Magnus Lundberg

Los indios, el sacerdocio y la universidad en Nueva España, siglos XVI-XVIII (review)

Various researchers have studied the colonial discussions on whether indigenous men should be allowed to become priests. Another, and much more complicated task, is to investigate to what extent Indians actually were ordained in colonial Spanish America. Trying to address such questions, Margarita Menegus and Rodolfo Aguirre study the indigenous presence at institutions of higher education, in particular, in New Spain. Even if the authors seek to cover the entire colonial period, their chronological focus is on a 130-year period from the late-seventeenth century to Independence.

El mundo de las catedrales novohispanas (review)

This is less a work of synthesis and analysis than it is a treasure trove of data. Specialists will find it a valuable complement to other historians who have quantified the colonial mining industry, such as John TePaske and Herbert Klein. Indeed, TePaske and Sluiter provided each other with insights and data. But the book does not present an overall assessment of how the American mines affected Spanish foreign policy against the Dutch, or how Spains capabilities shifted over time because of changes in mining output. Nor does Sluiter concern himself with the real levels of mining production, including contraband and smuggling, to contrast with the official figures. Readers would have found graphs and global figures useful, something akin to Kleins analysis for the eighteenth century. But such were beyond the aim and perhaps the capacity of Sluiter, who was in his early nineties when the book /was published. That the book saw print is a testament to his determination and scholarly commitment. In some ways, the volume is a distillation of Sluiters bequest to Berkeleys Bancroft Library: his personal collection of 160,000 documentary pages, transcribed and organized chronologically and thematically into fifty-six file drawers.