What book inventories reveal about shifting cultural identities in New Spain
“Colonizers were known to carry books in their luggage. In the early 1500s, books began to arrive in America by the thousands, destined for the capital of New Spain, Mexico City, and other urban hubs in Spain’s territories. A century later, Catholic monarchs in Spain learned of crypto-Jewish books across the Atlantic Ocean. They ordered all bookstores to submit detailed inventories to the Mexican Inquisition — an extension of the Spanish Inquisition — freezing in time a record of the reading materials that circulated among New Spain’s intellectual class…”
