Overview

Writing has long been linked to power. For early modern people on both sides of the Atlantic, writing was also the province of notaries, men trained to cast other people’s words in official forms and make them legally true. Thus the first thing Columbus did on American shores in October 1492 was have a notary record his claim of territorial possession. It was the written, notarial word-backed by all the power of Castilian enforcement-that first constituted Spanish American empire. Even so, the Spaniards who invaded America in 1492 were not fond of their notaries, who had a dismal reputation for falsehood and greed. Yet Spaniards could not do without these men. Contemporary scholars also rely on the vast paper trail left by notaries to make sense of the Latin American past. How then to approach the question of notarial truth? Kathryn Burns argues that the archive itself must be historicized. Using the case of colonial Cuzco, she examines the practices that shaped document-making. Notaries were businessmen, selling clients a product that conformed to local “custom” as well as Spanish templates. Clients, for their part, were knowledgeable consumers, with strategies of their own for getting what they wanted. In this inside story of the early modern archive, Burns offers a wealth of possibilities for seeing sources in fresh perspective.

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9780822348573

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While historians are increasingly attentive to how actions and intentions get filtered through the voices and pens of intermediaries, or standardized by juridical and legal formulas, very few scholars have undertaken a systematic examination of these processes and their implications. Kathryn Burns has done so, and brilliantly. Her book Into the Archive will be of enormous interest to cultural and social historians of colonial Latin America, to students of Latin American history more broadly, and to many scholars outside the field of Latin American studies, particularly those engaged in research on the early modern world, legal history, and the history of archives. oBarbara Weinstein, New York University 'Believe me, sir, it all depends on us!' brags a notary in a Quevedo play. 'So true,' say historians of early modernity; after all, history comes to us through these men's quills. But who are they? With an ethnographic eye, Kathryn Burns brings to life the surprisingly unpredictable human business that took place over notarial desks. Burns's fresh, rich, and ingenious investigation of notaries' power over letters adds crucially to our understanding of how Andean peoples joined the transatlantic textual community. oFrank Salomon, author of The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village Kathryn Burns leads us into the archive through a fine-grained historical ethnography of notarial practice and its social context in colonial Cuzco. Gracefully written and engaging, yet rigorous in its use of historical materials and its social analysis, her reading of the colonial notarial office as a space of political and social negotiation and intrigue will transform our appreciation of these repositories and our understanding of the colonial Latin American 'lettered city.' No longer transparent, the very production of archival documents becomes a space in which colonial society is revealed. oJoanne Rappaport, author of The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes

Author Information

Kathryn Burns is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru, also published by Duke University Press.

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