Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America
Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America
Synoptic Methods and Practices
Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America teaches imaginative and distinctive approaches to the practice of history through a series of essays on colonial Latin America. It demonstrates ways of making sense of the past through approaches that aggregate more than they dissect and suggest more than they conclude. Sidestepping more conventional approaches that divide content by subject, source, or historiographical "turn," the editors seek to take readers beyond these divisions and deep into the process of historical interpretation. The essays in this volume focus on what questions to ask, what sources can reveal, what stories historians can tell, and how a single source can be interpreted in many ways.
Both students and seasoned scholars will benefit from a careful reading of this innovative volume.'--Susan Deans-Smith, author of Bureaucrats, Planters, and Workers: The Making of the Tobacco Monopoly in Bourbon Mexico
Karen Melvin is a professor of history and a member of the Latin American Studies Program at Bates College. She is the author of Building Colonial Cities of God: Mendicant Orders and Urban Culture in New Spain and a series of essays on global Catholicism. Sylvia Sellers-García is an associate professor of history at Boston College. She is the author of Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire’s Periphery. Her current research focuses on social violence in the eighteenth century. Along with Melvin, she is a principal investigator and cofounder of Reading the Inquisition, an online collection of transcribed and translated Inquisition cases.
Foreword
Davíd Carrasco
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Karen Melvin and Sylvia Sellers-García
Part One. Conceiving Questions
Chapter One. Asking Questions in the Restless Discipline of Context
Karen Melvin
Chapter Two. Double Vision: Dichotomies in the Study of Latin America
Paul Ramírez
Chapter Three. Making Sense of Geographies: Regionalism in the Study of Latin American History
Nicole von Germeten
Chapter Four. Moving across Disciplines: Context, Theory, and Colonial Sources
Ivonne del Valle
Part Two. Conversing with Sources
Chapter Five. Quiet Voices and Laconic Sources: A Synoptic Approach to Wills
Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara
Chapter Six. Researching beyond Institutional Documents: The Power of Suggestion
Rachel Moore
Chapter Seven. What's in an Object: Plato, Aristotle, and the Virgin of Copacabana
Sean McEnroe
Chapter Eight. Thinking at the Margins: Subalterns and the Spanish American Past
Kristin Huffine
Part Three. Envisioning Histories
Chapter Nine. Telling Stories of Continuity and Change
José Refugio de la Torre Curiel
Chapter Ten. Foregrounding Marginal Voices: Writing Women's Stories Using Solicitation Trials
Jessica Delgado
Chapter Eleven. Writing Style and Audience
Sylvia Sellers-García
Part Four. Reckoning and Re-reckoning: Same Source, Different Perspectives
Chapter Twelve. Confession and the Art of Reading
Matthew D. O'Hara
Chapter Thirteen. Solicitation Stories: Reading Confession between History and Literature
Seth Kimmel
Chapter Fourteen. Ritual, Intimacy, and Emotion in Sacramental Spaces
Jennifer Scheper Hughes
Chapter Fifteen. A Confusion of Tongues or the Want of Schooling: A Carmelite Vision of Humble Penitents
Sean McEnroe
Chapter Sixteen. Mendacious Texts: The Art of Confessional Dissimulation
Paul Ramírez
Chapter Seventeen. Advice and Warnings for New Confessors by a Discalced Carmelite Friar and Priest
Translated by Sylvia Sellers-García, Paul Ramírez, and Karen Melvin
Afterword
Kenneth Mills
Contributors
Index
