Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru

This book sheds new light on the production of legal writings in early modern Spain and its colonies. It examines the producers, escribanos or notaries; their products, notarial records; and the uses of these records. Preserved in Spanish and Latin American archives, these documents have been cherished sources for historians. Building on earlier critiques against transparent readings of these and other texts, Kathryn Burns argues that notarial records are not clear windows into the past. Rather, they are complex writings wrought by “relations and shaping forces that formed them” (p. 11). Thus, to provide sounder readings of colonial societies, one should look at the records themselves and go into the archive, minding their production. Cuzco’s notaries, their assistants, and their clientele in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are the focus of this study. Happily, the trees do not hide the forest. Burns relates Cuzco’s notarial writings to those produced in...