Spanish Colonial Manuscript Collection

Collection

Identifier: MC.1954.93

Staff Only

Collection Overview

The Spanish Colonial Manuscripts document over three centuries of history related to New Spain and its northern provinces in the Americas. The collection consists of Inquisition records, civil suits and trials, trials of enslaved and Indigenous persons, Cortés family suits and documents, civil and government matters, ecclesiastical matters, exploration and missionization, Indigenous relations/Nahuatl manuscripts, and royal correspondences. A key focus of the collection centers on Mexico City and records related to the Mexican Inquisition.

Inquisition materials document the administrative, legal, spiritual, and social experiences of people within the Spanish Atlantic world. Three major thematic areas within the Inquisition records include 1) solicitation cases and priestly misconduct, 2) enslaved persons tried for blasphemy, and 3) large-scale trials against those suspected of practicing Judaism during the 1640s. Civil and government matters contain letters, censuses, personal, property, and town titles, claims, genealogies, viceregal pronouncements, receipts, official appointments, land grants, wills, and disputes from the early-16th through the mid-19th centuries. A strength in this area includes legal documents related to Hernán and Martín Cortés title and land claims, as well as compensation disputes following conquest. Topics cover such issues as money and property disputes, debts and embezzlement charges, bigamy and blasphemy, and other misconduct. Ecclesiastical records address the reach and limits of church authority, religious history, letters, directives, and decrees.

Notable names within these collections include Diego Columbus, Hernando de Soto, Hernán Cortés, Ponce de León, the Cortés family, Phillip II, Bartolome de las Casas, Carlotta and Maximillian, Duarte de León Jaramillo and family (daughters Clara and Ana Nuñez).

Dates

1470-1857

Language of Materials

Materials in Spanish, Nahautl, and English.

Access Restrictions

Available by appointment only at the Helmerich Center for American Research (HCAR) with the exception of materials with donor restrictions. Contact Library staff in advance to inquire if materials exist pertaining to your research interests.

Use Restrictions

Please contact the Rights and Reproduction Department for information on publishing or reproducing materials included in these records. Permission will be granted by the Gilcrease Museum as the owner of the physical materials, and does not imply permission from the copyright holder. It is the responsibility of the researcher to obtain all necessary permissions from the copyright holder.

Extent

334 item(s)

11 Linear Feet

Additional Description

Provenance

The core of this collection are 125 manuscripts that came to Gilcrease Museum from the library of George Robert Graham (GRG) Conway, a British civil engineer and historian of Mexico.

In the late 1940s, HP Kraus and Roland Tree, two dealers of rare books and manuscripts, began to open negotiations between Gilcrease and Conway over the sale of Conway’s collection. All four gentlemen signed the agreement in 1950. After Conway’s death in 1951, his daughter Marjorie Conway, who helped her father catalog and describe the collection, finalized the sale. Over the years, the manuscripts traveled from Mexico City to Canada (where Marjorie Conway lived) to a bank vault in New York City, and finally to a bank vault in Tulsa. The manuscripts officially arrived in four suitcases at the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of History and Art in 1956.

Before and after the acquisition of the Conway collection, the Thomas Gilcrease Foundation purchased or received donations of books, maps, and manuscripts related to colonial Latin America. This collecting approach points toward Thomas Gilcrease’s hemispheric thinking and interest in the history of the Americas as well as the significant contributions of Gilcrease Museum’s collection within the broad field of colonial-era Latin American history.

Additions to the collection were made, including manuscripts donated by William Bailey, Jr.

Processing Information

Staff, interns, and volunteers of the Thomas Gilcrease Library and Archive have contributed to the organization and maintenance of the files since the collection passed to the City of Tulsa in the 1950s.