Beschreibung
In contemporary limp vellum. ff. [1 (woodcut frontispiece, verso blank)] [1 (letterpress title page, verso blank) [1 ("Ex.mo Señor")] [1 (Distrito de la Audiencia […])] 4 [1 ("Armas que se d. First edition of the exceedingly rare work displaying the governing structure of the Spanish Indies, and the first illustrated work on the heraldry of Spanish America and Philippines. Governing a global empire consisting of scattered territories, extending from the Iberian Peninsula to Chile including Santo Domingo, Mexico, Peru, Potosi, Nueva Galicia, California, Florida, Rio de la Plata, and the Philippines in Southeast Asia, the Spanish royal authority massively depended on written information such as letters, certificates, memorials, and any documents referring the West and East Indies. Everything concerned the Indies was dealt with by an administrative organ, the Council of the Indies, consisting of eight counselors, assisted by two secretaries and around twenty employees. Díez de la Calle (1599 1662), the author of the present work, was one of these employees, served as a clerk of the Secretariat of New Spain of the Council of the Indies between 1624 and 1662, and throughout his career, he gathered an important corpus of documents related to the overseas provinces, their structure of power, and "human resources", namely the civil employees and clerics of the Crown in the Indies. A good part of these documents was published in four separate volumes under the collective title Noticias Sacras y Reales. Díez de la Calle s compilation of paperwork, as a classical bureaucratic tool, or a handbook of the administrative and ecclesiastical administration of the Indies, enumerates and describes the provinces, cities, dioceses, churches, and convents, councils and officials, and considered the best statistical accounts with historical summaries concerning the Indies, and an essential source to understand the machinery by which the Spanish overseas empire was governed. Published between 1645 and 1654 in four volumes of which the first (Memorial informatorio, 1645) is a compilation of printed transcriptions of administrative documents, while the second (Memorial y Noticias Sacras, y reales del Imperio de las Indias Occidentales, 1646), an extended version of the earlier one, offers additional historical information, biographical notes, and details of its sources. In the third book (Memorial y compendio, 1648), de la Calle presents to the monarch his further aims with the Noticias Sacras y Reales-project and justifies its importance by recounting the history of the Conquest and some thirty miracles or divine signs showing the blessing of the Hispanic enterprise. (Gaudin, p. 256) Published six years later, the present fourth volume, Memorial y Resumen, recounts and lists the districts of the eleven Royal Audiencias and Chancelleries of the Indies: Santo Domingo, Mexico, Lima, Guadalajara, Santa Fe de Bogotá, Charcas, Panama, Quito, Guatemala, Manila, Santiago de Chile (also mentions the short-lived Real Audiencia of Concepción), and most importantly enumerates the associated civil and ecclesiastical positions of each court. Besides this notable textual part, de la Calle collected the imagery of the coats of arms of the principal cities and churches of the New World and the Spanish East Indies and reproduced them as full-page woodcuts with few-line descriptions and dates of granting at the bottom of each page. We know no earlier illustrated works of its kind. Unlike the former ones, this volume is enhanced with a woodcut frontispiece: the series title set within an architectural border and crowned with the armorial achievement of the Council of the Indies, and two angels holding cornucopias. The separate letterpress title page, for the first time, indicates a publisher and presents the work to the president of the Council of the Indies, Gaspar de Bracamonte y Guzmán, Count of Peñaranda. In the two-page dedication, de la Calle summarizes his previou. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 2600
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