To Whom It May Concern

This is a book about books, particularly books of fiction. The chief characters of this story are not the heroes of the Spanish conquest and settlement of the sixteenth-century New World but, rather, the books which they and their descendants knew and read, the entertaining writings which fired the imaginations of these pioneers, stimulated their unparalleled achievements, amused their restless leisure, and consoled their bitter disillusionment. These printed products of creative spirits played a silent but not wholly passive part in shaping the events of the first act in the drama of Europeanizing the globe, and their participation is still an unwritten chapter in the history of that great enterprise. In this narrative the secular works of nonfiction and instruction figure as minor characters, while the purely religious and theological literature, though dominant in that great age, is only briefly seen. This account of the share of humane letters in an epochal adventure of mankind, therefore, makes no profession of being a critical essay on Spanish letters of the period, and much less does it presume to be an intellectual history of early Hispanic America. It seeks only to focus attention upon a neglected aspect of the early diffusion of European culture in the newly discovered portions of the world, and to demonstrate the existence of a relatively free circulation of books in the former colonies of Spain, a fact hitherto obscured by prejudices and misapprehension.

In the study of modern history an often subtle interaction between literature and events in human affairs, particularly since the invention of the printing press, is not fully appreciated. Fictional writings are not only the subjective records of human experience, but sometimes the unconscious instigators of the actions of men by

conditioning their attitudes and responses. Often the works of imagination that were most influential in this respect at a given time and place are not the supreme creations of genius; they are frequently inferior manifestations of artistic expression which, because of special circumstances, sway the thoughts and emotions of their readers more profoundly. As a result, they sometimes alter the course of history or modify contemporary customs and manners. Few would claim Uncle Tom's Cabin to be a masterpiece of American letters, but few would deny it an influence all out of proportion to its esthetic merits in the thoughts and subsequent actions of the people of the United States of the middle nineteenth century. The effect of the wide reading of the rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger by the youth of a generation or two ago on the economic conceptions and individualistic philosophies of older, conservative businessmen of recent years might prove a fruitful inquiry. And who can tell to what extent the dime-novel fiction of the athletic superman, Frank Merriwell, helped to bring about a shift of juvenile interest from going west to kill Indians to the tremendous enthusiasm for sports during the last four or five decades? Such writings can hardly be termed literature, yet they had an appeal to a mass of readers of an impressionable age which, in some measure, conditioned their habits of thought and conduct. It is possible, then, that the Spanish Conquistador offers an early example of this interaction between the fictitious and the real. His matchless courage and driving force did not spring from brawn and endurance alone; his febrile fancy had much to do in spurring him relentlessly on to unprecedented exploits. Some of the visionary passion that animated him had its inspiration in the imagined utopias, adventures, and riches alluringly depicted in the song and story of his time. The texture of dreams became corporeal in the new medium of leaden type, and these men of the Spanish Renaissance were moved to work miracles greater than those performed in the pages of their books. In the first chapters of this account an attempt is made to appraise, to understand, and to explain these men and the fiction they emulated.

This book about books of the Conquistador and his descendants strives to serve a threefold purpose: first, to explore the possible influence of a popular form of contemporary literature on the mind,

attitudes, and actions of these sixteenth-century Spaniards; second, to describe the mechanics of the associated book trade in the New World, including the related legislation and routines of shipping and conveying these wares to purchasers in the Western Hemisphere; and third, to indicate the universal diffusion of Spanish literary culture throughout the expanded Hispanic world of that great age. The first six chapters deal with the conqueror and the romances of chivalry that he knew, and the possible reaction of books on men is indicated particularly by the quest of the Amazons in America. Chapters VII to XII follow the fortunes of printed volumes through the House of Trade at Seville, on board the trans-Atlantic galleons, and into the ports of entry of the Spanish colonies. Chapters XIII to XIX are a series of case histories of individual shipments which symbolize the universal dissemination of books throughout the sixteenth-century colonial empire of Spain, including the outlying Philippines. This procedure was adopted because the surviving records in the archives of Spain and Spanish America are of such fragmentary nature that a statistical approach to the problem of book distribution is impossible. The total number of volumes which crossed the ocean in the sixteenth century can not be determined, though it clearly ran into the thousands annually, nor can the specific titles sent in the largest quantities be identified. The names which recur often on the surviving lists may be assumed to be among the most desired, and chapter IX suggests these seeming favorites, judging by a large number of ship manifests consulted in the Archive of the Indies at Seville.

The seven chapters of case histories are based on a selection of nine representative book lists, all but one from Spanish American repositories. They range from 1576 to 1613; book lists before the earlier date are extremely rare and the few discovered are short and of relatively slight interest. Of the nine, three are fairly long inventories for New Spain, dated 1576 and 1600; five are shorter ones for the viceroyalty of Peru, of 1583, 1606, and 1613; and one, still shorter but of considerable interest, is from the Philippines, dated 1583. Each chapter is based on one or more of these inventories and includes a historical sketch of the social and cultural life of the locality represented, together with an account of the special circumstances relating to the particular book order or shipment

and an analysis of the lists of titles, with emphasis on belles-lettres. Because of its exceptional value in giving insight into Mexican intellectual life at the end of the sixteenth century, the list discussed in Chapter XVI is subjected to detailed commentary on all types of literature noted in it. Chapters XIII to XVI consider general belletristic and secular writings more broadly, while the following three chapters are concerned with specific masterpieces of the Spanish novel, namely, Guzmán de Alfarache, by Mateo Alemán, and Don Quijote, by Cervantes, whose arrival in the colonies marks the close of an epoch in popular literary preferences. As the novel enters an eclipse at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the introduction of Don Quixote into the New World is the climactic event with which the book closes.

The whole question of fictional and secular books in the former Spanish colonies has long been beclouded by prejudices engendered by the so-called "Black Legend" of the obscurantism allegedly practiced by Spain in America, and by the antipathies arising from the wars of independence in the early nineteenth century. It is not the purpose of the present work to transform the denigration of Spanish colonial policies into a "White Legend," but this account of the often denied circulation of books and ideas in viceregal Hispanic America, added to the investigations of others, may help to demonstrate that the true color of the "legend" was something like, perhaps, a light gray. The conviction, which some historical evidence seems to support, that Spanish authorities tried to seal off the colonies from European thought by excluding all books save those of approved orthodox religion still dominates the minds of many; it is almost a dogma which even scholars hesitate to question. Perhaps the first to shake the firm belief in the extremely limited circulation of nonreligious literature was the venerable Spanish investigator, Francisco Rodríguez Marín, who, in 1911, published two well-documented lectures in a little volume entitled El 'Quijote' y Don Quijote en América . By a somewhat cursory inspection of the ship manifests of the fleets sailing to America in 1605, which he found in the Archive of the Indies at Seville, he proved the exportation of several hundred copies of presumably the first edition of the famous novel. His discovery of these registros thus opened a rich vein for research. In 1914 an important collection of documents, Libros

y libreros en el siglo XVI, published by Francisco Fernández del Castillo, revealed the possibilities of Mexican repositories for related material on the colonial book trade, besides throwing much light on the importation of printed literature.

In the winter of 1930–1931 it was my good fortune to be able to carry forward the researches of Sr. Rodríguez Marín in the Contratación records at Seville, which include the surviving registers of the annual fleets. I had photostatic copies made of many of these documents of the last decades of the sixteenth century and the first years of the seventeenth, and I took copious notes of many more. In 1932 and again in 1940 these archival investigations were continued in Mexico City; also in Lima, Peru, in 1937 and 1938, with briefer delvings into similar repositories of Chile, Argentina, and Colombia. These accumulating manuscript materials were first exploited in a short monograph, Romances of chivalry in the Spanish Indies with some registros of shipments of books to the Spanish colonies (Berkeley, 1933), which gave the fullest discussion then available of the circulation of light literature in those regions, and reproduced the first group of these curious book lists with a check list of titles. Subsequent utilization of other documents of this character occurred in a series of articles printed in scholarly journals, chiefly from 1940 to 1947. In considerably modified form some of the latter and parts of the monograph are incorporated in the present work.

In 1940 my good friend and fellow worker in the Archive of the Indies at Seville, the distinguished Argentine historian, José Torre Revello, published his monumental El libro, la imprenta y el periodismo en América durante la dominación española, a magnificently documented work with an appendix of ninety-seven book lists and related material, practically all from the great repository at Seville, where he labored for many years. Three chapters of this landmark of cultural history are devoted to the question of the circulation of books, and they have done much to shatter the legend of Spanish obscurantism in this respect so long maintained. More recently a compatriot, Father Guillermo Furlong, has brought out a similar work, Bibliotecas argentinas durante la dominación hispánica, which leans heavily on Sr. Torre Revello's monograph but adds a few book lists for study. This succession of important, docu-

mented studies has opened perceptible fissures in the hard rock of the traditional belief in Spanish intolerance towards humanistic literature in America, and the present work, with its further analysis, elaboration of details, and additional book lists mainly from Spanish American archives, seeks to advance this disruptive process.

I have a heavy debt of gratitude to acknowledge for help received from numerous institutions and individuals. Without their support and coöperation the long quest of materials, chiefly in foreign archives, on which my investigations are based, would have been impossible. In 1930 the American Council of Learned Societies of Washington, D. C. granted a generous fellowship which permitted me to spend a full year in Spain, with incidental excursions to France and England, for archival research. Subsequent aid from this source continued these efforts in Mexico in 1932. Research funds of the University of California assisted in the acquisition of photostatic copies of registros preserved at Seville. In 1936 the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation bestowed a fellowship enabling me to carry on my investigations in various countries of South America. The editors of the Hispanic Review, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and the Hispanic American Historical Review, published by the Duke University Press, have kindly given permission to reprint in modified and enlarged form several articles and book lists first published in those journals. The original forms of chapters XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, and XIX appeared in vol. XV, No. 1 (January 1947), vol. IX, No. 1 (January 1941), vol. XI, No. 3 (July 1943), vol. VIII, No. 4 (October 1940), and vol. IX, No. 3 (July 1941), respectively, of the first-mentioned review, and chapters IV and XIV in vol. XXII, No. 1 (February 1942), and vol. XXIV, No. 4 (November 1944) of the second. All have undergone revision in this book, varying from slight changes in text to a complete rewriting with the insertion of many new data.

First claim to my gratitude among individuals is held by Guillermo Lohmann Villena, a distinguished young scholar of Peru who made my visits at the National Archive in Lima fruitful by helping me to locate colonial book lists in that repository and later by sending me copies and transcriptions of other inventories that he encountered. The distinguished Spanish paleographer, Dr. Agustín

Millares Carlo, rendered similar service in my work in Mexico City. In the difficult and sometimes trying task of identifying the abbreviated titles of works on the colonial lists I have called upon numerous friends and colleagues, including Professors R. K. Spaulding and C. E. Kany of the University of California, and especially Dr. Otis H. Green of the University of Pennsylvania. The entire analysis of the book list contained in chapter XVI is, with slight changes in wording, entirely the work of Dr. Green, who generously authorized its use in this book. It appeared originally in the Hispanic Review (vol. IX) in an article of the same title as the present chapter and under our joint names. For the benefit of their advice and for reading the drafts of some chapters I wish to thank Dr. Earl J. Hamilton of the University of Chicago, Dr. Federico Sánchez y Escribano of the University of Michigan, and Dr. Otis H. Green. The failure to heed their counsel in some respects will account for some of the book's imperfections.

IRVING A. LEONARD
HEATHBROOK
SOUTH TAMWORTH,
NEW HAMPSHIRE
SEPTEMBER 1947