Looking Forward: Library Collections
The Biblioteca Franciscana
This project has shown how we can understand the cultural and intellectual lives of the people who wrote, printed, purchased, and displayed historical books by studying the history of their provenance. In this final section we turn our attention to the future, looking at modern collections of books from New Spain that offer new ways of thinking about and accessing these historical documents.The Biblioteca Franciscana, located in Cholula, Mexico, was established in 1990 to reunite the historical libraries of the Franciscans in New Spain. Funded in part by the Universidad de las Americas (Puebla), its mission is to preserve the bibliographic legacy of the order of San Francisco. Today, it holds more than 24,000 volumes from the colonial period, including sermons, theological treatises, canonical law, catechisms, hagiographies, and liturgies, as well as works of history, science, mathematics, philosophy, literature, grammar, and rhetoric. Collectively, these works demonstrate the breadth of Franciscan intellectual life and textual productivity.
The books at the Franciscana are catalogued according to their provenance, focusing on six collections pertaining to convents in Puebla, Mexico City, and Veracruz. This organizational structure turns the historical library into an organizing principal, drawing attention to the value of the library as an object of study (something that has been highlighted in this project as well). At the Franciscana we can explore not just the books, but also the history of their use.
The Franciscana is located in a restored Franciscan convent built in the sixteenth century. To enter the library, in the words of Elvia Morales and Rocío Cázares Aguilar, "era situarse en en otra época, traspasar un velo y llegar a un lugar donde el tiempo se había detenido" (74). María Clara de Greiff and Francisco Mejía Sánchez use similar words to describe their experience of the library: "Decidí entonces aventurarme en el tiempo, en la historia. Atravesé la portería y transité en la historia del rescate y resguardo del patrimonio bibliográfico franciscano" (77). The affective experience of entering a historical moment through the books - and libraries - of the past is at the heart of the Franciscana's mission as a new kind of historical library.
The Biblioteca Franciscana has one copy of volume one of the Advertencias, from the Convento de San Juan Bautista, Coyoacán. As the library tells us, "Esta colección reúne una gran variedad de sermones impresos en México, así como algunos títulos relativos a la historia mexicana colonial e independiente." The history of this collection is fascinating. In the 1930s, the Friar Agustín Báez began to collect books for a newly established Franciscan novitiate in San Andrés Calpan, some 150 miles southeast of Mexico City. In 1940, however, for political reasons, the novitiate, including the students and the library, were moved to the Roger Bacon College in El Paso, Texas. Along with the Friar Fidel de Jesús Chauvet, Báez continued to develop this collection (or in the words of Aguilar and Mejía Sanchez, "van rescatando [los libros] de los diversos conventos de la Provincia" (9)). The authors continue:
In the page about the SATO brand, we saw a copy of the Advertencias that did come from the Convento de San Antonio y Santa Bárbara, currently held at the Biblioteca José María Lafragua in Puebla. The copy of the Advertencias at the Franciscana, in contrast, bears a Marca de Fuego in the form of an oval containing the figure of a monk - a common figure in Franciscan firebrands - with text around the outside. According to the library catalogue, this marca de fuego pertains to the Convento de San Francisco de México. Given the provenance of the book, we associate it with the marca identified in the Catálogo Colectivo de Marcas de Fuego as the Convento de las Llagas de San Francisco de Puebla, or possibly the Convento Grande de San Francisco de Mexico (BJML-12075). As in the book described in the catalogue entry, it's possible that this copy of the Advertencias was at the Convento Grande de San Francisco in Mexico City, then moved to the convent in Puebla before making its way into the hands of Báez and Chauvet. The Biblioteca Franciscana preserves just a small slice of this history of movement in its catalogue.El acervo que lleva este nombre [San Juan Bautista Coyoacán] no es propiamente el fondo de origen del convento de Coyoacán, sino que se fue conformando con libros procedentes de las diferentes casas de estudio de la Provincia, en particular de la Casa de Teología en El Paso, Texas y de las compras que realizaron Fr. Agustín Báez y Fr. Fidel de Jesús Chauvet en la década de los cuarenta del siglo XX en diferentes "librerías de viejo" (Morales, 2010). Debido a ello, se encuentran libros con marcas de fuego diversas. Existe un gran número de libros formato folio con procedencia del Convento de San Antonio y Sta. Bárbara de Puebla, del convento de San Martín Texmelucan, entre otros.
La biblioteca antigua de Coyoacán llegó a las instalaciones de la Biblioteca Franciscana en el 2006. (10)
