This handsome and lavishly illustrated volume tracks the history of Venezuela’s colonial escribanos, those who performed activities ranging from secretarial tasks in a city council to notarization of public documents, including title deeds, wills, and judicial proceedings—a significant occupation. The book discusses the nature of the work, its functions, and its hierarchical structure. Nearly a third of the volume’s 331 pages are devoted to reproducing more than 220 seals and signatures of escribanos from 1530 to 1799. The author is a member of Venezuela’s National Academy of History whose previous publications include a two-volume history of Barquisimeto.
This work is divided into seven brief chapters. The first defines the subject and discusses how someone obtained the title escribano. The second chapter discusses the formal functions and obligations of colonial escribanos. The third classifies the diverse kinds of escribanos, identifying a total of 13 varieties and grouping them according to their hierarchical importance. Chapter 4 addresses several aspects of the practical activities of this profession, including the social identity of the first escribanos of the early colonial period, the illegal combination of this occupation with the privilege of encomendero, the violation of the prohibition against mestizos and even mulattos becoming escribanos, and the controls devised by the crown to stop such abuses.
Chapter 5 touches very briefly on the transition from the colonial to the independence period and lists a few of the early republican escribanos, along with the laws enacted to regulate the occupation. After the illustrations of the signs and signatures reproduced at length in chapter 6, the final chapter lists numerous escribanos in several regions of colonial Venezuela, indicating their specific titles, approximate years of activity, and place of occupation. Finally, an interesting appendix offers the tables of contents of some of the manuals utilized by colonial escribanos of Venezuela and probably other regions, manuals that apparently came from Spain.
Sponsored by Cordeleria Occidental, a private company in the Barquisimeto region of which the author was a cofounder, this is not the standard academic study but a large-format volume, obviously expensive to produce, with a somewhat commemorative flavor. Its chapters are brief and more descriptive (at times anecdotal) than analytical. It is nonetheless a significant introduction to the history of an important colonial occupation, about which little was known up to now. Its text is supported by extensive archival work both in several of Venezuela’s colonial archives and in Seville’s Archivo General de Indias. Research libraries will certainly profit from adding it to their collections.
