Path: Dissemination
In the "collection" path we described the bibliographic systems of book collection and organization employed by religious institutions during the colonial period. These systems changed significantly after Mexico achieved independence from Spain in 1821. During the war, church and state alike became sites of violence; libraries and archives, like the people who ran them, were uprooted and often destroyed. After independence, the nationalization of religious property led to a different, slower form of transformation, as books (and historical archives) were moved, stolen, sold, and abandoned through the course of the nineteenth century.
This path explores the collection of the Advertencias in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by considering two case studies. One exemplar that we consider was acquired by Joaquín García Icazbalceta, one of Mexico's preeminent historians and bibliographers. The other was brought to Europe, where it was acquired by the British and Foreign Bible Society. We consider how these two cases reveal competing interests in Mexican history and in the books of colonial Mexico.
This path concludes by considering the twentieth-century institutionalization of the Advertencias in libraries from Germany to Peru.