An Exhibit in conjunction with the lecture "Reading Notarial Truth:
Peru's Colonial Archives" by Kathryn Burns
April 7, 2005
The Latin American Library is pleased to introduce an important series of notarial documents relating to the city of Puebla de los Angeles, Mexico. Puebla lies eighty miles southeast of Mexico City in a fertile agricultural valley. It was an important religious and commercial center in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The first case of this exhibit displays several maps of Puebla, and contains information regarding its social and economic growth.
Notarial documents of the type displayed in this exhibit were kept in municipalities throughout the Hispanic world. The scribes who wrote these documents and maintained notarial registers in New Spain were required to pass a qualifying examination for entry into the profession. Notarial scribes were held in high esteem and, given the volume of transactions they performed, their positions could be very lucrative. The second display case in this exhibit features legal stipulations pertaining to scribes, and also includes an interesting manual used to guide them in drawing up specific notarial documents.
Notarial documents themselves record a large variety of everyday transactions. They include powers-of-attorney, wills, marriage and dowry contracts, sales of property, slaves, produce, livestock, and other goods, rental agreements, business contracts, and slave manumissions, among others. This type of primary source material is invaluable for social, cultural and economic history, studies of wages and prices, urban development, and for gleaning information about women, indigenous populations, Blacks and other sectors of society that seldom appear in other types of documentation.
Display cases three, four, and five contain examples of notarial documents from The Latin American Library's collection. Case three contains a selection of wills. Case four contains notarial transactions initiated by merchants. In case five, we have selected items that testify to the great variety of documents and types of historical information contained in notarial registers.
A second section of this exhibit continues in the adjoining gallery space, where "The Writing on the Wall" displays large reproductions of handwriting samples from notarial scribes, as well as a reproduction of a letter written by Hernán Cortés from mainland Mexico (1524) in the Manuscripts Collection of The Latin American Library. We hope some of our "paleographic tips" featured along the wall will encourage interested students and scholars to pursue the pleasures of research in notarial archives.
