Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru

ISBN-13: 9780822348689

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Duke University Press

Publication Date: 02-18-2020

Pages: 266

Product Dimensions: 6.10(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

Kathryn Burns is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru, also published by Duke University Press.

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INTO THE ARCHIVE

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Chapter One

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Los libros y letras andan por todo el mundo. -B. de Albornoz

La Edad de Oro, the Golden Age: this resonant phrase names a time when Spanish imperial might reached its apogee. Galleons full of American silver sailed the seas, from Mexico and Peru to Manila and Seville, giving ballast to the Spanish monarchs' heady sense of themselves as "lords of all the world." Spanish arts and letters flourished, and fashionable people throughout Europe wore severe black garments so as to look more Spanish. When in 1584 workers put the finishing touches on the monumental monastic palace of El Escorial, the power of the Spanish Habsburgs had never seemed greater. But this was also an age of notorious extremes and tensions. Visitors to the peninsula saw deepening poverty, haughty aristocrats, and a virulent "religious racism" that made life especially dangerous for the descendants of Jews and Moors. Rapid price inflation quadrupled the cost of basic commodities. Disease and famine carried off thousands, especially in Castile. Litigiousness increased dramatically; so, too, did the presence of beggars.

Into this world of sharpening contradictions a new literary antihero was born: the rogue, or pícaro. Like the biblical Lazarus, the picaresque narrator of Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) revives after being laid low, not once but several times. His first-person immediacy instantly draws the reader in. Fatherless young Lázaro goes out into the world to live by his wits, and proceeds to serve a series of masters. These include a beggar, a priest, a petty nobleman, and a seller of papal indulgences, each of whom turns out to be an artful con man, worse than the last. Lazarillo succeeds brilliantly as a send-up of the supposed pillars of Spanish society while posing deeply troubling questions: Can anyone be taken at his word? Behind the façade of appearances, who or what is true?

This was the perfect literary expression for an age of anxiety. And Lazarillo had many literary progeny, including the enormously popular two-part Guzmán de Alfarache (1599, 1604). Its eponymous narrator must also make his way in an uncertain, unstable world, without benefit of family ties or wealth. Guzmán is the son of a shady merchant, and pursues one dubious get-rich-quick scheme after another (all the while denouncing the pervasive influence of money, and the arrogance and power of the rich). He attaches himself to a series of masters and learns to beg, borrow, and steal. Along the way, he sees much greater rogues than himself-merchants, clergymen, captains at arms-engaged in the large-scale equivalent of begging, borrowing, and stealing. Guzmán constantly gets into trouble, but they do just fine, even though from Guzmán's perspective they are the true leeches of society's lifeblood.

Everything is potentially for sale in the pícaro's world-even the sworn, documented truth produced by notaries. The figure of the notary makes only a brief walk-on appearance in Lazarillo, but appears early and often in Guzmán. He is a particular kind of merchant, a word merchant. And he is most emphatically not to be trusted. "Before it slips my mind," Guzmán narrates in the novel's opening pages, "listen to the Good Friday sermon preached by a learned priest in the church of San Gil in Madrid." The priest (in Guzmán's reported speech) inventories the many different kinds of sinners he has steered toward reform in the course of his long career. All showed signs of true redemption, except for notaries.

I really don't know how they confess or who absolves them-those who abuse their powers, that is-because they report and write down whatever they please, and for two coins or to please a friend or lover ... they take away people's lives, honor, and property, opening the way for countless sins. They are insatiably greedy, with a canine hunger and an infernal fire that burns in their souls, which makes them gobble up other people's assets and swallow them whole.... So it seems to me that whenever one of them is saved-since they can't all be as bad as those I've described-the angels must say joyfully to one another as he enters paradise, "Laetamini in Domino. A notary in heaven? That's new, that's new."

With Guzmán, the picaresque took off in popularity, along with the stock figure of the greedy, conniving notary. In Francisco de Quevedo's Vida del buscón llamado don Pablos (1626), another highly successful contribution to the genre, the protagonist Pablos falls into jail and bribes a notary to help him. First Pablos gets an earful of the man's boastful omnipotence:

"'Believe me, sir, it all depends on us.... I've sent more innocent men to the galleys for pleasure than there are letters in a lawsuit. Now trust me and I'll get you out safe and sound.'" Next the notary makes sure entire clauses are expunged from the trial record, and gets his man released on probation. But Pablos immediately falls into the clutches of another notary, whose roof tiles he has accidentally broken. He is thrashed and bound by the man and his servants. Then the notary starts drawing up a written indictment of Pablos: "There were some keys rattling in my pocket, so he said, and he wrote down that they were skeleton keys, even though he saw them and it was obvious they weren't.... All this was happening on the roof. It didn't matter that they were a little nearer heaven; they still told lies." Pablos spends a sleepless night considering his cruel fate. Recalling the notary's "pages and pages of indictment" of him, Pablos concludes that "nothing grows as fast as your guilt when you're in the hands of a notary."

Nor was the stereotype of the bad notary limited to high cultural products. Notaries were the butt of dozens of common sayings, as picked up in early modern compendia of popular adages. They gave people a close shave: "Escribano, puta y barbero, pacen en un prado y van por un sendero" (Notaries, whores, and barbers: all pasture together and follow the same path). They had no souls or human warmth: "Escribano y difunto, todo es uno" (Between a notary and a dead man, there's no difference). By their pens they could make black appear white, then turn it back again: "Pluma de escribano, de negro hace blanco; y a la vuelta de un pelo, de blanco hace negro." You couldn't hope to win a lawsuit (pleito) unless you had the notary on your side: "Pleito bueno, pleito malo, el escribano de tu mano."

Notaries were not the only men on the receiving end of popular barbs, to be sure. But there is an especially strong argument coming out of early modern Spain that notaries are powerful and not to be trusted. Cautionary tales about them obtrude with sudden violence like geological upheavals, as though authors can't contain themselves. Mateo Alemán abruptly inserts into the first chapter of Guzmán the priest's rant against "incorrigible" notaries who will confound the angels if one ever makes it to heaven. Similar passages abound in texts of all kinds. In his biography of a saintly Spanish nun, for example, the Franciscan friar Pedro Navarro swerves into a narrative annex about an incident in an Italian town in the year 1601 in which a dead notary emerges from his coffin in the midst of his own funeral to tell horrified onlookers where he hid the money he had stolen from someone's pious bequest.

Why the notary? Did he become a scapegoat for the anxieties of an early modern empire in the midst of severe growing pains? Something of the sort does seem likely. The notary (figure 4) was a more familiar, accessible target in the legal profession than the more exalted figures of advocates and judges. And he stood at the confluence of several trends that were making people feel extremely vulnerable. Costs were increasing, bureaucracy was growing, and lawsuits were thriving as never before in Golden Age Spain. Most Spaniards could not read or write, and did not know the inner workings of the legal system. Yet even small fry might be caught up in the bureaucratic traps of legalese. Like the fictional Pablos, they might suddenly have to place their fate in the hands of a notarial intercessor for their case to reach an advocate or a judge. No wonder the notary seemed to wield control over others with the shaft of his pen. But there was more to the charged stereotype of the bad notary than convenient emotional displacement.

Greed and power: these are the two main characteristics entwined in the stereotypical notary. If we tease them apart and set aside the villainous greed (which is all but impossible to gauge in archival sources), we are left with the notary's power-and that was much more than a literary mirage. The notary was a powerful figure in Golden Age Spain. The very structure of Spanish justice made him so. Documents of all kinds-contracts, wills, legal petitions, and depositions-were crucial to obtaining justice, and the making of valid documents was the exclusive province of the notary. He acted, to quote Herzog, "as a bridge between the formal, public, technical world, on the one hand, and on the other, the circumstances, desires, and interests of individuals." For urban dwellers especially, he must have seemed ubiquitous. He actually might troll the city jail for customers. (In Seville, he could have come across Alemán or Cervantes, both of whom did time for debts and got to know the notorious city jail from within.) He might also have some pull with the local judge. Just how effective one's papers were, in or out of court, depended significantly, if not exclusively, on him. The reader who got a good laugh out of Pablos's notary in El Buscón ("Believe me, sir, it all depends on us") might be laughing in rueful recognition.

As for those of us used to filtering archival evidence to reconstruct the past, there's much to ponder here. The filtering process began long ago, in the very making of the archival record itself. Filtering and shaping the contents of documents was basically what notaries did for a living. This was what clients expected them to do: cast the essential details of their business in the standard, well-worn forms. If we know what notaries were empowered to do, we can see that even the most seemingly spontaneous archival "voices" often obey submerged but quite specific scripts. The archive becomes an echo chamber of blended, collaborative agencies.

In this chapter, we will go into these men's jobs-both as prescribed by Spanish justice and as exercised by Spanish notaries in practice. Notaries' work featured prominently in the extensive "how-to" literature for legal professions that began to thrive alongside Lazarillo, Guzmán, Don Quijote, and other bestsellers of the early modern book trade. To understand the notary's powers fully, however, we begin with a look at the deep historical roots of his craft.

Tracing Notarial History

Spanish notaries' powers, like those of other Mediterranean notaries, were deeply rooted in the history of writing, as their name implies: escribanos were meant to write, escribir. But this was not just any kind of writing; it was legal writing, conspicuously rooted in Roman private law. The Roman notary (tabellio) made written records of people's testaments and transactions-contracts of sale, leases, loans, dowries, and more. He might also prepare petitions (libelli, preces) for presentation to Roman officials. He was not a legal scholar (iurisconsultus) or advocate; those men could be called on to solve a legal problem or present well-crafted arguments to a magistrate. The Roman notary dealt instead in well-worn forms. By the late Roman empire he might be found working in public markets and fora across a wide swath of Europe, from Byzantium in the east to the Iberian peninsula and the British isles in the west.

Roman law is the most esteemed source of Spanish legality, but not its only source. When Germanic peoples invaded the Roman province of Hispania in the early fifth century ad, they introduced elements of a legal culture that privileged spoken words, tokens, and gestures over written records. Old forms remained, but gained new terms. Whoever purchased property, for example, was expected to perform symbolic acts to signify possession. (Traces of Germanic law could still be seen centuries later in gestures like Columbus's.) When North African armies invaded in 711 AD and brought most of the peninsula under Islamic rule, Arabic notaries began to influence local practice. They used detailed formularies to make written records of all kinds of things: maritime and other transactions; marriage, dowries, legacies, and so on. Among the most advanced medieval formularies in Europe were those produced in Islamic Spain.

As Mediterranean cities and economies grew, so did their need for reliable records. The northern Italian "legal renaissance" of the twelfth century reinvigorated the Roman law tradition-including, eventually, its notarial forms and practices. Bolognese notaries Salatiel (d. 1280) and Rolandino dei Passaggieri (d. 1300) wrote influential manuals of notarial practice that circulated widely in Europe. These directly shaped the Siete Partidas, the great Castilian legal code attributed to Alfonso X "el Sabio" (d. 1284). Large portions of Partida 3.18 are basically a notarial formulary. As Alfonso and his successors gradually brought most of the peninsula under Christian rule, the Partidas increasingly became the law of the land.

So it was that Iberian legal culture in the late middle ages came to bear a striking resemblance to that of northern Italy (and that of ancient Rome). Legal scholars played an esteemed role. These were the advocates, known in Spain as abogados or simply letrados, "lettered ones." They were expected to have studied law at a university, perhaps at Bologna, Paris, Salamanca, or Alcalá de Henares. There were also attorneys, known as procuradores, to shepherd clients' cases through the workings of the judicial system. They did not hold prestigious degrees but were adept at routine judicial business. Then there were the ubiquitous notaries public, the escribanos públicos. By the late middle ages these men had state sanction to act as fides publicae, authenticating a wide variety of judicial and extrajudicial records. They held title to their offices by virtue of royal appointment. Each city had a fixed number of municipal notaries, known as escribanos públicos y del número, and each of these "numerary" notaries inherited and enlarged the archives of his predecessors in office. (Large cities, like Toledo and Valladolid, might have 30 or more; Burgos had 38.) In addition, monarchs created escribanos reales (or de Su Majestad), "royal notaries" who might perform notarial duties in any part of the realm as long as they did not infringe on the numerary notaries' terrain.

When exactly did one meet up with a notary? That depended on one's condición, one's place in the order of things. Urban dwellers were by far the most likely to see notaries in action. Notarial workshops, or escribanías, might be found in conspicuous spots such as neighborhood plazas, and were especially thick wherever merchants gathered to trade-places like the steps of the enormous Gothic cathedral of Seville. (A typical Iberian workshop probably looked much as it does in Dutch engravings: a room with a large table, writing implements, shelves and chests for storing documents.) An artisan might see a notary often, whenever he took on a new apprentice or contracted for delivery of his goods. A mother superior or anyone who lingered near the entryway to a convent would have seen a notary constantly. Dowries had to be contracted for the novices and nuns; properties had to be bought, sold, renovated, and rented; services had to be engaged for delivery of foodstuffs, care for the sick, and any number of other things. And merchants might see notaries on a daily basis-especially if a trade fair had just happened or a ship laden with merchandise had just docked at the quay.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from INTO THE ARCHIVE by Kathryn Burns Copyright © 2010 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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