Firenze University Press
www.fupress.com/bsfm-jems
JEMS - Journal of
Early Modern Studies
Editorial
Memory from Below*
Citation: M. Martínez and A.
Castillo Gómez (2024) Editorial.
Jems. 13: pp. 7-18. doi: http://
dx.doi.org/10.36253/JEMS-22797149-15263
Copyright: © 2024 M. Martínez
and A. Castillo Gómez. This
is an open access, peerreviewed article published by
Firenze University Press (https://
oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/
bsfm-jems) and distributed under
the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original
author and source are credited.
Data Availability Statement:
All relevant data are within the
paper and its Supporting Information files.
Competing Interests: The
Author(s) declare(s) no conflict
of interest.
Editors: D. Pallotti, P. Pugliatti
(University of Florence)
Miguel Martínez
University of Chicago (<martinezm@uchicago.edu>)
Antonio Castillo Gómez
University Alcalá (<antonio.castillo@uah.es>)
Abstract
The editorial provides an overview of this issue of the Journal of Early Modern
Studies. First it lays out the research questions that were at the origin of the
project. Then it sketches out its conceptual and historiographical armature,
pointing to some classical and recent arguments about memory, the history
of literacy, and popular writing. Finally, this essay surveys the structure of
the special issue and summarizes the object and argument of each one of the
fifteen contributions.
Keywords: Early Modern Period, Literacy, Memory, Subalternity, Writing
The present issue of the Journal of Early Modern Studies interrogates how common men and women used different modes
of writing to keep, shape, and contest social memory in the
early modern world. Mapping a wide-ranging geography that
expands from Lyon to Cuzco, and from the Atlantic island of
Annobón to Palermo, the works included in this volume explore
the relation between often – though not always – individual ‘acts
of assertive literacy’ (Justice 1994, 24) and collective modes of
remembrance among social groups who were not, in principle,
expected to write.
* This work was supported by the project Vox Populi. Spaces, Practices
and Strategies of Visibility of Marginal Writing in the Early Modern and Modern
Periods (PID2019-107881GB-I00AEI/10.13039/501100011033), funded
by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and the National
Research Agency of Spain.
Journal of Early Modern Studies 13: 7-18, 2024
ISSN 2279-7149 (online) | DOI: 10.36253/JEMS-2279-7149-15263
8
What role did writing and reading play in common sense notions of living historically? How
did common men and women in different parts of the world use writing to defend, reinterpret,
or dispute custom? How did writing and reading contribute to the creation or resignification of
local sites of memory – ‘any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which
by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial
heritage of any community’ (Nora 1996, xvii)? Did the interplay between orality and writing
have a significant role in the ways historical events were remembered, commemorated, or forgotten? In this issue of JEMS, scholars working in different geographical areas and disciplinary
traditions address these and other questions in order to think broadly about the relationship
between subaltern writing and popular memory in the early modern world.
The reader will find essays on a wide variety of topics: the memory of popular revolt in
early modern Europe, the autobiographies of Mediterranean captives, and forms of colonial
literacy. There are interventions on the African vernacularization of European chivalric stories
and on letter writing by women and same-sex lovers; on the textual transmission of a lost orality of conquest and on the role of indigenous memory in colonial historical writing and legal
practice. Other contributions discuss letters of manumission, riddles, graffiti, pamphlets, and
Inquisitorial depositions. As we will see, the relationship between subaltern writing and the
social memory of the popular classes is a capacious avenue of research, and one that the editors
hope this volume will contribute to spark and encourage in the years to come.
The idea behind the volume, as well as the essays themselves, build on previous scholarly
endeavors. On the one hand, this project connects to the long tradition of studies on subaltern
writing, as explained at greater length in the Introduction. In this field, the contribution of
Italian historiography since the late 1970s (Bartoli Langeli and Petrucci 1978) and, in particular, after the opening in the 1980s of the first ‘archivi della scrittura popolare’1 (Pieve Santo
Stefano, this with nuances, Trento and Genoa) is remarkable. Although most of this research
focuses on modern history, it should be noted that, already in the 1960s, Armando Petrucci
explored the writing of the subaltern classes in earlier periods, such as Ancient Rome. After the
Perugia congress of 1977, ‘Alfabetismo e cultura scritta nella storia della società italiana’,2 and
together with Attilio Bartoli Langeli, Petrucci published some theoretical and methodological
reflections on the history of literacy and written culture, noting that ‘the study of the graphic
testimonies produced by the subaltern classes or oriented to them was of particular interest’.
They also pointed out some documentary repositories where these sources could be traced
(Petrucci 1978, 454; 454-456).3
Studies on popular senses of the past, moreover, have brought to light the complex interrelation between custom, collective memory, and social struggle. In early modern Europe, Andy
Wood has argued that a usable past was key in conflicts over economic and political resources
in the present. Local memory was the foundation of custom and legitimacy, and it was key in
shaping ‘vernacular landscapes’. No doubt, ‘oral tradition was a political resource’, but Wood
has shown how orality interacted with other textual and written ways of remembrance (2013,
285; 247-286). Guy Beiner analyzed in depth the reasons for the calculated and systematic
oblivion surrounding a popular insurrection in Northern Ireland led by Protestants in the
context of the Great Irish Rebellion of 1798. In contrast with ‘social memory’, Beiner explores
the workings and relevance of ‘social forgetting’, which should not be confused with collective
(Archives of popular writing).
(Literacy and written culture in the history of Italian society).
3
For an overall evaluation of Petrucci’s approach to subaltern writing and reading, see Castillo Gómez (2022).
1
2
9
amnesia. The involvement of protestants in an anti-British uprising complicated the division
of Northern Irish society along religious and political lines, and thus gave way to concerted
attempts at forgetfulness. By studying ‘the troubled afterlife of the rebellion’ in a wealth of written documentary evidence, Beiner offers ‘an archaeology of social forgetting … an excavation
of a monument to amnesia’ (2018, 42). In the early modern period and beyond, some events
become ‘sites of oblivion’ rather than sites of memory.
In line with Benedict Anderson’s (1983) classic argument, Leith Davis has recently explored
the role of the expanded availability of print in consolidating national collective memories in
the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (2022). In turn, the status of print in the
changing media landscape of the late seventeenth century would rise, Davis argues, thanks to
its association with the cultural memory of important national events. Jasper van der Steen, on
his part, explored the two opposing narratives around the Dutch Revolt and argued that public
memory around those events became the arena of fierce contestation in the Low Countries
from the very outset of the hostilities. Against the modernist assumption that only nationalism
explains the rise of popular national conscience, van der Steen argues that strong ideas around
shared collective history can be found in previous generations. The present issue aims at contributing to this growing body of scholarship on ‘popular modes of engagement with the past’
(2015, 18) by placing them in direct conversation with classic and emerging arguments on
subaltern writing and literacies.
Understood as the ‘systematic regulation of reading and writing’ (Guillory 1993, 18; 3-82),
literacy allowed for relatively rigid forms of exclusion in the early modern period – particularly
when gender and racial regimes of inequality intersected with class. But literacy was also a site
of contestation. Armando Petrucci suggested that ‘in a society that is only partially literate the
ability to write represents a privilege in social, economic and, of course, cultural terms; and
those who are excluded suffer from it and, whenever they are aware of it, will tend to fight to
conquer it, individually or in a group’ (Petrucci and Castillo Gómez 2002, 25). Subalternity, as
will be more thoroughly explored in the Introduction, did not entail a complete deprivation of
access to the written word, and scholarship on partial literacies, collective reading, or informal
schooling, among other topics, increasingly emphasizes the centrality of the letter in the daily
lives of the popular classes. The Reformation and the so-called ‘educational revolutions’ (Stone
1964; Kagan 1974) contributed significantly to the rise in literacy rates during the early modern
period, although institutional contexts and learning experiences varied widely – and hierarchically – throughout the period. Memory and writing played a crucial role in litigation, local
political culture, and the everyday economies of the poor and the middling sort. The present
volume builds on this scholarship by focusing on the role of subaltern writing and popular
literacies in the production, transmission, and dispute of the historical in local communities
throughout the early modern world.
Some characteristically early modern historical processes brought about radical transformations in the relationship between memory, writing, and class. First and foremost, perhaps, the
printing revolution. When evaluating the impact of the new technology, scholars have tended
to adhere to a more revolutionary or a more gradualist approach to the historical phenomena
associated with the movable type. While Elizabeth Eisenstein famously considered ‘the advent
of printing as inaugurating a new cultural era in the history of Western man’ (1979, 33), other
scholars, in contrast, argued that ‘print needs to be seen less in terms of a radical break than in
those of an environment combining speech, manuscript, and print in mutual interaction’ (Johns
2002, 120, n. 34, 1998; see also Petrucci 1990). Regardless of our position, there is little doubt
that the printing press gave way in early modern Europe to new ways of thinking about the
10
relationship between memory and the written word. The relative graphic closure of the printed
text allowed for a more durable and stable relation between writing and memory (Bouza 1998,
38). Mary Carruthers, moreover, maintained that, while the value of memory persisted beyond
the transformations brought about by the mechanical reproduction of written texts, the new
technology entailed a clear divide between the ‘fundamentally memorial’ character of medieval
culture and the modern age, which would bring about a ‘documentary’ culture (1994, 8).
While apparently less consequential for the history of literacy, the military revolution
gave way to large-scale modes of socialization that relied, to a certain extent, on writing and
reading (Amelang 1994; Martínez 2016). Moreover, the massive mobilization associated with
the first globalization prompted or accelerated the emergence of a number of popular genres
of writing, from relaciones and cartas de Indias, to avvisi, newssheets, broadside prints, etc. At
the same time, European imperial aggression and expansion destroyed or radically transformed
very disparate literate cultures, writing ecologies, and cultures of memory. To what extent did
these large-scale historical developments affect the role of writing in the spatial and material
plotting of popular memory at the local or regional levels?
The present volume, in fact, contains a sizeable number of contributions on colonial Latin America that pay attention to the vexed relationship between orality and writing, textual
transmission, and indigenous memory. As Ángel Rama argued in his influential La ciudad
letrada (The Lettered City) (1984), imperial bureaucracy in the colonial Americas was not only
an instrumental conglomerate of administrative practices, people, and institutions to conduct
government, but also a perfect exclusionary machine to build and maintain colonial power
through the unequal distribution of literacy and cultural capital. Scholarship on colonial
Latin American textual production, however, has substantially qualified Rama’s claims in the
last two decades: mestizos, indios, and people of African descent challenged this exclusionary
system and used writing, translation, and interpretation in strategic and creative ways to build
a place for themselves in colonial society, as well as to contest the memory of conquest and
colonization (Jouve Martín 2005; Rappaport and Cummins 2012; McDonough 2014; Ramos
and Yannakakis 2014; Dyck 2015; Brewer-García 2020; Gruzinski 2023). Specialists in urban
history, visual culture, Mesoamerican codices or Andean quipus have argued, moreover, for
an extension of our notions of literacy (León Llerena 2023). Rappaport and Cummins, for
instance, suggested that scholars should pay attention to the interaction between different forms
of literacy, whether verbal, visual, legal, or even urban: ‘to understand indigenous literacy, we
need to go beyond the written word. It is precisely in the learning of perspective by walking the
streets of a reducción, the observation of a corregidor kissing a royal decree, the recounting of a
dream sequence that mirrors a painting, the introduction of Spanish tilework in a wattle-anddaub Andean village, that we can begin to perceive the process through which such cognitive
transformation [undergone by native people] occurred’ (2012, 254).
While specific uses and traditions of popular writing are often too fragile or invisible, several strands of scholarship have striven to retrieve and interrogate them. Scholars have studied
the different historical regimes of preservation and destruction and the kinds of policies and
institutions have allowed for the storage or disappearance of subaltern written memory. As we
will discuss more in depth in the Introduction, Marxist historians such as E. P. Thompson or
Eric Hobsbawm, or cultural historians such as Arlette Farge and Natalie Zemon Davis, among
many others, have insistently reminded us of the importance of recovering the written traces of
the popular classes’ cultural and political agency. The intrinsic difficulties of working on popular
writing in the early modern period is also related to the relative scarcity of studies of memory
for the same period. The boom of memory studies (Hutton 2016) in the last few decades, on
11
its part, has tended to focus on the twentieth century. This issue attempts to recenter early
modernity as a period of consequential transformations in the relationship between writing,
memory, and forms of subordination and exclusion based on race, gender, and class.
After an Introduction that dwells on the conceptual articulation – subalternity, writing,
memory – that prompted the project in the first place, the volume opens with a section that
focuses on life writing and social memory. In ‘Tracing Lives: Writing, Memory and Popular
Autobiography’ we have collected several essays that dig out the biographical fragments and life
traces left by the common people of the early modern period. While relatively wide-ranging in
terms of geography, all of the case studies included essays which can be mapped onto a vaguely
Mediterranean landscape.
‘During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for enslaved and freed men and women
living in the Iberian region it was unusual, although still possible, to obtain direct access to
writing’. This statement from his conclusion sums up the purpose of Fernando Bouza’s contribution, ‘Forged Letters: Counterfeit Manumission Certificates and Subaltern Writing Practices
as Used by Enslaved Individuals in Early Modern Iberia’. Through meticulous archival research
that pays attention to different documentary types (cartas de horro and horro por maravedíes),
Bouza reveals the uses of literacy by enslaved and freed people in early modern Spain. Importantly, some of these documents contained traces of life stories. While occasionally these forms
of writing get us close to a kind of minimal autobiographical subjectivity and bear witness to
forms of solidarity among the enslaved, others point to the cancellation of the past, to the
erasure of personal and social memory. The article also retraces the existence of a market for
forged manumission letters, to the point of requiring the intervention of Castile’s Cortes in
1551 and 1570. In this context, the case of Juan Rodríguez Prieto is particularly telling: an
enslaved Afro-descendant who forged a letter of freedom for a fellow enslaved person. The exceptionality of Juan Rodríguez’s case is complemented in Bouza’s contribution by his attention
to documents written by notaries on behalf of enslaved and freed people.
José Luis Loriente Torres moves on to explore yet another instance in which traces of life
writing are thoroughly shaped by the coercive power of legal institutions – in this case, the
Inquisition – which paradoxically allowed some room for creative freedom. In ‘The “Discursos
de la Vida” in Inquisitorial Documentation: Autobiography between Orality and Memory’,
Loriente Torres takes as his point of departure General Inquisitor Fernando Valdés’ 1561 instructions for inquisitorial legal procedure, which required defendants to produce oral accounts
of their lives known as ‘trazas’ or ‘discursos de la vida’. Based on a corpus of over one thousand
texts, the article devotes some attention to establishing their specificity as a documentary type
and as a peculiar form of micro-autobiography or ‘oral autobiography’, as Amelang (2011)
called them. While mediated by the lettered practices of notaries and scribes, these texts often
bear the mark of the defendants’ predominantly oral culture – they are additive, redundant,
illative texts that abound in direct speech and display what Walter Ong (2012) referred to as
materiality, a closeness to the human lifeworld of the defendant, or to what Franco Franceschi
(1991) called ‘the language of memory’. Loriente Torres’ contribution to the study of this form
of ‘collaborative life writing’ closes with a more in-depth look at one particular case study, that
of Francisco de la Bastida, a young defendant prosecuted for having tried to pass for an official
of the Inquisition.
The Holy Office, now in Sicily, is also the context for Anna Clara Basilicò’s contribution
to this section and the volume. In ‘ “Becoming” Subalterns: Writing and Scribbling in Early
Modern Prison’, Basilicò focuses on the graffiti of the inquisitorial prison of Palermo, a corpus of writing that has recently attracted the attention of other scholars (Fiume and García
12
Arenal 2018a and 2018b; Fiume 2021; Foti 2023). A large part of the article is devoted to the
discussion of established theories of the subaltern – Gramsci, Spivak, Ginzburg – which sets
the background for her proposal of imprisonment as a form of temporary subalternity – for
many of the prisoners of the Holy Office belonged to the ruling classes. Basilicò, moreover,
dwells on the paradoxes of a form of writing that, despite being exposed, could hardly be said
to be public, for it allowed only for a limited number of conversations between the different
prisoners subsequently occupying a particular cell or quarter of the prison. In critical dialogue
with Giovanna Fiume and Giuseppe Pitré, some of the main experts on this corpus of graffiti,
Basilicò warns against the idealization of the victims. The same that can be said, she argues, of
traditional readings of a poem by Michele Moraschino in one of the cells, where the mention
of blood as ink should not be interpreted literally, but in relation to the Petrarchan tradition of
poets such as Sicilian Antonio Veneziano. Additionally, this contribution considers the weight
of those proper names we know, which would turn signed graffiti into a form of self-fashioning
and assertion of individuality.
The section closes with a piece on popular autobiography. If the documents studied in the
previous essays provided enticing yet always fragmentary glimpses of subaltern life stories and
writing, the last one focuses on rich, full-fledged first-person narratives. In ‘Describing Otherness
in Captives’ Autobiographies in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, Teresa
Peláez surveys three autobiographies written by early modern soldiers of commoner origin who
experienced and narrated captivity: the Aragonese Jerónimo Pasamonte, the Castilian Diego
Galán, and the Portuguese João Mascarenhas. In her essay, Peláez explores the representation of
Islamic societies, people, and states in different Mediterranean locales, from Algiers to Istanbul.
Liminal figures such as renegades and old captives, whose identities and allegiances are more
in flux, take center stage. Part of the othering cultural work done by these autobiographies is
due, Peláez argues, to the captive’s need to be reintegrated to Christian society: there was little
room for sympathetic or neutral representations of the religious and political enemy, who was
also the enslaver of the writers. Despite this, and the pressures of political conflict between the
Ottomans and the Habsburgs, Peláez argues that, as a genre, autobiography allowed a limited
space for narrating inter-faith forms of sociability and more neutral depictions of Islamic life.
The title of the next section, ‘Writing and Rebellion’, is an homage to Steven Justice’s (1994)
foundational book on the relation between popular literacy, the material text and premodern
social protest, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381. As one of the contributors to this
rubric puts it, the focus on writing, and its concealment in official historiography, ‘shows the
extent to which the memory of insurrections and their obscuring play a part in the formation
of social and political identities’ (Béroujon). Or as Justice himself said it, in reference to the
Great Rebellion of 1381, ‘The story of how the rising was remembered is the story of how it
was forgotten, of the cultural and psychic machinery that engaged to keep it in the preterite’
(Justice 1994, 193; see also Petrucci 2002).
In ‘ “Unions et germanies”: Armed Mobilization, Plebeian Politicisation and Historical
Memory in the Kingdom of Valencia (Fourteenth-Seventeenth Centuries)’, Mariana V. Parma
offers a thorough review of the Valencian agermanats, who in 1519-1522 frontally challenged
the authority of King Charles V and managed to carry on for a few years and partially institutionalize a successful revolt. A thoroughly anti-seigneurial uprising, some of its leaders explicitly
aspired to ‘leave no memory of the nobility’. And in fact, as in other popular rebellions of early
modern Europe, the burning of manorial and state records was a common occurrence during
the fighting. ‘Let there be no memory left of the viscount our enemy’, said the commoners
according to chronicler Martí de Viciana. On its part, the viceregal court of the Duke of
13
Calabria rushed to sponsor written accounts of the events as they happened. The dispute over
the memory of the rebellion started even before the armed and political conflict was settled.
Parma’s contribution usefully integrates the uprising of the first Germania (1519-1522) within
a larger historical cycle of social conflict. First, the article looks back to previous revolts. Then,
it moves on to considering the role the first Germania and its memory had in the popular
rebellion that exploded in 1693. In lack of a usable writing record from the earlier rebels, and
despite officially imposed oblivion, the uprising was kept alive through collective memory and
oral tradition among the popular classes. The explicit reference made by the rebels of the late
seventeenth century to those of the early sixteenth turned the memory of 1519-1522 into a
‘cultural repertoire of struggle’, according to Parma.
Anne Béroujon’s ‘The Memory of Rebellion (Lyon, 1529)’ is a detailed close reading and
a thorough contextualization of one rebellious placard published during the Great Rebeyne of
Lyon in 1529. In this riot, le povre (the poor) – the collective signatories of the placard – raised
against the city councilors and their mismanagement of grain during a time of scarcity. This
food riot, as Béroujon shows, was in fact only one in a series of popular uprisings during the
previous and following years. Anonymous and defiant public writing had a role in all of them;
in fact, it is possible to establish specific textual links between the letters, placards, and rebellious words of social conflicts that erupted in 1517, 1518, 1529, 1530, and 1543, Béroujon
shows. Ephemeral writing paradoxically carried along the memory of the poor people of Lyon.
The article explores issues such as the semantics, visual grammar, authorship, circulation, and
seizure of the placard. Béroujon pays attention, moreover, to how place – Place des Cordeliers
– and socio-professional milieus – the world of printers – conspired to ground and pass down a
long-lasting popular memory, a usable past that proved essential in reactivating political identities
and prompting political action in times of need. In fact, in exploring alternative memories of
the Great Rebeyne of Lyon, Béroujon shows that ‘writing nourish[ed] a local culture of revolt’.
Jesús Gascón Pérez’s ‘People, Pamphlets and Popular Mobilization in the Aragonese Rebellion of 1591’ deals with the production, circulation, and consumption of subversive literature
during times of social upheaval. In particular, this essay focuses on the Aragonese rebellion of
1591, which pitched King Philip II against his Aragonese subjects in a short-lived but intense
constitutional conflict around the liberties of the kingdom against absolute power. Arguing
against the ‘aristocratic view of 1591’, Gascón Pérez stresses the participation of almost all
orders of society in the rebellion: nobles, knights, infanzones, and priests, but also craftsmen,
farmers, jurists, or merchants. He centers the role of written verbal violence in the social and
political conflict, which amounted to a veritable ‘literary campaign’ of pasquinades and Lucianesque satires, sometimes attributed to Antonio Pérez himself. Pamphlets prompted riots
– at least they did in Teruel in November 1591 – and kept up the mobilization of the people
for the Aragonese cause. Rebellious placards took over the public space defying the authority
of the king and its officials. Royal edicts, in contrast, were torn down from the church doors.
Rebellious writing, Gascón Pérez argues, was at the core of this early modern political conflict.
Regardless of authorship, pasquinades combined elements from lettered and popular culture.
They all circulated in manuscript form, from hand to hand. Sometimes they were dropped in
the public squares, to be picked up by the people, and were of course read aloud. Students,
professional scribes, priests, and even nuns contributed to their diffusion by producing multiple
copies of the libelous texts.
In the next section we have grouped a coherent body of work on popular writing, indigenous
literacy, and ethnic memory in the Americas during the colonial period. ‘Contested Memories
in Colonial Latin America’ opens with Lisl Schoepflin’s ‘ “De los famossos hechos de los yndios
14
cañares y de sus privilegios”: Don Pedro Purqui and the Early Modern Andean Chronicle by
Martín de Murua’. By analyzing legal records and historiographical texts, Schoepflin explores the
relation between social memory and ethnic identity in the colonial Andes. The article focuses
on the role of Don Pedro Purqui, a community leader and intellectual in colonial Cuzco, in the
rearticulation of the history, myth, and memory of the Cañari people through his intervention in
legal processes and historical writing. The Cañari were a non-Incan Andean people that, thanks
to a kind of ‘structural amnesia’ provoked by the Spanish conquest, and through Purqui’s crucial
mediation, reappropriated Incan genealogy as a source of legitimacy in the colonial present. This
ethnogenetical response was also a way of defending the privileged status of Cañari nobility within the Spanish colonial order. It seems that Purqui was not literate in alphabetic writing but, as
Schoepflin shows by comparing the Gavin Murua and the Getty Murua – two different manuscript
versions of Murúa’s chronicle – , he did intervene and mediate in the process of historiographical
elaboration during the 1590s, motivating changes and erasures. Through this infiltration, Purqui
crucially contributed to reshaping the collective memory and ethnic identity of the Cañari people.
Without leaving the Andes, Aude Argouse and María Eugenia Albornoz Vásquez’s contribution, titled ‘Protecting and Protesting: Notarial Exclamations and Declarations (Peru, Chile
Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries)’, focuses on a legal documentary type that has not yet received
proper attention: the exclamaciones are documents written before a notary to retract or rectify
previous legal declarations. This contribution focuses on those kept in the notarial archives of
Cuzco, Lima (Peru), and Santiago (Chile) from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Exclamations allowed for the visibilization of illegitimate use of force and constraint (Sternberg 2023).
As legal instruments, they carried the legal memory of previous offences and allowed room for
protest and complaint. Argouse and Albornoz Vásquez are in favor of centering and revising the
figure of the notary, whose mediating legal role should not be seen ‘solely as a tool of European
hegemony’. Among other documentary types, exclamaciones show that women (half of whom
were illiterate), the poor, Indians, and prisoners all made recourse to the legal power of notaries.
Victims of gender violence, coerced widows and children, or abused indigenous subjects all made
recourse to exclamaciones. When exclamaciones were produced at the behest of a subaltern, they
argue, this kind of legal and documentary practice ‘liberates dominated voices’. This tracking of
the voice of the subalterns is done by paying heed to the language of the documents themselves,
the turns of phrase, corrections, interventions that could contain traces of a subaltern orality
and provide insight about the relationship between this and notarial practice.
In ‘Recovering the Written Traces of Hernando de Soto’s Voyage to La Florida’, Catalina
Andrango-Walker retraces the steps of the Spanish conquistador in a number of colonial sources,
mainly focusing on Inca Garcilaso’s La Florida del Inca and the Relaçãm verdadeira. AndrangoWalker shows how high-brow humanistic historical writing relied on the oral testimony and
the amateur writing of common soldiers. The article explores the roles of the eyewitness, the
oral storyteller, the scribe, and the translator in the collective and contested process of building
the memory and posterity of a colonial expedition. The primary accounts of soldiers, based on
eyewitnessing, were key to the regime of truth created by their interlocutors and compilers,
but at the same time they were deemed unworthy of serious historical writing, and thus the
memory they carried needed to be refigured. The study of textual transmission and translation
also serves, in Andrango-Walker’s contribution, to trace the reverberations of indigenous
memory – particularly of colonial violence – in European traditions of historical writing, such
as in the case of Garcilaso’s depiction of cacique Hirrihigua.
In line with his book on indigenous literacy and memory in Paraguay’s reducciones (Neumann
2015), Eduardo Neumann’s ‘Kurusu Kuatia (Inscribed Cross): Written Culture and Indigenous
15
Memory in the Reductions of Paraguay (Eighteenth Century)’ studies the somewhat exceptional
written culture of the Guarani in the colonial period. From the eighteenth century onwards, the
indigenous people of Paraguay maintained a strong and fluid relationship with writing, especially after the crisis provoked by the redrawing of the boundaries between Spain’s and Portugal’s
imperial reach in the area by the Treaty of Madrid in 1750. Indigenous subjects used writing to
frequently correspond with the Jesuits and with their Spanish overlords. We know, through indirect
mentions, of different forms of exposed writing in the reducciones, although no extant example
has survived. One of these, in fact, is the use of crosses inscribed with texts used to mark the territory. In addition to crosses, they used wooden boards in churches to publicize announcements
and write prayers, or for funerary inscriptions. The article also uncovers the council minutes of
the indigenous communities, which from 1758 included a sort of ‘summaries of events’ (mostly
military) which can be understood as a way of articulating the memory of the community. This
is also the case for the inscribed cross (kurusu kuati) that was erected in the summer of 1756
to memorialize the battle of Caiboaté, in which 1500 Guarani were killed, together with their
captain, a truly dramatic event that left a long-lasting impact in the history of the community.
The last two sections, while shorter, explore aspects that the editors consider pivotal in the
overall design of the volume. In ‘Gendered Letters’, we have grouped two pieces on not so visible
letter writing by women and by men accused of sodomy. In ‘Women Building the Colonial
Archive: Legal Authority, Female Knowledge and Affective Mobility in the Sixteenth-Century
Iberian Atlantic World’, Juan Manuel Ramírez Velázquez examines how Spanish criolla women
from different walks of life used writing to increase their mobility and to profitably navigate
the legal, economic, and political systems of a mobile male-dominated world. The essay focuses
on the letters by Catalina de Ávila, a propertied yet commoner widow from Almodóvar del
Campo in La Mancha to her son in Mexico, who had spent almost twenty years in the New
World; and on the petitions of three conquistadors’ widows, Isabel de Cavallos, Ana Segura,
and María de Victoria. The writing of these women opens to a connected world, shaped by the
large-scale transatlantic and transpacific exchanges of the sixteenth century, and particularly
by the movement of their own husbands, sons, and other absent male relatives. Their letters
become the mobile carriers of news, both written and oral, local memory, and biographical
trajectories. Ramírez Velázquez’s conceptualization of ‘affective mobilities’ attempts to bring
together geographical displacement and the rhetorical strategies of persuasion (movere) that
shaped their writing as a vehicle for self-fashioning and empowerment.
Juan Pedro Navarro Martínez’s ‘Letters from Sodom: ‘‘Emotional” Agency and Evidence
of Sexual Crime in Early Modern Courts of Italy and Spain’, on its part, zooms in on the
letters of same-sex lovers in late sixteenth-century Italy and eighteenth-century Spain. Before
delving into the kind of affect embodied by this epistolary discourse, Navarro Martínez offers
a reflection on the relation between early modern judicial institutions, the documentary types
they produced, and the historiography of gender and dissident sexuality. In contrast with other
kinds of documentation gathered or generated by the bodies in charge of disciplining sexual
practice, Navarro Martínez argues, letters are a privileged place to look for what he calls the
‘emotional agency’ of the defendants. The two case studies are Domenico Pelliccia, a monk of
the monastery of Subiaco (Rome) who was accused of sodomy in 1595, and Sebastián Leirado,
an amateur actor processed for the same crime in Madrid in 1769. The chronological arch, and
the transnational scope, allow for a comparative framework that has proven productive before
for the study of other subaltern lettered practices in early modern Europe.
The two essays that make up the last section, ‘Memory in Print and Performance’, open
new ways of looking at the memory of the people in relation to the materiality of writing, oral
16
tradition, and communal performance. In ‘Printed Riddles in Early Modern Italy: Traditional Perspectives and New Approaches’, Marco Francalanci starts by offering a complete historiographical
overview of the work of Italian ethnographers, bibliographers, and folklorists on riddles. From
one of the earliest extant vernacular texts, to the Renaissance collections of printed riddles, Francalanci gives weight to the written traditions of this compact, playful, and ingenious form that
we may mistakenly associate mainly with its oral iterations. Some of the most important writers
and collectors of riddles of the sixteenth century, Francalanci shows, were workingmen. Before
becoming a cantastorie, Giulio Cesare Croce was a blacksmith, as was Angelo Cenni, also known
as Resoluto. Sonnet and ottava rima gradually became the main poetic forms for the production
of riddles and enigmas, and they often involved obscenity and vulgarity. They tended to be published, according to Francalanci, in very small, portable, and cheap formats, and occasionally by
idiosyncratic travelling printers such as Damon Fido Pastore. This, combined with the pervasive
anonymity of the genre, has historically compromised their survival and retrieval.
In his contribution (‘The Saga of Lohodann: Making Sense of an Annobonese Folktale
Rooted in Carolingian Drama’), Jeroen Dewulf studies the intricate story of Lohodann, a Luso-African creole version of the medieval European paladin Roland that is recited during the
Holy Week in Annobón, an Atlantic island off the coast of West Africa that is today part of
Equatorial Guinea. As it survived in the late twentieth century, the performance of the legend
was the responsibility of one family, and it obeyed gendered rules of transmission and inheritance. The essay begins by providing a rich historical survey of Annobón, from the Portuguese
settlement to its handing over to the authority of the Spanish empire. The peculiar forms of
autonomy and self-government that developed in this small island are placed in the context of
the triangular slave trade that shaped the early societies of the Black Atlantic, tracing connections between Brazil and continental Africa. Dewulf offers a thorough historical excavation of a
twentieth-century oral practice that harks back to medieval and early modern textual traditions
in French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. The long durée of popular memory, carried along
by a mostly illiterate community, is inextricably linked to the entangled history of colonialism
in this area of the Atlantic. The institutional arrangements and the traditions of vernacular
African Christianity, from confraternities to sacristãos, proved essential for the refashioning and
transmission of the cultural memory around Roldán/Lohodann. In Annobón, Dewulf argues,
the uses of this European legend are indissociable from the traditions of the de facto autonomous government of the people of the island and from African forms of syncretic Christianity.
In sum, the essays gathered in this volume call attention to the different uses of written
culture by the subaltern classes in the early modern period. They also explore the mediations
of the professionals of the pen in those circumstances in which the subaltern – often illiterate –
needed their services. By focusing on topics such as indigenous literacies, writing and rebellion,
oral tradition and performance, local history, life writing, or contested historiographies, these
essays, considered together, offer road to the memory of the people in the enlarged world of early
modernity. A ‘topography of remembrance’ (Wood 2013) that, linking the writing practices of
the common people to the memory of their communities, shows that the fight over the past
was also, necessarily, a dispute about the present and the future.
Works Cited
Amelang James (1994), ‘Popular Autobiography in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: A
Preliminary Approach’, in J. Pradells Nadal and J.R. Hinojosa Montalvo, eds, 1490: en el umbral
de la modernidad. El Mediterráneo europeo y las ciudades en el tránsito de los siglos XV-XVI, vol. 1,
Valencia, Generalitat Valenciana, 405-424.
17
Amelang James (2011), ‘Tracing Lives: The Spanish Inquisition and the Act of Autobiography’, in A.
Baggerman, R. Dekker and M. Mascuch, eds, Controlling Time and Shaping the Self: Developments
in Autobiographical Writing since the Sixteenth Century, Leiden, Brill, 33-48.
Anderson Benedict (1983), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,
London, Verso.
Bartoli Langeli Attilio, and Armando Petrucci, eds (1978), ‘Alfabetismo e cultura scritta’, s. i., Quaderni
storici 13, 38, 2, 437-700.
Beiner Guy (2018), Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion
in Ulster, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Bouza Fernando (1998), Imagen y propaganda. Capítulos de historia cultural del reinado de Felipe II,
Madrid, Akal.
Brewer-García Larissa (2020), Beyond Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Carruthers Mary (1994 [1990]), The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press.
Castillo Gómez Antonio (2002), ‘De la suscripción a la necesidad de escribir’, in Id., ed., La conquista
del alfabeto. Escritura y clases populares, Gijón, Trea, 21-51.
Castillo Gómez Antonio (2022), ‘En los márgenes del archivo: Armando Petrucci y la cultura escrita de
las clases subalternas’, in Id., ed., L’eredità di Armando Petrucci.Tra paleografia e storia sociale (con
un inedito di Armando Petrucci), Roma, Viella, 157-188.
Davis Leith (2022), Mediating Cultural Memory in Britain and Ireland: From the 1688 Revolution to the
1745 Jacobite Rising, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Dyck Jason (2015), ‘Indigenous and Black Intellectuals in the Lettered City’, Latin American Research
Review 50, 2, 256-266.
Eisenstein E.L. (1979), The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Fiume Giovanna (2021), Del Santo Uffizio in Sicilia e delle sue carceri, Roma, Viella.
Fiume Giovanna and Mercedes García-Arenal (2018a), Parole prigioniere. I graffiti delle carceri del Santo
Uffizio di Palermo, Palermo, Istituto Poligrafico Europeo.
Fiume Giovanna and Mercedes García-Arenal, eds (2018b), ‘Graffiti: New Perspectives. From the Inquisitorial Prison in Palermo’, Quaderni storici 157, 53, 1, 3-163.
Foti Rita (2023), I graffiti delle Carceri segrete del Santo Uffizio di Palermo. Inventario, progetto e cura di
Giovanna Fiume, Palermo, Palermo University Press.
Franceschi Franco (1991), ‘Il linguaggio della memoria. Le deposizioni dei testimoni in un tribunale
corporativo fiorentino fra XIV e XV secolo’, in J.-C. Maire Vigueur and A. Paravicini Bagliani, eds,
La parola all’accusato, Palermo, Sellerio, 213-232.
Gruzinski Serge (2023), Quand les Indiens parlaient latin. Colonisation alphabétique et métissage dans
l’Amérique du XVIe siècle, Paris, Fayard.
Guillory John (1993), Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, Chicago, University
of Chicago Press.
Johns Adrian (1998), The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, Chicago, University
of Chicago Press.
Johns Adrian (2002), ‘How to Acknowledge a Revolution’, American Historical Review 107, 1, 106-125.
Jouve Martín J.R. (2005), Esclavos de la ciudad letrada. Esclavitud, escritura y colonialismo en Lima (16501700), Lima, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.
Justice Steven (1994), Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381, Berkeley, University of California Press.
Hutton P.H. (2016), The Memory Phenomenon in Contemporary Historical Writing: How the Interest in
Memory Has Influenced Our Understanding of History, New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
Kagan R.L. (1974), Students and Society in Early Modern Spain, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.
León Llerena Laura (2023), Reading the Illegible: Indigenous Writing and the Limits of Colonial in the
Andes, Tucson, University of Arizona Press.
Martínez Miguel (2016), Front Lines: Soldiers’ Writing in the Early Modern Hispanic World, Philadelphia,
University of Pennsylvania Press.
18
McDonough K.S. (2014), The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico, Tucson, University of Arizona Press.
Neumann Eduardo (2015), Letra de Indios. Cultura escrita, comunicação e memória indígena nas Reduções
do Paraguai, São Bernardo do Campo, Nhanduti Ed.
Nora Pierre, ed. (1996), Realms of Memory. The Construction of the French Past, vol. 1, Conflicts and
Divisions, ed. by L.D. Kritzman, trans. by A. Goldhammer, New York, Columbia University Press.
Ong W.J. (2012 [1982]), Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London-New York, Routledge.
Petrucci Armando (1978), ‘Per la storia dell’alfabetismo e della cultura scritta: metodi-materiali-quesiti’,
Quaderni storici 13, 38, 2, 451-465.
Petrucci Armando (1990), ‘Conclusion: L’écriture manuscrite et l’imprimerie: rupture ou continuité’,
in C. Sirat, J. Irigoin, and É.Poulle, eds, L’écriture: le cerveau, l’oeil et la main. Actes du colloque
international du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, Collège de France, 2-4 mai 1988,
Thurnout, Brepols, 411-421.
Petrucci Armando (2002), Prima lezione di paleografia, Roma-Bari, Laterza.
Petrucci Armando and Antonio Castillo Gómez (2002), ‘Armando Petrucci: un paseo por los bosques
de la escritura’, Litterae. Cuadernos sobre Cultura Escrita 2, 9-37.
Rama Ángel (1984), La ciudad letrada, Hanover, Ediciones del Norte.
Ramos Gabriela and Yanna Yannakakis, eds (2014), Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes, Durham, Duke University Press.
Rappaport Joanne and Tom Cummins (2012), Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes,
Durham, Duke University Press.
Sternberg Giora (2023), ‘Writing to Undo: Protestation as a Mode of Early Modern Resistance’, The
American Historical Review 128, 1, 214-248.
Stone Lawrence (1964), ‘The Educational Revolution in England, 1560-1640’, Past and Present 28, 41-80.
van der Steen Jasper (2015), Memory Wars in the Low Countries, 1566-1700, Leiden-Boston, Brill.
Wood Andy (2013), The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern
England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.