Legal histories, such as Michael Weisser’s books on crime and punishment in the early modern period, which stress the structural and social bases of the law, recently have become very popular. This monograph by Richard L. Kagan on Castilian legal practices in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provides scholars with a good detailed study, and in the process goes a long way in explaining the litigiousness chronicled in so many Spanish plays and in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote.
Kagan spends little time on the pan-Mediterranean origins of Iberian law, but he does discuss the Siete Partidas and the fueros—the latter a most important aspect of Spanish law. The Castilian court system and its legal procedures are presented simply enough to provide a primer for graduate students and interested lay readers. The passages on Castilian procuradores, “attracted to money like flies to a honey pot,” according to Lazarillo de Tormes, show more depth. This may be explained on the basis of a Spanish prejudice that asserted that many attorneys were conversos, which created a controversy that raged on and gave historians a better social profile on this group than on other professionals. A detailed look at the Chancillería of Valladolid, the only appellate court with complete records, provides the bulk of the study’s material.
For the Latin Americanist, Kagan’s book is more an introduction to Spanish law than an exposition on colonial law. He does, however, provide an appendix on judicial archives, with brief information on legal aspects of the Council of the Indies, the Casa de Contratación, and the Contaduría Mayor de Hacienda, a branch of the Council of Finance after 1554 that dealt with tax cases—an institution not yet studied in enough detail to indicate its usefulness on colonial matters. Indeed, aside from a few references to Peru, there is disappointingly little about the Americas, a persistent problem in Iberian studies. Nonetheless, Kagan’s work is very sound.
