Introduction
The Primeros Libros collection brings together for the first time all books printed before 1601 in the Americas in the form of digital facsimiles. "Reading the First Books" explores new methods for engaging with this exceptional collection.
This project takes as its premise the idea that a book's cultural significance is shaped by the context of its production and use. Bibliographic methods - examining catchwords, watermarks, type faces, and bindings - can give insight into the processes of production. Marginalia and ephemera reveal histories of use that can tell stories about shifting trends in reading practices. Archival contexts provide a history of the book as artifact and help to reveal its importance in modern life. Digital transformations reveal shifting relationships between book as object and book as text.
"Reading the First Books" showcases these multiple transformations by highlighting a single book from the Primeros Libros collection. The Advertencias para los Confessores de los Naturales was printed at the Franciscan convent at Tlatelolco, Mexico, around the year 1601. Like many confessional manuals, it was to be used as a field guide for new Spanish missionaries; for this reason, it is a trilingual text written in English, Spanish, and the indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl.
In many respects, the Advertencias does not stand out among sixteenth century American books. As a theological work, it leans heavily on the ideas (frequently plagiarized) of other authors. As a historical document, it is less revelatory than the shining works of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and others. Interestingly, despite its lack of appeal as a textual work, more copies of the book are held in archives and popular collections than any other work from the same era. This suggests that the cultural force of the book rests not just in its words, but also in its role as artifact. Our work in this project explores that claim by moving between words, books, and contexts.
Navigating the Project
"Reading the First Books" has been published using Scalar, "a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that's designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online." Scalar allow users to find multiple pathways through the material. You may explore this project by following tags or media, or you may use the "Main Menu" page to see a visualization of the project.
The most straightforward way to explore the project is through the paths listed in the main menu and described below. Each path leads the user through a sequence of short multimedia essays that offer a close reading or analysis of the Advertencias.
Introduction: This path (which you can follow below) will provide an overview of the Advertencias, including information about authorship, content, and use.
Production: This path explores the scene of production of the Advertencias, considering who printed the book and where it was printed. We consider questionable colophons, duplicated pages, and irregular catchwords.
Collection: This path considers how the Advertencias was collected in religious libraries across Mexico during the early colonial period, using firebrands, manuscript evidence, and archival records to trace the early collection history of the books.
Acquisition: This path considers the movement of the Advertencias into private collection and public institutions from Mexican independence to the present day. Focusing on a few specific case studies, we consider the national, intellectual, religious, and financial forces that drive the movement of these books as sources of information and as heritage items.
Conclusion: In the conclusion, we discuss some of the many implications of the digitization of the Advertencias, and point to some areas for future research.
References: Here we provide a list of references that were used in the development of this project.
Terms: Here we provide definitions for key terms used in the study of early book production.
