wealth of previously unpublished legis-
lation restricting the exportation of books to the New World, thus giving
further credence to prevailing views of Spanish institutions as repressive
mechanisms that had effectively stunted intellectual life in the colonies.
Specialized bibliographies and further documentation on printing in var-
ious countries continued to supplement the Wndings of nineteenth-century
bibliographers well into the 1950s.18 And the notion of cultural stagnation
in the colonial period continued on the part of some scholars as late as
1940 and even into the 1960s. However, starting in the decade of the
1910s, a parallel revisionist perspective on colonial intellectual life began
to emerge as new light was shed on the book trade between Spain and its
former American colonies.
282 Book History
II. The Civilizing Role of the Western Book

In the early twentieth century, a shifting intellectual climate contributed
to reconsidering the Spanish imperial enterprise as an essentially positive,
civilizing mission. In Spain, largely as a result of the war of 1898, when the
remaining territories of its former American empire (Cuba and Puerto Rico)
were lost, many intellectuals were consumed with a sense of progressive,
centuries-long national decline, which developed as a nostalgic yearning for
lost essential Hispanic values. It was in this spirit of impassioned defense
of hispanidad that the Spanish historian Julin Juderas coined the term
leyenda negra, or Black Legend, in 1914 to designate the historical defama-
tion of Spain that had prevailed since the sixteenth century, particularly
among northern European rivals.19 In Latin America a parallel reactionary
sentiment stressing the Spanish roots (as opposed to the indigenous past)
of the continent developed in the early twentieth century in some quarters,
partly in response to the threat of U.S. hegemony in the hemisphere, partly
as a reaction against various popular social movements in the region.
Finally, a growing interest in the Spanish past of U.S. territories formerly
under Iberian rule was developing among historians in this country, who
had also inherited a romanticized view of the conquest from nineteenth-
century writers like Washington Irving and William Prescott.20 From among
these ideological strands an alternate view of Spains role in the New World
began to emerge, in which the coming of the Western book was conceived
as playing a fundamentally civilizing role.
In the early years of the twentieth century, two publications opened the
door for subsequent research into the circulation of books in the colonies
beyond the letter of the law. In 1911 Francisco Rodrguez Marn, a Spanish
literary scholar, published documentary proof that several hundred copies
of what was probably the princeps edition of Don Quijote had been regis-
tered for shipment to the colonies in 1605, only a few months after publi-
cation.21 Three years later, the Mexican Francisco Fernndez del Castillo
published a thick volume, Libros y libreros en el siglo XVI, containing a
wealth of previously unpublished documents from Mexican archives con-
cerning the origins of printing and the diffusion of European books in
New Spain.22
The 1930s through the 1950s were watershed years, as new documen-
tary evidence, such as ships registers, bills of sale, Inquisitorial records,
and other sources for inventories of books and private libraries cast new
light on the circulation of books in the colonies. In particular, two histori-
ans, the Argentine Jos Torre Revello and Irving Leonard from the United
States, published a succession of books and articles in the 1930s and 1940s
revealing evidence of an extensive transatlantic book trade from Spain to

the New World.23 Their investigations provided mounting and convinc-
ing evidence that, as in other areas of Spanish rule, a huge gap existed
between legislation and actual practice. In 1940 Leonard was able to doc-
ument the arrival and receipt of the same shipment of Cervantess novel
that Rodrguez Marn had conWrmed registered in Seville, thus dispelling
prevailing notions that even if books managed to leave Spain, they were
systematically conWscated on arrival in the Indies.24 In the same year Torre
Revello published his monumental history of printing and book circula-
tion in Spanish America, El libro, la imprenta y el periodismo en Amrica
durante la dominacin espaola, which included an oversized appendix
amply documenting the shipment of European books to the New World
colonies. By 1949, when Leonards now classic work, Books of the Brave,
was published, it was conclusively proved that whatever the ofWcial policy
had been, major works of Wction such as Don Quijote, picaresque novels
like Guzmn de Alfarache, even the popular chivalry novels expressly for-
bidden by royal decree, as well as secular dramatic works, classic Latin
and Greek authors, and other nonreligious printed works not only arrived
regularly in the New World but, in many cases, were shipped shortly after
publication in Spain. In addition to Leonard and Torre Revello, Guillermo
Frlong Crdiff of Argentina, Francisco Fernndez de Cosso and Edmundo
OGorman of Mexico, the Canary scholar Agustn Millares Carlo, and
Guillermo Lohmann Villena of Peru formed perhaps the core group of schol-
ars who scoured archives for documentary evidence to disprove any notion
that Spanish obscurantism had deprived colonial readers of the latest titles
from Europe.25
As more evidence of the transatlantic book trade came to light, old issues
concerning the book in colonial society were revisited and new areas of in-
quiry were opened. The work of this generation of scholars established the
cluster of concerns and basic methodological approaches that still occupy
most book historians in the region. Given the central role of the Inquisi-
tion in all aspects of control and suppression of printed works, Leonard,
Torre Revello, and Dorothy Schons investigated its institutional workings
as they related to the production and circulation of books between Spain
and the colonies.26 Leonard in particular argued that commercial interests
had prevailed over state-issued legal restrictions on the circulation of books,
and that the Inquisition had only exercised censorship on books that directly
threatened Catholic orthodoxy, but openly allowed the shipment of all other
kinds of works.
So too, the revelation of a steady flow of European books to the Indies
led to renewed speculation on the influence of ideas from the Old World in
the New via print. One highly suggestive topic to reemerge was the possible
284 Book History
influence of the popular chivalry novels on the Spanish conquest. Leonard

and the Mexican scholar Ida Rodrguez Prampolini proposed the popular
tales of chivalry as an inspirational force on the Spanish conquistadors.27
III. Recent Research: Continuities and

Some New Directions on Print
In the past four decades, most scholarship on the Western book in early
Spanish America has remained largely within the thematic and methodo-
logical contours established by the modern founders of the discipline.28
However, as we shall see, recent theoretical developments in the Weld of
early Spanish American studies have generated strong critiques of the
traditional methods and concerns of book historians, while new avenues
of inquiry aim to account for the complex politics and material realities of
symbolic exchange in the colonial world.
The dominant goals of most traditional research on the book in colo-
nial Spanish America have been either to document the establishment and
development of printing in speciWc regions or to trace the dissemination
of European ideas through print, whether through the transatlantic book
trade or, to a much lesser degree, through colonial printing presses. Follow-
ing the lead of Leonard and Torre Revello in the 1930s, primary sources
for documenting the book trade continue to be ships registers, bills of sale,
Inquisitorial and other ofWcial records of trials, book merchants properties,
and post mortem inventories.29 Important contributions have been made
to the Weld by literary critics and historians, but very few scholars have
devoted their research primarily to the book in the period. Most studies
are descriptive in nature and many, particularly those on regions beyond
Mexico and Lima, are isolated Wndings, published in journals or as books
that are not easily accessible.
For a history of printing covering the region, Medinas work, especially
the relatively more accessible two-volume compendium of his monographs
on the establishment of printing compiled by Guillermo Feli Cruz and
Jos Zamudio Zamora, is still an indispensable source, supplemented by
the work of subsequent bibliographers.30 In English, Hensley Woodbridge
and Lawrence Thompson provide a concise overview summarizing the
Wndings of Medina, Frlong Crdiff, and other scholars on the history of
printing in each colonial city, indicating basic sources in each case.31 For a
general history of printed works in the region, including discussion of local
printing, the rise of newspapers in the eighteenth century, and the circu-
lation of imported books, Torre Revellos El libro, la imprenta is still an
authoritative source, while Millares Carlos survey of the history of the book
in the West includes sections on the establishment and development of print-
ing as well as on the history of libraries in Latin America.32 More recently,
Jos Luis Martnezs El libro en Hispanoamrica provides a basic intro-
duction to key moments in the history of print in the region and is partic-
ularly commendable for devoting a chapter to native American books or
codices, as the corpus of Mesoamerican painted manuscripts have been
known since the nineteenth century.33 Another notable contribution with a
regional scope is Julie Greer Johnsons The Book in the Americas, a lav-
ishly illustrated companion volume to a 1988 exhibition at the John Carter
Brown Library on the book in Latin America, including Brazil.34
Aside from these general histories, three studies that treat aspects of early
Spanish American books with a regional focus are worthy of mention.
Mohler provides a useful overview of the commercial and legal context of
publishing in the Spanish colonies up to independence; Luis Aznar traces
the origins and ideological context of bibliographical compilations of early
historical works on the New World in Spain and Spanish America; and
Millares Carlo surveys research on private and institutional libraries dur-
ing the colonial period.35
Varying widely in focus and depth, general histories of the book for spe-
ciWc countries that cover the pre-independence period include: for Mexico,
Ernesto de la Torre Villars Breve historia del libro en Mxico, although
aimed at nonspecialists, is of interest for considering the cultural politics
of books and printing and also includes a chapter on Mesoamerican writ-
ing traditions; for Guatemala, Alexandre A. M. Stols, La introduccin de
la imprenta en Guatemala, and Virgilio Rodrguez Beteta, Evolucin de
la imprenta, los libros y el periodismo coloniales; for Colombia, Tarcisio
Higuera, La imprenta en Colombia; for Ecuador, Stols, Historia de la
imprenta en el Ecuador, 17551830; for Venezuela, Julio Febres Cordero,
Historia del periodismo y de la imprenta en Venezuela, and Ildefonso Leal,
Libros y bibliotecas en Venezuela colonial (16331760); for Costa Rica,
Ivn Molina Jimnez, El que quiera divertirse: Libros y sociedad en Costa
Rica (17501914); and for Cuba, Ambrosio Fornet, El libro en Cuba, sig-
los XVIII y XIX.36 Overviews of issues concerning the importation, pro-
duction, and circulation of printed works for the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries that include reviews of recent contributions to the study of the
book for this period are found in Libros en la Nueva Espaa en el siglo
XVI, by Carmen Castaeda, for sixteenth-century New Spain and for
Peru, Guibovich, Printing Press, and Teodoro Hampe, The Diffusion of
Books.37
Aside from documenting the establishment of printing, the most wide-
spread approach to the book in the period is the analysis of individual or
286 Book History
institutional libraries to determine colonial reading habits and the spread of

European ideas. Millares Carlos Bibliotecas y difusin libro, mentioned
above, provides an exhaustive overview of work in this Weld up to 1970,
with a partially annotated bibliography that lists 187 entries for the six-
teenth through the eighteenth centuries; Francisco de Solanos essay on
library inventories as sources for colonial studies also lists more recent work
on libraries in Spain and Spanish America, as well as selected sources on
book censorship and the Inquisition.38 Most who have taken this approach
have centered on the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with some works on inventories found
in other parts of the region, and a few studies documenting the presence
of books by eighteenth-century Spanish reformers and on French political
thought in colonial libraries.39
Recent works on library inventories are especially numerous for colonial
Peru.40 In a Weld characterized by the publication of isolated Wndings, Hampe
and the Spanish scholar Carlos Alberto Gonzlez Snchez are among a
handful of book historians who have pursued this approach more system-
atically, examining a relatively large number of book inventories to investi-
gate varying patterns of literacy and reading habits over an extended period
of time and across a broader social spectrum. Hampes Bibliotecas privadas,
which gathers together his previously published Wndings, analyzes the con-
tents of libraries belonging to magistrates, bishops, a viceroy, an inquisitor,
a provincial priest, a conquistador, a vagabond, and a curaca, an Amerin-
dian leader in a remote Andean village, as well as the library of a convent
in Cuzco, while in Diffusion of Books he analyzes twenty-four invento-
ries discovered by him and others, and provides an excellent overview of
the current state of research on private and institutional libraries in colo-
nial Peru. Gonzlez Snchez studies the circulation of books in sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century Peru through the correspondence of peninsular
immigrants and ofWcial inventories of deceased Spaniards whose property
fell under the custody of the Crown to be shipped back to descendants in
Spain. With respect to the study of library inventories, recently discovered
evidence of book circulation among Amerindian elites suggests future areas
of investigation into the role of printed works in colonial societies beyond
elite Creole circles.41 One notable exception to the focus on library inven-
tories and the circulation of imported books in Peru is Guibovichs Print-
ing Press, a useful examination of local publishing output in Lima during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as it reflects the social, political,
and intellectual context of lettered Creole elites during the period.
Scholarly works on colonial books in Mexico present a wider array of
methodological and thematic approaches than those focusing on Peru.
Aspects of print technology and practices in New Spain, Mexicos strong
bibliographic tradition, the history of institutional libraries, the history of

reading, and native writing traditions have all been the subject of scholarly
attention. Recent works on colonial print technology in Mexico include
essays by Antonio Rodrguez Buckingham; several historical works on paper
in New Spain by Hans Lenz (who has also published two monographs on
native paper in Mesoamerica); a shorter work on paper in the late colonial
period, based on documentation in the Archivo General de la Nacin, by
Mara Cristina Snchez de BanWl; de la Torre Villars recent book on book
plates; and Isabel Gran Porra describing the social context and labor
conditions of early Mexican printers.42 Historical studies of institutional
libraries in colonial Mexico include Ignacio Osorio Romeros book on the
social history of libraries and two essays by Michael Mathes on sixteenth-
century Franciscan libraries, including a brief account of the history and
contents of the library at the Colegio de Tlatelolco, the Wrst institution of
higher education established in the New World by the Spaniards to educate
the sons of Amerindian nobles.43 On the history of bibliography, Alicia
Perales Ojedas La cultura bibliogrWca en Mxico surveys bibliographic
activity since the sixteenth century.44 Peripheral regions of New Spain have
also received scholarly attention. Carmen Castaeda has published a num-
ber of works on the establishment of printing, the development of the book
trade, and the use of printed works in educational centers in colonial Guad-
alajara; Bernardo P. Gallegos examines literacy, education, and society in
present-day New Mexico during the period of Spanish rule.45
Of particular note also are three publishing series in Mexico devoted to
research on the history of books and print culture with works on the colo-
nial period. At El Colegio de Mxico, since the mid-1980s, the Seminario
de Historia de la Educacin en Mxico has produced several publications
on the social history of reading and education in viceregal Mexico.46 Also,
since 1987, the Biblioteca del Editor publishing series of the Universidad
Nacional Autnoma de Mxico (UNAM) on the history of the book in Mex-
ico has several publications devoted in whole or in part to colonial book
studies.47 Another publishing project was initiated in 1983 by the Direccin
General de Bibliotecas de la Secretara de Educacin Pblica (SEP), which
includes a section on colonial libraries as part of a projected Wve-volume
general history of libraries in Mexico from the colonial period to 1921.48
On the other side of the Atlantic, scholars have studied various aspects
of the relationship of colonial books to the metropolis. A noteworthy con-
tribution is Clive GrifWns The Crombergers of Seville, the Wrst and to date
the only book-length study of a printing dynasty in the Spanish-speaking
world, of particular importance to Americanists because the Seville-based
Crombergers had extensive business interests in the New World, Wnanced the
Wrst printing establishment in Mexico, and were also granted the monopoly
288 Book History
of the book trade to the colonies for a good part of the sixteenth century.49
GrifWns book traces the social, political, and economic history of the
Crombergers of Seville and includes numerous illustrations of Cromberger
imprints on microWche. Anastasio Rojo Vega traces the activity of sixteenth-
century Spanish book merchants relating to transatlantic markets in other
peninsular cities.50 Another prominent aspect of colonial Spanish American
books to receive attention from European scholars relates to the exchange
of ideas between the Old World and the New. Maxime Chevaliers impor-
tant social history of reading in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and
the production, circulation, and reception of the popular chivalry novels
deserves particular mention; more recently, Trevor Dadson has examined
inventories of libraries in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain to deter-
mine the reception of published works about the New World.51 As will be
seen below, French and French-based scholars have contributed recently to
understanding the relationship of print to new forms of sociability in late
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spanish America. Other contribu-
tions by Spanish scholars include Pedro Jos Rueda Ramrez on mechanisms
of Inquisitorial control of book shipments to the Indies in Seville; Guillermo
Aulet Sastres publication of a document containing authorized book prices
for the late sixteenth century; and Jos Simn Dazs comparative analysis
of the conventions governing title pages, dedications, panegyrics, and other
structural components of early Spanish books.52
In large part, research on books and print culture in the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries shares much of the same thematic focus and
methodological approach as work on the previous two centuries. Though
shipping records are not as consistent as they are for the sixteenth and sev-
enteenth centuries, the analysis of library inventories to determine the spread
of European ideas is the subject of a number of essays, while another com-
mon focus is the establishment of printing in Santaf de Bogot, Quito,
Buenos Aires, and other cities during the period.53 A third topic to receive
attention is the rise of periodical literature during the latter half of the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With the exception of works by
Leal, Molina Jimnez, and Fornet, noted earlier, the majority of these works
are descriptive. However, especially since the 1990s, we Wnd a growing
number of substantial contributions to understanding the role of the print-
ing press and periodical literature in broader social, cultural, and political
transformations during the late colonial period.
As for most other topics concerning the history of print in the region,
though far from recently published, Medinas works are required reading for
the history of late colonial periodicals, while Torre Revellos El libro, la
imprenta is also an essential source.54 There are several general histories of
newspapers and journalism in the region that include the late colonial period,
but perhaps the most useful is Historia de la prensa hispanoamericana by

Jess Timoteo Alvarez and Ascensin Martnez Riaza, who summarize the
Wndings of various sources for each country and include a very selective but
annotated bibliography of works on the history of journalism.55 The two
best works with a national scope are on Mexico. The Wrst is El periodismo
en Mxico, by Luis Reed Torres and Mara del Carmen Ruiz Castaeda, a
collection of essays that begins with a discussion of pregoneros or criers,
who transmitted news orally, and includes coverage of the different genres
of colonial printed news sources (hojas volantes, pasquines, gacetas), as
well as chapters on other aspects of periodical literature in this period; and
the second is Yolanda Argudns Historia del periodismo en Mxico, which
summarizes previous work on early newspapers.56 Among the studies on
Peru, two classic essays are Carlos Mir Quesada, Historia del periodismo
peruano, and Ral Porras Barrenechea, El periodismo en el Per. More
recently, Juan Gargurevich Regals Historia de la prensa peruana is useful
for considering early newspapers within the context of political develop-
ments; and, for Colombia, Antonio Cacua Pradas Orgenes del periodismo
colombiano, which reproduces some archival documentation, and provides
information on modern facsimile reproductions and other sources for early
Colombian periodicals.57
In addition to the obstacles that circumscribed local printing and publish-
ing in general (the high costs of imported parts and machinery, Inquisitorial
restrictions, and the chronic lack of paper), the production of colonial Span-
ish American gacetas was often hindered also by limited pools of suscribers
to Wnance what was a costly enterprise.58 As a result these publications
were generally short-lived and output was often irregular. Nonetheless, a
number of gacetas not only managed to survive but became influential vehi-
cles for the development of patriotic collective identities or, in Benedict
Andersons phrase, imagined communities among Creole elites.59 Colonial
presses had sporadically produced broadsides featuring information about
natural disasters, the schedule of arrival and departure of fleets, and strange
occurrences since 1541, when the Wrst such publication appeared in Mex-
ico.60 The Wrst Spanish American periodical to be published regularly was
the monthly Gaceta de Mxico y noticias de Nueva Espaa (1722), which
lasted only six months; Limas Wrst newspaper was the Gaceta de Lima
(1743), which was also of short duration. The Gaceta de Guatemala, how-
ever, initially lasted two years (172931), and was subsequently revived
(17941816). By the end of the eighteenth century, a number of specialized
newspapers devoted to science, medicine, and literature, along with other
topics, were also being published.61
The role of colonial presses in shaping social change in late eighteenth-
and, especially, early nineteenth-century Spanish America is only beginning
290 Book History
to be explored. Recent research on the much-debated issue of the Enlight-

enment in the region has tended to stress that it was the cultural, scientiWc,
and economic aspects of Enlightenment thought that took hold in Spanish
America rather than the more politically subversive ideas, which were pro-
moted retrospectively as a result (not a cause) of the independence move-
ments.62 Moreover, it is increasingly clear that the latter were not revolutions
inspired by the French model but rather political civil wars instigated by
criollo elites, not by oppressed masses, in response to Napoleons invasion
of Spain in 1808, and did not substantially alter social hierarchies.
A prime example of the intellectually progressive but politically conser-
vative outlook that characterized earlier stages of the Spanish American
Enlightenment is the influential Peruvian newspaper Mercurio peruano,
published in Lima from 1791 to 1794, which has been the subject of the
most thorough study of late colonial periodicals in the region.63 The col-
lective product of an enlightened Sociedad Acadmica de Amantes del Pas,
a civic association of prominent Creoles, like many others that flourished
in the region, the Mercurio promoted throughout its 3,658 pages public
education, scientiWc experimentation, and useful knowledge over received
tradition on matters pertaining to the physical world, as well as economic
progress, civic values, and a deep interest in all things Peruvian. While the
publication was instrumental in forging a strong Creole patriotism, it was
nonetheless limited to an elite readership. Even though, by the standards
of the time, the Mercurio was immensely popular, oscillating between 400
and 228 subscribers in Peru and abroad (not counting single-issue sales),
among the subscribers was the Peruvian viceroy, hardly a context for ex-
pressing politically subversive views.64
Any consideration of the social role of the print shop during this per-
iod as a central point of communications and community intellectual
life, as Anderson has suggested, must take these sociopolitical factors into
account.65 Several recent works do just that in examining the ways in which
periodical literature gave rise to new reading practices and the emergence
of concrete public spaces in late colonial Spanish America. Relying heavily
on primary sources (gacetas, ephemeral material, correspondence of the
period), most of the essays in Los espacios pblicos en Iberoamrica: Ambi-
gedades y problemas, siglos XVIII y XIX shed new light on the social role
of printing, publishing, and reading practices during the period.66 Renn
Silva traces the emergence of public opinion in colonial Colombia through
new (although circumscribed) communities of readers among urban elites
and rural landowners; Annick Lemprire examines the role of late colo-
nial Mexican presses in the formation of a public sphere; Jolle Chassin
bases her study of the same subject on three radical newspapers that cir-
culated in Lima between 1811 and 1812; and Cline Desram focuses on
manuscript forms of communication and the transition to print culture

in early nineteenth-century revolutionary Chile. Another essay concerned
with the role of newspapers and reading in the formation of a public sphere
is Victor Peraltas La revolucin silenciada, which proposes successive
stages of this process in late colonial Lima: from the politically conservative
project of the Mercurio peruano to the use of the press by the Peruvian
viceroy as an instrument of propaganda in favor of the Spanish monarchy
after the French invasion of Spain in 1808, which ultimately established a
precedent for using print as a critical space by antimonarchical Creoles
after 1810.67 Like the essays in Espacios Pblicos, Peralta also discusses
new reading practices and communities centered around speciWc social
spaces such as cafs, public bookstores, tertulias (discussion groups), and
theaters, and reviews previous research on early Peruvian newspapers.
Other contributions to the study of late colonial books and printing
include a wide array of topics and methodological approaches: Harry Bern-
stein on the role of periodical publications, books, and libraries in the
exchange of scientiWc information and knowledge between the United
States and Spanish America in the late colonial period; Larry Jensens Chil-
dren of Colonial Despotism, which examines the changing dynamics of
ofWcial censorship and the periodical press through 1840 in colonial Cuba
(which remained a Spanish colony until 1898); Franois Lpez on European
book merchants through whom the works of Voltaire and other French
philosophes were channeled to Spain and then to the American colonies;
Pablo Maceras analysis of the Peruvian periodical press in the tumultuous
years before independence; Michael Mathes on eighteenth-century medical
works published in New Spain; Ren Millar Corbacho on the clandestine
book trade in eighteenth-century Lima and Inquisitorial censorship; Eduardo
Ruiz Martnezs La librera de Nario, a descriptive account of Colombian
patriot Antonio Narios role as a book merchant and printer; Dorothy
Tanck de Estrada on pedagogical methods and material aspects of teaching
reading in late colonial New Spain; and Nancy Vogeleys discussion of the
role of the printing press in the career and writings of Jos Joaqun Fernn-
dez de Lizardi, a Mexican educational reformer, newspaper editor and pub-
lisher, and the author of what is arguably the Wrst Spanish American novel.68
IV. Recent Research:

Rethinking the Book and Beyond
Since at least the 1960s, early Spanish American studies have undergone
profound shifts in theoretical orientation and thematic focus that bear upon
292 Book History
the present and future of book studies for the period. The underlying
assumptions that guided traditional approaches to the book, that is, colo-
nized criollos stifled by Spanish oppression or, conversely, the civilizing role
of benevolent Spanish institutions in the New World, have been modiWed
by a number of scholarly developments, including postmodern theories of
discourse, new insights into the intellectual history of early Spanish Amer-
ican urban elites, and research on symbolic and historical resistance to
Spanish rule in Amerindian societies. In the past decade these developments
have brought about strong critiques of the methods and concerns of tra-
ditional book historians, or, more commonly, a less explicit disregard for
the Western book as a relevant or primary vehicle of colonial knowledge
and communication. They have also generated interest in the role of books
and printed works in processes of Europeanization and cultural transfor-
mation of native societies.
The most direct and consistent criticism of traditional approaches to book
studies has come from Rolena Adorno, a U.S. Andeanist scholar who has
published widely on symbolic practices by and about Amerindians in early
Spanish America. In several publications Adorno has argued persuasively
against the theoretical premises and thematic concerns of traditional book
history in the region. Her introduction to a new English edition of Books
of the Brave, quoted previously in this essay, critically reevaluates the main
tenets of Leonards classic in light of historiographic traditions and recent
trends in early Spanish American studies. Another critical perspective on
the primacy of print as a vehicle of knowledge in early Spanish America, in
this instance by a scholar focusing on elite Creole culture, is that of Chocano
Mena, also quoted earlier. Examining the political and social context of
scholarly life in early Mexico, Chocano Mena highlights the circumscribed
character of print culture, in which the primary ways of circulating ideas
and information were probably either oral or by manuscript, leading her to
question the relevance of printing revolution approaches to the study of
the book in the region, at least for the Wrst two centuries of Spanish rule.
Censorship is one topic on which new light has been shed by scholars
concerned with the politics of ofWcial suppression of ethnographic descrip-
tions of Amerindians. An important early contribution in this regard is
that of Juan Friede, a Colombian historian who discovered an uncensored
manuscript draft of a published (and expurgated) sixteenth-century ofWcial
history of the conquest of Colombia.69 Comparison of the two versions, the
unexpurgated manuscript and the expurgated published version, allowed
Friede a unique case study through which to trace the mechanics of censor-
ship on ethnographic information about Amerindians; his research yielded
important insights into the ideological and political reasons for the suppres-
sion of sociocultural descriptions of Native American societies in published
accounts of the conquest during the sixteenth century. More recently,

Adorno has explicitly challenged the views of early book historians con-
cerning the influence of chivalry novels on writings about the conquest by
examining the publishing success of early works about native Americans
within the epic genre, as opposed to narrative ethnohistories of the period
on the same subject that never made it to print.70 She concludes that, rather
than Wring the imagination of the conquistadors toward noble deeds, as
Leonard suggested, the rigid conventions of epic forms of representation
were promoted by the Crown toward political ends, as ofWcially endorsed
narrative frameworks to contain discourses about the controversial topic
of Amerindian customs and beliefs in Counterreformation Spain.
So too, the reconsideration of literary expression in its relationship to
social institutions and networks of power in recent decades has put into
question the relevance of traditional debates concerning the perceived in-
adequacies of colonial literary production. On this count, too, Adorno
addresses the views of Leonard and other book historians perplexed by the
scanty production of literary masterpieces in the Spanish colonies. Under-
scoring the historical nature of inherited nineteenth-century conceptions of
the literary, Adorno points to the narrowness of belletristic approaches for
judging the discursive richness and variety of colonial letters.71
While recent theoretical approaches to the study of early Spanish Amer-
ican societies are generating an explicit reevaluation of the traditional con-
cerns of book historians, alternate aspects of communication beyond the
printed word are being explored that reflect more fully the complexities
and unique circumstances of manuscript and print communication during
the colonial period. One fruitful area of inquiry is that of scribal, or notar-
ial, literature and practices, a key framework that shaped a wide array of
written texts within the highly legalistic lettered culture of colonial Spanish
America. Kathryn Burns has proposed a historicization of colonial notarial
documents to examine the ways in which ofWcial scribal conventions may
have constructed representations of colonial life, and to reflect on the mate-
rial conditions of the archival record in shaping contemporary interpre-
tations of the past.72 Jorge Lujn Muoz provides a useful overview and
bibliography of colonial notarial manuals and scribal literature.73
A number of recent studies by scholars working on pre-Hispanic and
postcontact Amerindian texts and symbolic practices, though these writers
by no means consider themselves book historians, nonetheless suggest fruit-
ful insights and future directions for a broader conception of the book,
native and Western, including the tensions and intersections of print and
nonprint forms of communication among the peoples of the New World.
Walter Mignolos Darker Side of the Renaissance offers a provocative
analysis of the role of Western books, alphabetic literacy, and early modern
294 Book History
conceptions of language and writing in the colonization of the New World.74

Of particular interest for the history of the book are the Wrst two chapters,
in which Mignolo situates early modern European conceptions of the book
in light of Renaissance philosophies of language and writing, which privi-
leged European forms of recording (paper, book, writing instruments) as
exclusive vehicles for knowledge, effectively excluding Amerindian ways of
recording and knowing. While Mignolo addresses theoretical conceptions
of the book, other scholars examine the role of printed works in processes
of cultural exchange and transformation. Martin Lienhard suggests a typ-
ology of Amerindian uses of alphabetic writing and colonial textual pro-
duction; Serge Gruzinski considers the technologies or material forms of
expression (codices, books, pictorial representations) that served as vehi-
cles in the process of Westernization of Mesoamerican populations.75 Elsa
M. Rodrguez Leyva also considers the role of books and printed works
in the process of Westernization in early Mexico; Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru
examines the Wrst printed texts used in early Spanish efforts of indoctrina-
tion in sixteenth-century Mesoamerica.76
Native traditions of recording in ancient Mesoamerican societies, as well
as among Quechua-speaking inhabitants of Peru, are by no means a new con-
cern in the historiography of early Spanish America.77 The earliest Span-
ish accounts of Peru mention the quipus, a system of color-coded knotted
cords apparently used to record past events as well as for recordkeeping.78
In Mesoamerica the Maya, Mixtec, Nahua (or Aztec), and other native cul-
tures had developed writing traditions inscribed on tombs, architectural
structures, pottery, and other objects. But those that made a deeper im-
pression on the Spaniards because of their similarities to (and differences
from) Western books were the painted manuscripts produced with a vari-
ety of materials, including native amate and agave paper, and in different
formats.79
Initially, Amerindian painted books were viewed as curiosities by the
Europeans, and descriptions appeared in a number of historical accounts
of the time.80 However, once the process of evangelization was underway,
these texts were construed as vehicles of idolatry and demonic beliefs. Most
were burned or otherwise destroyed as a result of the wars of conquest or
by zealous missionaries and administrators anxious to eradicate idolatry,
while others were destroyed by native leaders as a tactic of survival. Despite
this destruction, there are at least sixteen surviving pre-Hispanic codices
from the Mayan, Nahua, Cholultec, and Mixtec cultures.
A few decades after the conquest, it became clear that the Christianizing
mission was better accomplished by learning the cultures and traditions
of native peoples and teaching the faith using native languages. A process
of alphabetization began, as priests worked with native scribes to develop
conventions for writing Mesoamerican languages.81 Through this collabo-

ration, another corpus of native texts was produced throughout the six-
teenth century by alphabetized Amerindian scribes who either transcribed
traditional texts in Latin, Castilian, or their native languages or composed
new ones on commission by local Spanish authorities. Since the nineteenth
century, the corpus of pre- and post-Hispanic painted manuscripts are
known as the Mesoamerican codices.
During the eighteenth century, in response to denigrating formulations
about the supposed inferiority of America by European intellectuals such
as Cornelius de Pauw and others, a number of apologetic works written by
patriotic criollo scholars exalted the ancient Amerindian writings as part
of a common New World intellectual tradition.82 Perhaps the most repre-
sentative of these texts was the Wrst bibliography by a Mexican, Juan Jos
de Eguiara y Egurens Bibliotheca mexicana (1755), expressly compiled to
demonstrate the range of intellectual production in New Spain, which fea-
tured a passionate defense of Mexican literate culture from its beginnings
in ancient Mesoamerica.83 In the nineteenth century, Mexican bibliogra-
phers such as Jos Mariano Beristin de Souza and Joaqun de Icazbalceta
also included the codices in their inventories.
Building on the work of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
antiquarians, anthropologists, and art historians, a growing scholarly liter-
ature examines pre-Hispanic and postcontact native books and forms
of recording. Though approaches vary widely, perhaps a common thread is
attention to the ways in which the material aspects of native documents,
whether they are painted screenfolds or knotted cords, shape the produc-
tion of meaning. The collection of essays edited by Mignolo and Elizabeth
Hill Boone, Writing Without Words, provides an excellent introduction to
the concerns of and approaches to the study of native books from a vari-
ety of American cultures.84 Mignolos Signs and Their Transmission, also
a chapter in Darker Side, focuses on the role of the Western book in the
Spanish enterprise of the New World as an instrument of colonization.
Boones introductory essay makes the case for a more inclusive notion of
writing within the context of Amerindian texts, while her Aztec Pictor-
ial Histories surveys the material conventions used by Aztec manuscript
painters to construct different genres of historical narratives. Stephen
Houstons Literacy Among the Pre-Columbian Maya discusses the social
role of scribes and literacy in pre-Hispanic Mayan society; and Rappaports
Object and Alphabet considers the uses of alphabetic literacy in the
northern Andes, suggesting how written documents influenced new forms
of political agency in indigenous communities under Spanish rule. Other
studies include Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins on visual and alpha-
betic literacies in colonial Ecuadorian and Colombian native societies and
296 Book History
Cumminss recent Toasts with the Inca, on wooden drinking cups inscribed
with painted images (queros) among the Incas.85 Also worthy of mention
is the Wlm Tlacuilo, directed by Enrique Escalona, which examines the role
of the tlacuilo or scribe among the ancient Nahuas through a reconstruc-
tion of the Codex Mendoza.86
Much has yet to be explored with respect to the impact of books and
printing on the social, cultural, and economic life of early Spanish America.
However, given the circumscribed role of print culture during this period,
scholars are pursuing other avenues of inquiry and alternate approaches to
capturing the unique material circumstances and intersections of printed
and nonprinted forms of expression and symbolic exchange.
Notes
1. All dates concerning the establishment of printing refer to that of the Wrst docu-
mented imprint. Hensley C. Woodbridge and Lawrence S. Thompson summarize key sources
and debates on the introduction of printing for each city in the region, Printing in Colonial
Spanish America (Troy, N.Y.: Whitson Publishing Company, 1976). I extend warmest thanks
to Winston Atkins, Kathryn Burns, Margaret Greer, and Orest Pelech for perceptive com-
ments on earlier drafts of this essay. Thanks also to SALALM colleagues, especially Fernando
Acosta Rodrguez, David Block, Adn Benavides, Micaela Chvez Villa, and Beverley and
Howard Karno, for generous assistance with information and materials used in this essay.
2. To convey some scale of the printing enterprise in these two cities, we can note that
between 1539 and 1600 Mexico City presses produced 300 editions, and in the following
century a total of 2,007 editions were produced; Lima presses produced 1,106 titles between
1584 and 1699. Information culled from several sources for Mexico by Magdalena Chocano
Mena, Colonial Printing and Metropolitan Books: Printed Texts and the Shaping of Schol-
arly Culture in New Spain: 15391700, Colonial Latin American Historical Review 6,
no. 1 (1997): 7172, and, for Lima, Pedro Guibovich, The Printing Press in Colonial Peru:
Production Process and Literary Categories in Lima, 15841699 Colonial Latin American
Review 10, no. 2 (2001): 173.
3. Until the early eighteenth century, the viceroyalty of New Spain included parts of
present-day California, Texas, Florida, Mexico, and Central America; the viceroyalty of Peru
encompassed all of the Spanish dominions south of the isthmus of Panama.
4. Chocano Mena mentions several extraneous factors that contributed to this phenom-
enon, including the demographic decline of native populations, but also suggests the growth
of a local intelligentsia as an important cause of the Hispanization of the press in colonial
Mexico during this period. Colonial Printing, 73, 76.
5. For comparative examinations of local printing output in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, see Chocano Mena, Colonial Printing, and Guibovich, Printing Press.
6. According to Hans Lenz, paper mills operated intermittently in New Spain, but their
output was of poor quality and probably negligible, given the volume of paper imported from
European mills. See his Historia del papel en Mxico y cosas relacionadas (Mexico City: Por-
ra, 1990), 16.
7. Stephen Mohler provides a comprehensive summary in English of Spanish royal
decrees concerning colonial printing and publishing up to 1814 in Publishing in Colonial
Spanish America, Inter-American Review of Bibliography 28, no. 3 (1978): 26366.
8. See Chocano Mena, Colonial Printing, whose main arguments I have interpreted
in this section.
9. In a now classic study of Spanish American intellectual history, the late Uruguayan
critic Angel Rama sketched the distinctive characteristics of elite literate culture that became
entrenched in viceregal cities. The Lettered City: Post-Contemporary Interventions, trans. John
Chasteen (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), originally published as La ciudad letrada
(Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 1984).
10. Hernn Vidal discusses at length colonial intellectuals alienation from immediate
political and concrete realities in early viceregal societies in Socio-historia de la literatura
colonial hispanoamericana: Tres lecturas orgnicas (Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of
Ideologies and Literature, 1985); see esp. 10818.
11. The role of Zumrraga in the campaigns of extirpation of idolatry and the destruc-
tion of native texts has been the subject of much debate since native American historians held
him responsible for the destruction of the archive of Texcoco in the sixteenth century. See,
for example, Jos Luis Martnez, El libro en Hispanoamrica: Origen y desarrollo (Madrid:
Fundacin Germn Snchez Ruiprez, Ediciones Pirmide, 1986). For an apologetic inter-
pretation of Zumrragas career, see Joaqun Garca Icazbalceta, Don fray Juan de Zumr-
raga, primer obispo y arzobispo de Mxico, ed. Rafael Aguayo Spencer and Antonio Castro
Leal (1881; Mxico: Editorial Porra, 1947).
12. For a discussion of the work of nineteenth-century bibliographers as foundational
texts in the construction of Spanish American literary history, see Roberto Gonzlez Echevar-
ra, A Brief History of the History of Spanish American Literature, in The Cambridge
History of Latin American Literature, ed. Gonzlez Echevarra and Enrique Pupo-Walker
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1112.
13. For a critical discussion of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century views of colonial
book circulation, see Irving Leonard, Books of the Brave: Being an Account of Books and of
Men in the Spanish Conquest and Settlement of the Sixteenth-Century New World (1949;
reprint, with an introduction by Rolena Adorno, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, 1992), 7783. All references to this work are taken from this edition. Among
the exceptions were two nineteenth-century bibliographers, Jos Mariano Beristin de Souza
and Joaqun Icazbalceta, who staunchly defended the civilizing role of Spain in the Americas.
14. For a discussion of the legacy of nineteenth-century bibliographers in debates con-
cerning the lack of novels during the colonial period, see Cedomil Goic, La novela hispano-
americana colonial, in Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana, vol. 1, Epoca colonial, ed.
Luis Iigo Madrigal (Madrid: Ctedra, 1982), 369.
15. Jos Mara Vergara y Vergara, Historia de la literatura en Nueva Granada, vol. 1, ed.
and annotated by Antonio Gmez Restrepo and Gustavo Otero Muoz (Bogot: Banco Pop-
ular, 1974), 114, quoted in Leonard, Books of the Brave, 79.
16. For a detailed account of Medinas intellectual trajectory, see Guillermo Feli Cruz,
Prlogo. Medina: Gnesis del bibligrafo, in Jos Toribio Medina, Historia de la imprenta
en los antiguos dominios espaoles de Amrica y Oceana (Santiago de Chile: Fondo
Histrico y BibliogrWco Jos Toribio Medina, 1958), xxxixciv, and Medina, the Man, in
Jos Toribio Medina, Humanist of the Americas: An Appraisal, ed. Maury Bromsen (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Pan American Union, 1960), 315. See also the other essays in Jos Toribio
Medina, Humanist of the Americas for discussion of various aspects of Medinas multifaceted
career.
17. Medinas studies on the establishment of printing were originally published as indi-
vidual monographs devoted to each city entitled La imprenta en. . . . His seven-volume Biblio-
teca hispano-americana, 14931810 (Santiago de Chile: Impreso y grabado en la casa del
autor, 18981907) included and expanded on these Wndings. A synthesis of Medinas Wndings
298 Book History
on the history of printing in the former Spanish overseas domains and other relevant docu-
mentation, compiled by two of his students, is contained in Medina, Historia de la imprenta.
18. For a comprehensive bibliography of works on the history of printing in the New
World that supplement and expand on Medinas Wndings up to 1958, see Jos Zamudio
Zamora, Bibliografa de estudios complementarios a las obras de Medina relativas a la
imprenta, in Medina, Historia de la imprenta, cviicxli.
19. A historical account of the Black Legend is provided by Benjamin Keen, The Black
Legend Revisited: Assumptions and Realities, Hispanic American Historical Review 49, no.
4 (1969): 70319.
20. For a discussion of the early historiography of Latin America in the United States,
see Charles Gibson and Benjamin Keen, Trends of United States Studies in Latin American
History, in Latin American History: Essays on Its Study and Teaching, 18981965, ed.
Howard F. Cline (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967), 85577. See also Rolena Adornos
discussion of the influence of William Prescott and Washington Irving on Irving Leonards
conception of the Spanish Conquest, in her introduction to Books of the Brave, xxiv, as well
as her study of Irvings works on Spanish history and their influence on subsequent writers,
Washington Irvings Romantic Hispanism and Its Columbian Legacies, in Spain in Amer-
ica: The Origins of Hispanism in the United States, ed. Richard L. Kagan (Urbana: Univer-
sity of Illinois Press, 2002): 49105.
21. Francisco Rodrguez Marn, El Quijote y don Quijote en Amrica (Madrid: Libr-
era Hernando, 1911).
22. Francisco Fernndez del Castillo, Libros y libreros en el siglo XVI (Mexico City:
Archivo General de la Nacin and Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1982). Leonard provides an
account of previous research leading to his Wndings in his foreword to Books of the Brave,
xlivxlv.
23. Jos Torre Revello, Prohibiciones y licencias para imprimir libros referentes a Amer-
ica, 17371808 Boletn del Instituto de Investigaciones Histricas 14, nos. 5152 (1932):
1747; El libro en Amrica en el siglo XVI, La Ilustracin Argentina 16 (193839); Lo
que se lea en Amrica en el siglo XVI, Pola 1, no. 2 (1938); Un catlogo impreso de
libros para vender en las Indias Occidentales, Boletn del Instituto de Investigaciones Histri-
cas (1940); El libro, la imprenta y el periodismo en Amrica durante la dominacin espaola
(Buenos Aires: Jacobo Peuser, 1940); Merchandise Shipped by the Spaniards to America
(15341586), Hispanic American Historical Review 23 (1943): 77388; Leonard,
Romances of Chivalry in the Spanish Indies with Some registros of Shipments of Books to
the Spanish Colonies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1933); A
Shipment of Comedias to the Indies, Hispanic Review 2, no. 1 (1934): 3950; Notes
on Lope de Vegas Works in the Spanish Indies, Hispanic Review 6 (1938): 27793; Don
Quijote and the Book Trade in Lima, 1606, Hispanic Review 8 (1940): 285304; Leonard,
Books of the Brave; and, with Robert S. Smith, A Proposed Library for the Merchant Guild
of Veracruz, 1801, Hispanic American Historical Review 24 (1944): 84102.
24. Leonard, Don Quijote and the Book Trade, 285304.
25. Representative publications of these scholars from this period are Guillermo Frlong
Crdiff, Historia y bibliografa de las primeras imprentas rioplatenses, 17001850, 4 vols.
(Buenos Aires: Editorial Guarana, 1953); Francisco Fernndez de Cosso, La imprenta en
Mxico, 15941820 (Mexico City: J. Porra e hijos, 1947), and La imprenta en Mxico,
15531820 (Mxico: Universidad Nacional de Mxico, 1952); Edmundo OGorman, Biblio-
tecas y libreras coloniales, 15851694, Boletn del Archivo General de la Nacin (Mexico)
10, no. 4 (1939): 6611006; Agustn Millares Carlo and Julin Calvo, Juan Pablos, primer
impresor que a esta tierra vino (Mxico: Librera de M. Porra 1953); and Guillermo
Lohmann Villena, Los libros espaoles en Indias, Arbor (Madrid) 2, no. 6 (1944): 22149.
26. Leonard, Books of the Brave; Torre Revello, El libro, la imprenta; Dorothy Schons,
Book Censorship in New Spain (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1950).
27. Leonard, Books of the Brave; Ida Rodrguez Prampolini, Amadises de Amrica: La
hazaa de las Indias como empresa caballeresca (1948; Mexico City: Academia Mexicana de
la Historia, 1990).
28. Though divergent in purpose and orientation, two surveys of recent literature on the
book concur in this assessment: Adorno, introduction to Books of the Brave, x; and Carlos
Alberto Gonzlez Snchez, Mundos del libro: Medios de difusin de la cultura occidental en
Indias de los siglos XVI y XVII (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla and Diputacin de Sevilla,
1999), 2536, esp. 35. For a brief discussion of the state of research on books and libraries
in Peru, see also Guibovich and Gabriela Ramos, La investigacin sobre historia de los
siglos XVI y XVII: Per, 19801990, Revista Andina 9, no. 1 (1991): 18687.
29. Gonzlez Snchez, Mundos del libro, 2545, discusses some of these sources, adding
the correspondence of Spanish immigrants with relatives in the Old World as well as the post-
mortem inventories of deceased Spaniards with no successors in the Indies.
30. See notes 17 and 18 above.
31. See note 1 above.
32. Agustn Millares Carlo, Introduccin a la historia del libro y de las bibliotecas (Mex-
ico City: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1971).
33. Jos Luis Martnez, El libro en Hispanoamrica: Orgenes y desarrollo (Madrid: Fun-
dacin Germn Snchez Ruiprez: Ediciones Pirmide, 1986).
34. Julie Greer Johnson, The Book in the Americas: The Role of Books and Printing in
the Development of Culture and Society in Colonial Latin America (Providence: John Carter
Brown Library, 1988).
35. Mohler, Publishing; Luis Aznar, Precursores de la bibliografa histrica ameri-
canista, Humanidades (Universidad Nacional de la Plata, Argentina) 28 (1940): 263315;
Agustn Millares Carlo, Bibliotecas y difusin del libro en Amrica colonial: Intento bibli-
ogrWco, Boletn histrico (Caracas) 22 (1970): 2572.
36. Ernesto de la Torre Villar, Breve historia del libro en Mxico, 3rd rev. ed. (Mexico
City: Universidad Nacional de Mxico, 1999); Alexandre A. M. Stols, La introduccin de la
imprenta en Guatemala (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, 1960);
Virgilio Rodrguez Beteta, Evolucin de la imprenta, los libros y el periodismo coloniales
(Guatemala, 1962); B. Tarcisio Higuera, La imprenta en Colombia (Santaf de Bogota, 1970);
Alexandre A. M. Stols, Historia de la imprenta en el Ecuador, 17551830 (Quito: Casa de la
Cultura Ecuatoriana, 1953); Julio Febres Cordero, Historia del periodismo y de la imprenta
en Venezuela (Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1983); Ildefonso Leal, Libros y
bibliotecas en Venezuela colonial, 16331760 (Caracas: Ediciones de la Facultad de Humani-
dades y Educacin, Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1978); Ivn Molina Jimnez, El que
quiera divertirse: Libros y sociedad en Costa Rica, 17501914 (San Jos: Editorial de la Uni-
versidad de Costa Rica, 1995); and Ambrosio Fornet, El libro en Cuba, siglos XVIII y XIX
(Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1994), which includes an excellent bibliography on books,
printing, and reading in Cuba. The last two are, perhaps, the best general social histories of
print in the region. An earlier, condensed version of sections of Fornets book on publishing,
authorship, and the literary market in Cuba during the period of Spanish domination (1492
1898) appeared in a publication that is perhaps more accessible in the United States: Liter-
atura y mercado en la Cuba colonial, 183060, Casa de las Amricas 14, no. 84 (1974):
4052. Although addressing the pre-independence period only briefly, since Chile did not have
a permanent press until 1811, Bernardo Subercaseauxs excellent study, El libro en Chile:
Alma y cuerpo (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Andrs Bello, 1993) also examines print culture
within a broader sociopolitical and ideological context.
300 Book History
37. Carmen Castaeda, in La cultura del libro en la Edad Moderna: Andaluca y Amr-
ica, ed. Pea Daz et al. (Crdoba, Spain: Universidad de Crdoba, 2001), 27188; Guibovich,
Printing Press; and Teodoro Hampe, The Diffusion of Books and Ideas in Colonial Peru:
A Study of Private Libraries in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Hispanic American
Historical Review 73, no. 2 (1993): 21133.
38. For Millares Carlo on libraries, see note 35 above; Francisco de Solano, Fuentes
para la historia cultural: Libros y bibliotecas de la Amrica colonial, Ensayos de metodologa
histrica en el campo americanista, ed. Fermn del Pino Daz (Madrid: Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones CientWcas, Centro de Estudios Histricos, 1985), 6984.
39. Recent works on colonial library inventories not included in Millares Carlo or Solano
are Lorenzo Calzavarini, Biblioteca del convento Nuestra Seora de los Angeles y accin
franciscana en Tarija y . . . ms all, in El libro, espejo de la cultura, ed. Werner Guttentag
and Josep Barnadas (Cochabamba: Editorial los Amigos del Libro, 1990); Cristin Gazmuri
Riveros, Libros e ideas polticas francesas en la gestacin de la independencia de Chile
Cahiers du Monde Hispanique et Luso-Brasilien: Caravelle 54 (1990): 179207; Helga Krop-
Wnger von Kugelgen, Exportacin de libros europeos de Sevilla a la Nueva Espaa en el ao
de 1586, in Libros europeos en la Nueva Espaa a Wnes del siglo XVI, in vol. 5 of Das
Mexiko-Projekt der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1973);
Ivn Molina Jimnez, De lo devoto a lo profano: El comercio y la produccin de libros en
el Valle Central de Costa Rica, 17501850, Jahrbuch fr Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft
und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas 31 (1994); Guillermo Tovar de Teresa, Las bibiotecas mex-
icanas de la primera mitad del siglo XVI, in his La ciudad de Mxico y la utopa en el siglo
XVI (Mexico City: Espejo de Obsidiana, 1987), 6570.
40. Recent studies on Peru include Carmen Arellano and Albert Meyers, Testamento de
Pedro Milachami, un curaca caari en la regin de los Wanka, Per, Revista espaola de
antropologa americana 18 (1988): 95127; Luis Jaime Cisneros and Pedro Guibovich, Una
biblioteca cuzquena del siglo XVII, Histrica (Lima) 6 (1982): 14171; Pedro Guibovich,
Libros para ser vendidos en el Virreinato del Per a Wnes del siglo XVI, Boletn del Insti-
tuto Riva Aguero 13 (198485): 85114; Las lecturas de Francisco de Issaga, Histrica
(Lima) 10 (1986): 191212. Teodoro Hampe has published numerous studies of private and
institutional libraries in colonial Peru since the mid-1980s, contained in his book, Bibliotecas
privadas en el mundo colonial: La difusin de libros e ideas en el virreinato del Per, siglos
XVI-XVII (Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1996); see also his Diffusion of Books and, with Carlos
Alberto Gonzlez Snchez, La biblioteca de un pcaro indiano del siglo XVI: El cura Alonso
de Torres Maldonado, Investigaciones y ensayos 36 (1987): 48396. Guillermo Lohmann
Villena, La biblioteca de un peruano de la Ilustracin: El contador Miguel Feij de Sosa,
Revista de Indias 44, no. 174 (1984): 36784; Libros, libreros y bibliotecas en la poca vir-
reinal, Fnix: Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional (Lima) 21 (1971): 1724; Pablo Macera,
Bibliotecas peruanas del siglo XVIII, in vol. 1 of Trabajos de historia (Lima: Instituto
Nacional de Cultura, 1977), 283312; Luis Martn, La biblioteca del Colegio de San Pablo
(15681767), antecedentes de la Biblioteca Nacional, Fenix: Revista de la Biblioteca
Nacional (Lima) 21 (1971): 1536.
41. See Arellano and Myers, as well as Hampe, mentioned above; see also Manuel Burga,
Nacimiento de una utopa: Muerte y resurreccin de los Incas (Lima: Instituto de Apoyo
Agrario, 1988), 31068; esp. 34142 and 34748.
42. Antonio Rodrguez Buckingham, The Establishment, Production, and Equipment of
the First Printing Press in South America, Harvard Library Bulletin 26 (1978) 35052; The
First Forty Years of the Book Industry in Sixteenth-Century Mexico, in Iberian Colonies, New
World Societies: Essays in Memory of Charles Gibson, ed. Richard L. Garner and William B.
Taylor, (N.p., 1986): 3761; Hans Lenz, Cosas del papel en Mesoamrica (Mexico: Loreto y
Pea Pobre, 1984); Historia del papel en Mxico y cosas relacionadas, 15351950 (Mexico
City: Porra, 1990); El papel indgena mexicano (Mexico: Secretara de Educacin Pblica,
1973); Mara Cristina Snchez de BanWl, El papel del papel en la Nueva Espaa, 17401812
(Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Antropologa e Historia, 1993); de la Torre Villar, Ex-libris y
marcas de fuego (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, 2002); and Isabel
Gran Porra, El mbito socio-laboral de las imprentas novohispanas, siglo XVI, Anuario
de Estudios Americanos 48 (1991): 4994.
43. Ignacio Osorio Romero, Historia de las bibliotecas novohispanas (Mexico City: SEP,
Direccion Nacional de Bibliotecas, 1986); Michael Mathes, Un centro cultural novogalaico:
La Biblioteca del Convento de San Francisco de Guadalajara en 1610 (Guadalajara, 1986);
Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco: La primera biblioteca acadmica de las Amricas (Mexico City:
Archivo Histrico Diplomtico Mexicano, 1982).
44. Alicia Perales Ojeda, La cultura bibliogrWca en Mxico (Mexico City: UNAM, Insti-
tuto de Investigaciones BibliogrWcas, 2002).
45. Castaeda, Circulacin y edicin de los libros al norte de la Nueva Espaa, in El
contacto entre los espaoles e indgenas en el norte de la Nueva Espaa, ed. Ysla Campbell
(Ciudad Juarez, Mexico: Universidad Autnoma de Ciudad Jurez, 1992), 20715; Cuando
los libros y la imprenta llegan a Guadalajara, Libros de Mexico 38 (1995); La educacin en
Guadalajara durante la colonia (Guadalajara, 1984); Libros en la Nueva Espaa en el siglo
XVI, in La cultura del libro en la Edad Moderna: Andaluca y Amrica, ed. Pea Daz et al.
(Crdoba, Spain: Universidad de Crdoba, 2001), 27188; Los usos del libro en Guadala-
jara, 17931821, in vol. 2 of Cincuenta aos de historia en Mxico: En el cincuencentenario
del Centro de Estudios Histricos (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mxico, Centro de Estudios
Histricos, 1991); Bernardo P. Gallegos, Literacy, Education, and Society in New Mexico
16931821 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992).
46. Titles of interest to colonial book history are Historia de la lectura en Mxico, ed.
JoseWna Vzquez (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mxico, 1988), with two articles on the colo-
nial period by Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru and Dorothy Tanck de Estrada, reviewed below. See
also Gonzalbo Aizpurus books on the social history of education among urban creoles,
Amerindians, and women in colonial Mexico, Historia de la educacin en la poca colonial:
El mundo indgena (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mxico, Centro de Estudios Histricos,
1990); Historia de la educacin en la poca colonial: La educacin de los criollos y la vida
urbana (1990); Las mujeres en la Nueva Espaa: Educacin y vida cotidiana (1987).
47. Publications relevant to early book history are de la Torre Villar, Breve historia del
libro, mentioned above; and Perales Ojeda, Cultura bibliogrWca; Enrique Escalona, Tlacuilo;
and Elsa Rodrguez Leyva, Libro y occidentalizacin, all reviewed below.
48. For a description of the project on library histories and a list of works published in
the series until 1994, see Rosa Mara Fernndez de Zamora, La historia de las bibliotecas en
Mxico: Un tema olvidado, 60th IFLA General Conference Proceedings, 1994, www.ifla.org/
IV/ifla60/60-ferr.htm. Published in this series is Osorio Romeros Bibliotecas novohispanas,
mentioned above.
49. Clive GrifWn, The Crombergers of Seville: The History of a Printing and Merchant
Dynasty (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998).
50. Anastasio Rojo Vega, Los grandes libreros espaoles del siglo XVI y Amrica,
Cuadernos hispanoamericanos 500 (1992): 11531.
51. Maxime Chevalier, Lectura y lectores en la Espaa de los siglos XVI y XVII (Madrid:
Ediciones Turner, 1976). See also Chevaliers recent reflections on his influential book, Lec-
tura y lectores . . . veinte aos despus, Bulletin Hispanique 99, no. 1 (1997): 1924; Trevor
Dadson, Libros y lecturas sobre el Nuevo Mundo en la Espaa del siglo de oro, Histrica
18, no. 1 (1994): 17.
302 Book History
52. Pedro Jos Rueda Ramrez, El control inquisitorial del libro enviado a Amrica en
la Sevilla del siglo XVII, in La cultura del libro, 25570; Guillermo Aulet Sastre, Precios
autorizados de libros espaoles en Indias, Revista de Indias 24 (1946): 31112; Jos Simn
Daz, El libro espaol antiguo: Anlisis de su estructura (Kassel: Reichenberger, 1983).
53. See notes 36, 38, 39, and 40 above.
54. For Medina, see notes 17 and 18 above. Torre Revello provides a well-documented
descriptive overview of colonial Spanish American newspapers and a basic bibliography on
the subject up to 1940 in El libro, la imprenta, 160205 and 26163.
55. Ascensin Alvarez and Jess Timoteo Martnez Riaza, Historia de la prensa his-
panoamericana (Madrid: MAPFRE, 1992). Another source worth consulting is Gustavo
Adolfo Otero, La cultura y el periodismo en Amrica, rev. ed. (Quito: Casa Editora Liebmann,
1953), originally published as El periodismo en Amrica: Esquema de su historia a travs de
la cultura latinoamericana, 14921946 (Lima: Editorial PTCM, 1946). Other general histo-
ries are Antonio Checa Godoy, Historia de la prensa en Iberoamrica (Seville: Ediciones Alfar,
1993); and Jos Luis Sez, Periodismo e independencia en Amrica Latina (Santo Domingo:
Ediciones MSC, 1990), which considers the periodical press in light of independence move-
ments up to the end of the nineteenth century. Mary A. Gardners bibliography of secondary
sources on the periodical press in Latin America lists many Spanish-language sources that
cover the pre-independence period. See Gardner, The Press of Latin America: A Tentative and
Selected Bibliography in Spanish and Portuguese (Austin: University of Texas Press, Institute
of Latin American Studies, 1973).
56. Luis Reed Torres and Maria del Carmen Ruiz Castaeda, El periodismo en Mxico:
500 aos de historia, rev. ed. (Mexico City: Edamex, 1995); Yolanda Argudn, Historia del
periodismo en Mxico desde el Virreinato hasta nuestros das, with the assistance of Mara
Luna Argudn (Mexico City: Panorama Editorial, 1987); see also Moiss Ochoa Campos,
Resea histrica del periodismo mexicano (Mexico City: Porra, 1968).
57. Carlos Mir Quesada, Historia del periodismo peruano (Lima: Librera Internacional,
1957); Ral Porras Barrenechea, El periodismo en el Per (Lima: Instituto Ral Porras Bar-
renechea, 1970); Juan Gargurevich Regal, Historia de la prensa peruana, 15941991 (Lima:
La Voz Ediciones, 1991); Antonio Cacua Prada, Orgenes del periodismo colombiano (Bogot:
Editorial Kelley, 1991). Essays on the subject in Argentina are not as recent; see Oscar Beltrn,
Historia del periodismo argentino: Pensamiento y obra de los forjadores de la patria (Buenos
Aires: Editorial Sopena, 1943), and Juan Rmulo Fernndez, Historia del periodismo argen-
tino (Buenos Aires: Librera Perlado, 1943).
58. Torre Revello, El libro, la imprenta, mentions all of these obstacles to publishing
newspapers. More recently, Cacua Prada has noted the restricted circumstances of production
of colonial newspapers in Santaf de Bogot in Orgenes del periodismo colombiano (Bogot:
Editorial Kelley, 1991), 220.
59. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991).
60. The publication in question was a report on a devastating earthquake in Guatemala.
See Torre Revello, El libro, la imprenta, 160.
61. In Mexico, for example, the Mercurio volante con noticias importantes y curiosas
sobre varios asuntos de Fisica y Medicina (17721773) and Observaciones sobre la fsica, his-
toria natural y artes tiles (1787) were devoted to the sciences; the Gazeta de literatura de
Mxico (178894) was concerned with literary topics; other papers were more eclectic, such
as the influential Papel peridico de Santa Fe de Bogot (179197) and Mercurio peruano
(179194), while, later, the Diario poltico de Santaf de Bogot (181011), and many others,
had a distinctly political proWle.
62. For an overview of research and key debates regarding the Enlightenment in Spanish
America, see Arthur Whitaker, Changing and Unchanging Interpretations of the Enlightenment
in Spanish America, in The Ibero-American Enlightenment, ed. A. Owen Aldridge (Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 1971): 2157.
63. Jean-Pierre Clment, El Mercurio peruano, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1987).
64. Clment, Mercurio, 1:6769. Another late colonial newspaper has been the sub-
ject of a monograph by Rafael Antolnez Camargo, El Papel peridico de Santaf de Bogot,
17911797: Vehculo de las luces y la contrarrevolucin (Bogot: Banco Popular, Fondo de
Promocin de la Cultura, 1991).
65. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6162.
66. Franois-Xavier Guerra and Annick Lemprire, eds., Los espacios pblicos en Ibero-
amrica: Ambigedades y problemas, siglos XVIII y XIX (Mxico: Centro Francs de Estu-
dios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos and Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1998). Of interest
also is the introductory essay by Guerra and Lemprire, which considers the relevance of
Habermass theories within the Spanish American context.
67. Victor Peralta, La revolucin silenciada: Hbitos de lectura y pedagoga poltica en
el Per, 17901814, Anuario de Estudios Americanos 54, no. 1 (1997): 10734.
68. Harry Bernstein, Some Inter-American Aspects of the Enlightenment, in Latin
America and the Enlightenment, ed. Arthur P. Whitaker (New York: D. Appleton-Century
Company, 1942), 5369; Larry Jensen, Children of Colonial Despotism: Press, Politics, and
Culture in Cuba, 17901840 (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1988). Jensen also
includes a useful review of sources on the subject, xvxviii. Franois Lpez, Strategies com-
merciales et diffusion des ides: Les ouvrages franais dans le monde hispanique et hispano-
americain a lpoque des Lumires, in LAmrique espagnole a lpoque des Lumires:
Tradition, innovation, reprsentations (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche
ScientiWque, 1987), 35362; Pablo Macera, El periodismo en la Independencia, in vol. 2,
Trabajos de historia (Lima: Instituto Nacional de Historia, 1977), 32542; Mathes, Libros
novohispanos de medicina durante el siglo de la Ilustracin, 17001821, Colonial Latin
American Historical Review 4, no. 4 (1995): 5569; Ren Millar Corbacho, La Inquisicin
de Lima y los libros prohibidos, Revista de Indias 44, no. 174 (1984): 41644; Eduardo Ruiz
Martnez, La librera de Nario y los Derechos del Hombre (Bogot: Planeta, 1990); Tanck
de Estrada, La enseanza de la lectura y la escritura en la Nueva Espaa, 17001821, in
Vzquez, Historia de la lectura en Mxico, 4993; Nancy Vogeley, Lizardi, and the Birth of
the Novel in Spanish America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), esp. 2955.
See also the general histories of books and printing, note 36 above, as well as the works on
eighteenth-century library inventories, notes 38, 39, and 40 above.
69. Juan Friede, La censura espaola del siglo XVI y los libros de historia de Amrica,
Revista de Historia de Amrica 47 (1959): 4594.
70. Rolena Adorno, Literary Production and Suppression: Reading and Writing about
Amerindians in Colonial Spanish America, Dispositio 11, nos. 2829 (1986): 125.
71. Rolena Adorno, Introduction to Leonard, Books of the Brave, xxvxxviii.
72. Kathryn Burns, Notaries, Truth and Consequences, unpublished MS.
73. Jorge Lujn Muoz, La literatura notarial en Espaa e Hispanoamrica, 15001820,
Anuario de Estudios Americanos 38 (1981): 10116. See also Bernardo Prez Fernndez del
Castillo, Historia de la escribana en la Nueva Espaa y el notariado en Mxico (Mexico City:
Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, 1983), which lists other sources on the history
of ofWcial scribes in colonial Mexico, and a recently edited facsimile edition of a widely used
1605 Mexican notarial manual by Nicols de Yrolo, Primera parte de la poltica de escrituras,
ed. Mara del Pilar Martnez Lpez-Cano (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autnoma de
Mxico, 1996).
74. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and
Colonization (1995; Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
75. Martin Lienhard, Las prcticas textuales indgenas: Aproximacin a un nuevo objeto
304 Book History
de investigacin, Nuevo Texto Crtico 7, nos. 1415 (199495): 7788; Martin Lienhard,
La voz y su huella: Escritura y conflicto tnico social en Amrica Latina, 14921988
(Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 1991); Serge Gruzinski, The Conquest of Mexico: The
Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993). See also his survey of recent research on the history of men-
talits in Mexico where, using his own research on the process of Westernization of Amerindi-
ans in early Mexico to illustrate methodological procedures, he fleshes out a number of issues
related to the material aspects of symbolic exchange in the process of Europeanization of
Amerindians. Ms all de la historia de las mentalidades, Memorias del Simposio de His-
toriografa Mexicanista (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, Instituto
de Investigaciones Histricas, 1990), 487501.
76. Elsa M. Ramrez Leyva, El libro y la lectura en el proceso de occidentalizacin de
Mxico (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, 2002); Gonzalbo Aizpuru,
La enseanza de la lectura y la escritura en la Nueva Espaa, 17001821, in Vzquez, His-
toria de la lectura en Mxico, 4993. See also Gonzalbo Aizpurus monographs on the social
history of education in New Spain, mentioned above. Robert T. Jimnez provides a sketchy
but nonetheless useful introduction to strategies of alphabetization used by the Wrst Francis-
can friars in sixteenth-century Mexico, with a few illustrations of methods and texts, in The
History of Reading and the Uses of Literacy in Colonial Mexico (Champaign: University of
Illinois, Center for the Study of Reading, 1990).
77. For an overview in English of native forms of recording in Mesoamerica and the
Andes, see Gordon Brotherston, The Book of the Fourth World: Reading Native Americans
Through Their Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chap. 1.
78. A summary of early Spanish works that describe quipus from the 1530s to the nine-
teenth century is provided by Gary Urton in An Overview of Spanish Colonial Commentary
on Andean Knotted-String Records, in Narrative Threads: Accounting and Recounting in
Andean Knotted Khipus, ed. Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2002), 325. For an engaging introduction to the logic of the quipus, see Marcia Ascher
and Robert Ascher, Code of the Quipu: A Study in Media, Mathematics, and Culture (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981).
79. For a comprehensive inventory and discussion of pre- and post-Hispanic Mesoamer-
ican painted manuscripts, see John B. Glass, A Survey of Native American Pictorial Manu-
scripts, vol. 1 of The Handbook of Middle American Indians, ed. Herbert F. Cline (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1975), 380; and John B. Glass and Donald Robertson, A Census
of Native Middle American Pictorial Manuscripts, in vol. 14 of The Handbook of Middle
American Indians, ed. Herbert F. Cline (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975), 81252. See
also Virginia Guzmn M. and Yolanda Mercader M., Bibliografa de cdices y lienzos del
Mxico prehispnico (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropologa e Historia, 1979).
80. Albrecht Drer and Pietro Martire dAngiera were among the Europeans who re-
corded their impressions upon seeing the Wrst painted manuscripts brought to Europe. A con-
cise introductory overview of European perceptions and the subsequent destruction of native
Mesoamerican painted books is provided by Martnez, El libro en Hispanoamrica, 1115.
81. Fray Bernardino de Sahagn is a key Wgure in this regard. See, for example, the col-
lection of essays and bibliography on the subject, edited by Jorge Klor de Alva, H. B. Nichol-
son, and Eloise Quiones Keber, The Work of Bernardino de Sahagn: Pioneer Ethnographer
of Sixteenth-Century Aztec Mexico (Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, and Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1988), especially the essay by Klor de Alva on Sahagns formida-
ble ethnographic achievement and its relevance to contemporary theoretical issues and
debates in ethnology, cultural studies, and textual studies, 3152.
82. For a discussion of the collection and publishing history of these manuscripts since
the sixteenth century, see Glass, Survey of Pictorial Manuscripts, 1926. See also D. A.
Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal state,
14921867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 36667 and 38190, for dis-
cussions of the role of seventeenth-century Mexican scholar Carlos de Sigenza y Gngora
and that of the Italian Lorenzo Boturini Benaducci in the following century in the preserva-
tion of these texts, as well as their respective attitudes toward native Mexican cultures. For
an in-depth discussion of the so-called Dispute of the New World, see Antonello Gerbi, The
Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 17501900 (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1973). An introductory overview of major eighteenth-century responses by
Spanish American intellectuals to this debate is included in Stolley, The Eighteenth Century,
35051.
83. Juan Jos Eguiara y Eguren, Biblioteca mexicana, trans. (from the Latin) Benjamn
Fernndez Valenzuela, with an introduction by Ernesto de la Torre Villar and Ramiro Navarro
de Anda (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico, 198691).
84. Walter Mignolo and Elizabeth Hill Boone, eds., Writing Without Words: Alternative
Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).
85. Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins, Between Images and Writing: The Ritual of
the Kings Quillca, Colonial Latin American Review 7, no. 1 (1998): 732; Cummins, Toasts
with the Inca: Andean Abstraction and Colonial Images on Quero Vessels (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2002).
86. Tlacuilo, d. Enrique Escalona, 55 min., Churubusco-Azteca, S.A., 1988, videocassette.
See also the accompanying script, also written by Escalona and also entitled Tlacuilo (Universi-
dad Autnoma de Mexico, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologa
Social, 1989).

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THE STATE OF THE DISCIPLINE

The Politics of Print

I. Historical Contours and Foundations

European settlers in the viceregal capitals. By the mid-seventeenth century,

of viceregal societies tended to inhibit the development of independent

masterpieces produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the so-

II. The Civilizing Role of the Western Book

revealing evidence of an extensive transatlantic book trade from Spain to

influence of the popular chivalry novels on the Spanish conquest. Leonard

III. Recent Research: Continuities and

institutional libraries to determine colonial reading habits and the spread of

bibliographic tradition, the history of institutional libraries, the history of

but perhaps the most useful is Historia de la prensa hispanoamericana by

to be explored. Recent research on the much-debated issue of the Enlight-

manuscript forms of communication and the transition to print culture

IV. Recent Research:

accounts of the conquest during the sixteenth century. More recently,

conceptions of language and writing in the colonization of the New World.74

conventions for writing Mesoamerican languages.81 Through this collabo-

in Spanish America, in The Ibero-American Enlightenment, ed. A. Owen Aldridge (Urbana:

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