Distance And Documents At The Spanish Empire S Periphery

The Spanish Empire is famous for being, at its height, the realm upon which "the sun never set." It stretched from the Philippines to Europe by way of the Americas. And yet we know relatively little about how Spain managed to move that crucial currency of governance—paper—over such enormous distances. Moreover, we know even less about how those distances were perceived and understood by people living in the empire. This book takes up these unknowns and proposes that by examining how documents operated in the Spanish empire, we can better understand how the empire was built and, most importantly, how knowledge was created. The author argues that even in such a vast realm, knowledge was built locally by people who existed at the peripheries of empire. Organized along routes and centralized into local nodes, peripheral knowledge accumulated in regional centers before moving on to the heart of the empire in Spain. The study takes the Kingdom of Guatemala as its departure point and examines the related aspects of documents and distance in three sections: part one looks at document genre, and how the creation of documents was shaped by distance; part two looks at the movement of documents and the workings of the mail system; part three looks at document storage and how archives played an essential part in the flow of paper.

An exploration of Colombian maps in New Granada.

In the wake of England's break with Rome and gradual reformation, English Catholics took root outside of the country, in Catholic countries across Europe. Their arrival and the foundation of convents and colleges on the Continent as attracted scholarly attention. However, we need to understand their impact beyond that initial moment of change. Confessional Mobility, therefore, looks at the continued presence of English Catholics abroad and how the English Catholic community was shaped by these cross-Channel connections. Corens proposes a new interpretative model of 'confessional mobility'. She opens up the debate to include pilgrims, grand tour travellers, students, and mobile scholars alongside exiles. The diversity of mobility highlights that those abroad were never cut off or isolated on the Continent. Rather, through correspondence and constant travel, they created a community without borders. This cross-Channel community was not defined by its status as victims of persecution, but provided the lifeblood for English Catholics for generations. Confessional Mobility also incorporates minority Catholics more closely into the history of the Counter-Reformation. Long side-lined as exceptions to the rule of a hierarchical, triumphant, territorial Catholic Church, English Catholic have seldom been recognised as an instrumental part in the wider Counter-Reformation. Attention to movement and mission in the understanding of Catholics incorporates minority Catholics alongside extra-European missions and reinforces current moves to decentre Counter-Reformation scholarship.

For All of Humanity examines the first public health campaigns in Guatemala, southern Mexico, and Central America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It reconstructs a rich and complex picture of the ways colonial doctors, surgeons, Indigenous healers, midwives, priests, government officials, and ordinary people engaged in efforts to prevent and control epidemic disease.

This book examines the hemispheric histories of overlooked peoples and places that shaped colonial Spanish America. This volume focuses on the experiences of Native peoples, Africans and Afro-descended peoples, and castas (individuals of mixed ancestry) living in regions perceived as fringe, marginal, or peripheral. It covers a comprehensive geographic range including northern Mexico, Central America, the Circum-Caribbean, and South America, as well as a sweeping chronological period, from the earliest colonization episodes of the sixteenth century to the twilight of Spanish rule in the late eighteenth century. The chapters highlight the diverse peoples, from semisedentary and nonsedentary Native groups and Mosquito captains to free African governors—who lived, labored, fought, ruled, and formed communities across Spanish America. The volume examines how these overlooked peoples navigated colonial processes of conquest, displacement, and relocation, while drawing attention to local factors that influenced these experiences including ecological change, rivalries, diplomacy, contraband, time and distance, and geography. Through their analysis of the local and temporal contexts, the studies in this volume offer new insight into why the protagonists of these places responded contentiously—through resistance or flight—or cooperatively—by accepting treaties or alliances. Non-specialists-undergraduate students, booksellers, and librarians will be drawn to the individuals case studies, while scholars will find this collection to be an indispensable research tool.

This book attends to the most essential, lucrative, and overlooked business activity of early modern Europe: the trade of paper, uncovering its hotspots and trade routes, usual dealings, and recycling economies.

An illustration of how indigenous and non-indigenous actors deployed concepts of time in their conflicts over race and modernity in postcolonial Guatemala.

The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Early Modern Spanish Literature and Culture introduces the intellectual and artistic breadth of early modern Spain from a range of disciplinary and critical perspectives. Spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (a period traditionally known as the Golden Age), the volume examines topics including political and scientific culture, literary and artistic innovations, and religious and social identities and institutions in transformation. The 36 chapters of the volume include both expert overviews of key topics and figures from the period as well as new approaches to understudied questions and materials. This invaluable resource will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in Hispanic studies, as well as Renaissance and early modern studies more generally.