Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru

(Duke University Press) Early modern people relied on notaries for many things. Notaries existed to cast other people’s words in official forms and make them legally true. But notaries were notorious for having their own agenda and some of their documents are reputed for falsehoods. How can historians rely on these archives that document Latin America’s past? In this book, Burns argues that the archive itself must be historicized in order to be understood. She depicts notaries as businessmen whose products conformed to local “custom” as well as Spanish templates, and clients as knowledgeable consumers with strategies for getting what they wanted. Burns is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.