Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru

Purchased for a class on the Archive, this book was well written, with great sources.

This book is a great approach to the archives as history and a research question separate from the material housed within them.I recommend this book if you are student of history and researching in any type of Spanish archive.

Extremely readable account that opens up insights into the relationship between records and power. Turns out history isn't always written by the winners. Most often, it's written -- and shaped -- by their notaries and clerks.

Brillant research

Into the Archive is a study of the work that notaries (scribes acquainted with legal conventions) did in colonial Peru, with a special emphasis on sixteenth-century Cuzco. Individual chapters explore notaries' work and reputation in medieval and Renaissance Spain, their role in Spanish America, the day-to-day dynamics of their work, how Spanish colonists could manipulate the written record, and how historians might read the sometimes opaque or misleading documents that notaries created. "The point of these readings, and this book," writes Kathryn Burns, "is to enrich the way we read our sources. If we know how archives were made, and the ways people might use them to further their own ends, then our interpretations can go further" (p. 143). Anyone who plans to do original research in colonial Spanish American archives will find this book invaluable. Others may find it interesting as a work of social and cultural history: it illuminates aspects of literacy, the law, apprenticeship, and Spanish-Indian relations in colonial Peru. Well-written, crisp, and focused, technical yet also full of human interest, it is a model of historical scholarship.

Fascinating material.