Archives

The Archives section of Mesolore presents transcriptions from alphabetic primary-source documents housed in libraries and archives in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Most of these transcriptions are taken from unpublished bureaucratic documents: reports to the king of Spain, legal disputes, land surveys, inquisitorial investigations. These alphabetic documents, most written by hand, therefore provide you with examples of textual genres different from the other primary sources in Mesolore (the hand-painted pictorial records of the Codex Nuttall, Codex Selden, Matrícula de Tributos, and Lienzo de Tlaxcala; the published volumes of the Molina and Alvarado Vocabularios).

image description

All transcriptions of archival documents, even those published on paper, will contain errors and omissions. Transcriptions of archival documents should always be checked against the text of the original files. Transcriptions of documents are thus a starting point for further archival research, and it is…

image description

The pages of the Ã’udzavui screenfolds are painted with hundreds of place signs. Only a handful of these signs have been linked to specific locations on the ground. Rich but underused sources of information on Ã’udzavui geography can be found in colonial and independence-period land…

image description

This section of Mesolore’s Archive presents transcriptions from primary-source documents housed in libraries and archives in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Our focus here is on documents from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Our interest is not simply in the history of…