The handwritten and printed missionary books of the Spanish viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru were key instruments designed to help study Indigenous languages. This volume considers these missionary books.
How do the social, material, and spatial processes underlying the making of early modern missionary grammars, vocabularies, and devotional translations deepen our understanding of their contents? The handwritten and printed missionary books produced in the Spanish viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru were key instruments designed to help study Indigenous languages in order to efficiently teach religious doctrine to local communities unfamiliar with European culture and religion. This volume considers these missionary books as physical and social objects and illuminates how a variety of factors determines their physical appearance, structure, and form, which in turn shape and guide the interpretation of their contents: people involved in its making; geographical and social circumstances and conditions of production; technologies, materials, and tools; genre and function(s) of the books; and intended readership, modes of distribution, and readerly responses.
Acknowledgements, Abbreviations, Introduction,
Chapter 1: Mapping the
conditions to record missionary linguistic knowledge on paper,
Chapter 2:
Pre-publication review: controlling the contents and creating credit,
Chapter
3: Publishing missionary books: a niche market,
Chapter 4: Foregrounding the
printing office in the making of a printed missionary book,
Chapter 5: Taking
into account the particularities of missionary books,
Chapter 6: A means to
an end? Determining a medium to record missionary knowledge, Conclusion,
Works Cited.
Zanna Van Loon is the curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Museum Plantin-Moretus. She obtained a PhD in Early Modern History (KU Leuven, 2020) and worked as the expert on early modern books and analytical bibliography and the project leader of STCV. The Bibliography of the Hand Press Book.
