Table of contents:

Introduction

Preliminary Remarks

1. Summary of the Royal Library’s Codicological Examination of the Manuscript

1.1. Sheets and Quires  
             1.1.1. General Patterns
             1.1.2. Special Features
1.2. Watermarks

2. The Nueva corónica y buen gobierno in the Royal Library

2.1. Classification
2.2. “(Re)discovery” and Provenance
2.3. Misarranged Quires
            Table 1:  Catalog of Misordered Quires, Restored to their Correct Sequence in 1927
2.4. Binding Activities
2.5. The Paris Facsimile Edition: No Universal Retracing
             2.5.1. “Painting Out Bleedthroughs”
             2.5.2. China Paper Applications    

3.  The Author’s Biography and His Composition of the Work 

3.1. New Biographical Information about Guaman Poma
3.2. Period of Composition of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno
3.3. Guaman Poma’s Overall Plan
              Table 2: Quires and Chapters of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno
3.4. Textual Composition
3.5.  The “Tabla de la dicha corónica”
3.6.  Textual “Completion”
3.7. Repaginating Four Chapters to Compensate for a Previous Error     

4. Final Renderings: The Coordination of Codicological and Textual Evidence

4.1. Guaman Poma’s Additions to the Completed Manuscript  
               Table 3: Summary of Textual Emendations and Sheets Added to, and Excised from, the Primary Quire Structure
               Table 4: Sheets Added to the Completed Manuscript  
4.2. Guaman Poma’s Late Introduction of Quires 22 and 23, “Camina el autor”
4.3. A Sheet Cut Out and Replaced:  Montesclaros’s Governance and the Buen gobierno 
                4.3.1. The Role of the Viceroy
                4.3.2. Guaman Poma’s Marqués de Montesclaros: Exemplary and Present Viceroy
4.4. Don Juan de Mendoza y Luna: Luz de materias de Indias (GkS 589, 2°) 
4.5. The Central Role of Chapter 20
4.6. The Author and Artist as His Own Scribe
4.7. Sealing the Text, Closing the Book: Frontispiece Calculations
4.8. The “First of the New Chronicles“

Acknowledgments

Works cited

Introduction

Don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, the author and artist of El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (completed 1615, emended 1616), was a person of unlimited aspirations. He expressed the hope that his 1200-page chronicle would be placed “in the archive” as a testimony to past events and a guide to the pursuit of justice. He specified that it should be preserved “in the archive of heaven as of the world,” that is, in Rome, at the head of Christiandom, and in Castile, headquarters of all earthly power. His more immediate hope had been for its publication, that is, that Spain’s king Philip III would serve as his patron and have the work printed “to make immortal the memory and name of the great ancient lords” of Peru. Guaman Poma’s exuberant work with its many purposes would not be published for three hundred years, and, after many print editions (Paris, Oruro, Bolivia, Mexico City, Caracas, Madrid, Lima), its truly global reach would not be achieved until the new millenium: the 2001 digitization of his autograph manuscript by the Royal Library of Copenhagen.

The digitized edition of Guaman Poma’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno manuscript (GkS 2232 4º) is one of the marvels of the Internet era. Its freshness and immediacy carry new readers eagerly through its portal. Its complete accessibility draws its most veteran students and scholars to renewed inquiries and new questions. In this light, and as a complement to the digitization project, I planned to update my 1977 review of the autograph manuscript, which appeared in the 1979-80 volume of Fund og Forskning and has now been placed in facsimile on this website. Thanks, however, to being invited to participate in preparing the Royal Library’s 2001-2002 codicological survey of the Guaman Poma codex (see summary in Section 1, below), I have been able to entertain new questions and not simply modify previous understandings. My aim herein is to coordinate the physical characteristics of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno manuscript with its contents, that is, to integrate Guaman Poma’s vision of Peru’s ancient past, its precarious present, and uncertain future with his construction and emendation of the manuscript that conveys it.

This articulation of codicological and textual evidence has yielded several major results. First, it foregrounds and reinforces the character of Guaman Poma’s authorship as the enterprise, single-minded in purpose and execution, of a sole individual. Although I set forth this hypothesis in my earlier bibliographic investigation of the manuscript (Adorno 1979-80, 17, 27, note 8), the present coordination of codicological and textual evidence reveals systematically how the work was created, corrected, augmented, and updated, and that it was done by his hand alone. Second, this coordination of material and textual evidence reveals for the first time how Guaman Poma handled the scarcity of material resources during the final stages of his work and how he dealt with the competing priorities of informational accuracy and graphic design. Third, in relation to the three great divisions of the work (the Nueva corónica of ancient Andean history,  the “Conquista” account of the Spanish conquest, and the Buen gobierno treatise on colonial reform), the dual, codicological/textual analysis makes evident the growing importance that Guaman Poma attached to the Buen gobierno. In particular, it reveals the importance of its inaugural chapter and the strategic, historical role that Guaman Poma assigned to the viceroy Don Juan de Mendoza y Luna, the marquis of Montesclaros, the eleventh viceroy of Peru (1607-1615). This result allows us to reemphasize Guaman Poma’s ultimate realization of his work as a treatise on “good government,” as one among many privately authored arbitrios written on Spanish imperial reform.

This inquiry is divided into four sections. Because of the cumulative nature of the analysis, I have provided cross-references among its four parts, which are summarized as follows:

1. Summary of the Royal Library’s Codicological Examination of the Manuscript
I survey here the new findings regarding the autograph manuscript’s quires, watermarks, and other physical characteristics.

2. The Nueva corónica y buen gobierno in the Royal Library 
In this section I examine the history of the manuscript in the Royal Library, including its classification in the Old Royal Collection, its “rediscovery” and provenence, and its facsimile reproduction by the Institut d’Ethnologie in Paris with the help of the Royal Library. This discussion sets a new date for the Royal Library’s acquisition of the manuscript. It also reexamines the character and quality of the Paris facsimile edition by which Guaman Poma’s work was most well known from 1936 until the appearance in 1980 of the Murra/Adorno and Pease editions of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno.

3. The Author’s Biography and His Composition of the Work
Here I take a fresh look at the recent gains in information about Guaman Poma’s life and the genesis of his work. I also reexamine the process of its composition and first “completion” as based on codicological evidence.

4. Final Renderings: The Coordination of Codicological and Textual Evidence
Scrutinizing the final emendations that Guaman Poma made to his manuscript, I explore in this section the necessarily close relationship between the codicological evidence of the manuscript and Guaman Poma’s conceptual formulation and redaction of his work. In particular, I test the capacity of the new codicological data to reveal or support the textual evidence of Guaman Poma’s growing concerns as he reached the end of his project and closed his book for the last time. The results of this analysis modify the familiar profile of the utopian-minded Andean who would make his son the “prince of the Indies” and reveal instead the hard-headed, well informed advocate of comprehensive administrative reform aimed at relieving the crushing labor and tribute demands on the native population.

Studying the successive modifications of the physical manuscript in light of its textual contents transforms the static artifact into a living testimony. It is for this reason that I have described Guaman Poma’s book as a “witness unto itself.”

Preliminary Remarks: 

The Online Facsimile Edition and Manuscript Analysis
Along with the Royal Library’s codicological survey of the manuscript, my source for the present analysis was the digital facsimile. Its extraordinarily high quality makes its consultation a necessary complement to this essay as well as the appropriate source for any future manuscript analysis of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno. The digital edition renders visible many details of Guaman Poma’s graphic and prose texts that otherwise would go unnoticed, and it has proved to be indispensible in deciphering Guaman Poma’s occasional layers of superimposed writing.

The example of the work’s title on the portada or frontispiece makes the point. Not visible in any print facsimile but perceptible in the digital edition is the manuscript’s earlier title, El primero i nueva corónica i buen gobierno. The online viewer can see that the “o” of “primero” and the conjunction “i” were suppressed when Guaman Poma introduced, in black ink, decorative motifs that obscure them (see illustration). His corrected, final title, El primer nueva corónica i buen gobierno, is more concise. (I consider the meaning of this modification in section 4.8, below.)

Only in the rarest instances are the images on the web inadequate for deciphering the text. The most perplexing case is the series of sequential calculations regarding the length of his work that Guaman Poma entered on the frontispiece. Here the digital reproductions on the web are best supplemented by enlarged images of details. See Section 4.7 for this series of calculations and the analysis of their sequence.

Pagination:
(1) Guaman Poma’s pagination:  Guaman Poma numbered the pages of his manuscript, beginning unconventionally by placing the number one on a verso page (the back side of the frontispiece). He made certain errors by inadvertently repeating sequences of numbers (154-155, 523-532) and others, by producing five-digit numbers when he composed or corrected numbers in the 1000 and 1100 ranges (see “Pagination Survey of Copenhagen, Royal Library, GkS 2232 4to” on this website and Section 4.6, below). 

(2) Actual pagination: The designation “actual” refers to the sequential correction of his pagination as created for the 1980 Murra/Adorno edition of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno and reproduced in the Royal Library’s online facsimile. It starts from Guaman Poma’s unconventional beginning that designates the verso of the frontispiece as page one, and it is the pagination used in this essay.

Chapters:
Guaman Poma divided his work into chapters but he did not number them. His “Tabla de la dicha corónica” (“Table [of contents] of the said chronicle”) diverges from the body of the text insofar as the “Tabla” fails to list certain chapters or sections of chapters and reorganizes the presentation of others into a different format (see Section 3.5, below). The chapter references I cite below refer to the numbered, descriptive chapter titles that John Charles and I created as a bilingual, Spanish-English “Tabla de contenidos/Table of contents” for the online edition. It is more complete than any previous list of contents, including the “Índice general” that John V. Murra and I prepared for the 1980 Siglo XXI edition. Throughout this essay I cite Guaman Poma’s “Tabla de la dicha corónica” by his own Spanish-language designation, usually shortening it to “Tabla.” I use “table of contents” in English to refer to the online edition’s Charles/Adorno chapter list.

Sheets:
The basic term, a “(single) sheet,” is a unit of paper producing two pages, recto and verso, as they appear in the bound codex.

When discussing the physical make-up of the manuscript book, the following distinctions are made:

(1)   A “(regular) double sheet” is a unit of paper producing four pages. Approximately ninety-six per cent of the codex is made up of such double sheets. In one case, a regular double sheet is not integrated into the quire but has been attached or grafted onto it.

(2)   A “single sheet with flap” is a unit of paper producing two pages. The flap is a narrow extension, folded over onto the sheet, that runs its full vertical length and makes possible the secure appending of the sheet to the quire, either by pasting or stitching.

(3)   Such “single sheets with flap” may appear in pairs, pasted together all along the flaps and resulting in what I call “composite (pasted) double sheets.” Three quires, totaling approximately three per cent of the codex’s bulk, are made up entirely of such composite (pasted) double sheets.

(4)   Besides being organized and pasted in pairs, “single sheets with flap” may appear in unpasted pairs, functioning as “composite (unpasted) double sheets” (two cases), or alone. In the latter instance, the sole “single sheet with flap” is either exceptionally grafted onto and later integrated into the quire structure (one case) or simply grafted onto the completed quire (three cases). See Section 1.1 and Table 4, below.

Bottom-fold Sheets and Truncated Texts:
The three sides of the book block have been cut evenly in preparation for binding. Although a great many page numbers at the top of the book block have been truncated by this procedure, care was taken to avoid removing from the bottom of the book block the lines of text that occasionally extend deep into the page beyond Guaman Poma’s customary lower margin. These portions of text were preserved by making a vertical scissors-cut in the sheet along the gutter of the book and folding this bottom portion of the sheet back up onto itself. Thus the book block could be cut without risking the excision of valuable text. Some pages were inevitably overlooked in this process, and the cutting of the book block resulted in the truncation of some sheets’ textual contents. Actual page 43 provides an example of a truncated text; actual page 420, an instance of the successfully executed bottom-fold sheet.

Binding:
It is apparent that the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno codex has been subjected to a variety of binding procedures. Physical evidence in the book points to at least four binding operations during the nearly four hundred years of the codex's existence (see Section 2.4, below). In connection with these binding activities, certain elements were assembled incorrectly, and other elements that previously had been tucked loosely into the manuscript were secured more effectively, either by pasting (three cases: actual pages 466-467, 978-981, 1188-1189), by stitching (two cases: actual pages 474-475 and 1104-1139 [“Camina el autor”]), or by pasting and stitching (one case: actual pages 1066-1067). 

We can be assured, however, that all the elements are today located in their intended place in the manuscript. This is due to the fact that Guaman Poma gave all possible cues to their proper sequential arrangement at every stage of his work. In this fortunate situation, the understanding of the process of Guaman Poma’s redaction and emendation of his work is not dependent on knowing whether a particular stitching or pasting was done by him or by subsequent binders who have successfully accomplished his intentions.

1. Summary of the Royal Library’s Codicological Examination of the Manuscript

The manuscript consists of twenty-six quires plus an additional single sheet, and the paper used by Guaman Poma exhibits three variants of the Latin Cross watermark described by Briquet (vol. 1, pp. 332 ff. [not vol. III, p. 332, as reported in Adorno 1979-80, 26, note 3]). I summarize below the results of this investigation (see “Codicological Survey of Copenhagen, Royal Library, GkS 2232 4to - Quires, Sheets, and Watermarks” on this website).

1.1. Sheets and Quires

1.1.1. General Patterns
Twice-folded sheets, each yielding four quarto sheets or eight pages, were used to make up the majority of the quires. There are “large” and “small” quires: quires 1 through 20, and quires 21 through 26, respectively.

The “large” quires are uniformly made up of regular double sheets, with insertions of additional sheets in two quires only (quire 13, actual pages 636-637, 646-647; quire 18, actual pages 904-905, 958-959). With one exception, the first twenty “large” quires ascend in size from twelve to fifteen double sheets in the following manner: Quires 1 through 4 consist of twelve double sheets; quires 5 through 12, thirteen double sheets; quires 14 through 16, fourteen double sheets; quires 17 through 20, fifteen double sheets. Only quire 13 consists of sixteen double sheets. The evidence suggests that quire 13, originally made up of fifteen double sheets, was expanded by incorporating two single sheets with flaps, that is, a composite double sheet  (whose two halves had not been pasted together), which was introduced prior to its use for writing as the fourteenth double sheet of the quire, that is, actual manuscript pages 636-637 and 646-647.

Of the “small” quires, three are made up of double sheets and three are constituted by single sheets with flaps, that is, composite double sheets pasted together prior to being assembled into quires and used for writing. Quires 22, 23, and 24 are made up of regular double sheets, and quires 21, 25, and 26 are made up exclusively of composite double sheets. Quire 21 consists of four composite double sheets; quire 22, seven double sheets; quire 23, two double sheets; quire 24, six double sheets; quire 25, four composite double sheets; and quire 26, two composite double sheets.

1.1.2. Special Features
As mentioned above, there are two instances of composite double sheets appearing in quires that otherwise consist of regular double sheets: the composite double sheet (number fourteen) in quire 13 (actual pages 636-637 and 646-647) and the composite double sheet (number two) in quire 18 (pages 904-905 and 958-959).  

In the entire manuscript there are only seven additions to the primary quire structure, which is the arrangement of the quires as laid out by the author before he began writing. (See Section 4.1, below, for the interpretation of these instances).  

Two of these seven additions can be described as compatible with the primary quire structure insofar as they appear to have been introduced in the course of writing. Consisting of two composite double sheets, these additions are, respectively, actual pages 636-637 and 646-647; and 904-905 and 958-959.

Four other additions are incompatible with the primary quire structure inasmuch as they appear to have been attached or “grafted” onto the already existing and “closed” quires. Not counting the still later addition of the full “Camina el autor” chapter (to be discussed below, Section 4.2), these four “late” additions consist of: (1) a single sheet with flap (actual pages 466-467), pasted in between two pages; (2) another single sheet with flap (actual pages 474-475), stitched into the first half of the quire and probably replacing a single sheet cut out of the quire at the same place; (3) a regular double sheet (actual pages 978-981), pasted in between two pages; and, finally, (4) a single sheet (actual pages 1188-1189), that is found pasted onto the last page of quire 26.

The one remaining addition is both compatible and incompatible with the primary quire structure. That is, the sheet constituting actual pages 1066-1067 was tucked loosely into the already paginated and sewn quire; it bears no page numbers and no catchwords and, beyond that, the wet ink of page 1068 had blotted onto page 1065, revealing the post-sewing addition of the sheet. At the same time, the flap of this single sheet appears in the other half of the quire, indicating that it was integrated into the quire, even though the quire had been previously sewn.

Put another way, these seven belated sheet additions consist of introducing regular or composite double sheets on three occasions (actual pages 978-981 and 636-637/646-647, 904-905/958-959, respectively) and a single sheet in four instances (actual pages 466-467, 474-475, 1066-1067,1188-1189). As they appear today, two of these single sheets, actual pages 466-467 and 1188-1189, have been added to the quires by pasting their narrow flap to the preceding page and applying a thin line of paste at the inner edge of the single sheet to make it adhere to the following page with maximum stability. One has been added by stitching and pasting (actual pages 1066-1067), another, by stitching alone (actual pages 474-475).  

In relation to the single sheet stitched into quire 10 (actual pages 474-475), there are two “flaps” that appear between actual pages 473 and 474. The first flap, immediately following page 473, is much narrower than the second, which precedes page 474. The first flap can be identified as belonging to the regular double sheet (number eleven of quire 10), now consisting only of this very flap and the sheet occupied by pages 484-485. The second flap belongs to the sheet used for pages 474-475. Apparently, this was originally a regular double sheet, because its carelessly cut, uneven edge does not resemble the more evenly cut edges of the single sheets that had been cut with great care in preparation for their assembly into, and use as, composite double sheets. While the stitching into quire 10 of the single sheet that became pages 474-475 undoubtedly corresponded to the author’s wishes, it is not possible to determine when that stitched insertion was made. 

See Sections 4.1 and 4.3, below, for my discussion of the contents of these additions.

1.2. Watermarks
Watermarks appear in the inner fold of half the total number of sheets. That is, each unfolded sheet used by Guaman Poma bore a single watermark, located in the middle of one half of the sheet. When the sheet was folded twice to form two, quarto-size double sheets, one of these double sheets appeared with no watermark. The other double sheet exhibited the watermark in its fold, with the result that half a watermark would be visible in each of the two sheets of that folded double sheet. In the bound book, these half-watermarks can be seen in the two sheets pertaining to every second double sheet, approximately.

2. The Nueva corónica y buen gobierno in the Royal Library

2.1. Classification
As Richard Pietschmann (1908, 1912; rpt. in Tello 1939) had done decades earlier, I also identified the year of the first recorded appearance of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno in the Royal Library as 1784-1786 (Adorno 1979-80, 7, 19, 27, note 16). Pietschmann’s source, and mine, was the handwritten Catalogus manuscriptorum Bibliothecæ Regiæ scriptus et odinatus annis 1784-86 (vol. 3, p. 616), prepared under the supervision of Jón Erichsen, Director of the Royal Library from 1781 to 1787. (Erichsen subsequently published a printed extract of the catalog in Danish, but Guaman Poma’s book is not explicitly mentioned among the Spanish manuscripts that Erichsen listed in the extract’s relevant pages [Erichsen 1786, 82-84]).  

Although the call-number by which we know the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno manuscript, “GkS 2232 4to,” appears for the first time in the Erichsen catalog (see illustration), it was probably not numbered during Erichsen’s tenure. Since his work was a shelf-list, with every second page blank and hence intended to make possible the interpolation of later acquisitions, it is more probable that the numbers were added later, when every single item in the Old Royal Collection within the respective formats of folio, quarto, and octavo was numbered in a running series, replacing the less exact means of identifying items’ places on the shelf by the page number of the catalog in which they appeared.

The 1784-86 Erichsen catalog (vol. 3, pp. 606-618) was the first to give the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno a subject classification (see also Section 2.2, below). Folio, quarto, and octavo items were catalogued in separate groups, but they all followed the same subject classification scheme. In the system used by Erichsen, the pertinent subject category was “History,” and it was divided into “Universal,” “Ancient,” and “Recent,” with “Recent History” being further subdivided according to country. Spanish and Portuguese materials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were classified together because of  Portugal’s 1580-1668 incorporation under the Spanish crown. Since Erichsen’s catalog antedates Latin American independence from Spain by some three decades, Spain’s overseas possessions, including Peru and the former Inka empire, were automatically subsumed under “Spain,” the imperial “mother” country. Erichsen thus placed Guaman Poma’s manuscript book in the category of “Recent Spanish and Portuguese History.” Since there are other listings of chronicles in this category, it is likely that the work’s Spanish-language title, “Corónica,” determined, at least in part, its classification under this rubric.

Spanish History,” however,  was broadly conceived in the Erichsen catalog, and the collection of works in which Guaman Poma’s appears in this catalog is quite heterogeneous. The Nueva corónica’s immediate environment consists of  predominantly Spanish-language works that range thematically from history to works of political, juridical, and economic interest. In this context, it is likely that the reference to political and economic governance in Guaman Poma’s title, “Buen gobierno,” also supported the classification of his work, like that of others similarly entitled, under the capacious category identified as Iberian history.

I set out some of these titles so that the reader can “peruse” the Erichsen catalog. The works among which the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno is accommodated include: chronicles of the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella and the kings of Navarre; discourses of Charles V and his son, Philip II; accounts and “curious papers” on the Spanish Armada, and other affairs of Spain and Rome; the final report on his governance of the eleventh viceroy of Peru, Don Juan de Mendoza y Luna, the marquis of Montesclaros; fragments of a biography of Don Gaspar de Guzmán, the Count-Duke of Olivares and Grand Chancellor of the Indies; a treatise on “justice and good government” in Spain (“la Justicia y buen Gobierno en España”); an exchange between the pope and the Spanish monarch on the reform of certain ecclesiastical abuses; a work directed from the prosecuting attorney of the Council of the Indies to the Count-Duke of Olivares; a discourse of Thomas Campanella on the wisdom of avoiding running afoul of the Spanish monarchy; a series of discourses on the economic restoration of Spain, directed to Olivares; several Spanish diplomatic reports; a Spanish protest to the pope about Portugal; fragments of a biography of Olivares; a work on Spanish numismatics; a treatise on accountancy in the “provinces of the Indias Occidentales;” and a report on affairs in Spain by a Venetian ambassador (GkS 565, 566; 573, 574; 578; 589; 590; 2210; 2211; 2212; 2213; 2215; 2224-2231; 2233; 2234; and 3577, respectively).

Immediately pertinent is GkS 589 2°, the viceroy Montesclaros’ 1615 report to his successor, in a manuscript copy under the title “Luz de materias de Indias” (“‘Light,’ or information, on the affairs of the Indies”). (See Section 4.4, below.) 

If the bibliographic classification of his work in a learned library instead of its use at the seats of power and governance in Madrid and Rome had been Guaman Poma’s objective, he surely would have been pleased with the Erichsen catalog’s placement of his work. As we saw at the outset of this essay, he aspired to have his work preserved both as a celebration of the Andean historical past and a contemporary guide to good governance and the cause of justice (actual pages 751, 991). The work’s first recorded “archival” classification met the challenge, at least with regard to the recognition of his dual subject matter of history and politics. Although the work was not archived permanently, as Guaman Poma desired, in Spain (“cauesa del mundo,” or “head of earthly power,” in his parlance), its location under the bibliographic heading “Spain” precisely hit the mark.

2.2. “(Re)discovery” and Provenance
If Erichsen’s 1784-86 catalog offered the first classification of Guaman Poma’s manuscript, it was not the first notice of the work in the Royal Library’s records. For nearly a century the Royal Library’s manuscript catalog of 1784-86 has provided the earliest date by which the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno’s presence in the Old Royal Collection could be verified. Now, thanks to the recent investigations of the Danish historian, former Research Librarian at the Royal Library Harald Ilsøe, we know that the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno had already appeared in an earlier catalog of the Royal Library, dated 1729. In his recently published study of the early history of the Royal Library’s collections, Ilsøe (1999, 77) announced that this comprehensive shelf-list of manuscript holdings, identified as “E 20” in the Royal Library’s archive, contains the following entry (vol. 2, p. 687, no. 46):

En skreven spansk Bog 4to med mange Figurer. sub titulo El primer nueva coronica, y buen gobierno por D. Filippe Guaman poma de Aiala. [A Spanish manuscript in quarto with many illustrations. The title is El primer nueva coronica, y buen gobierno por D. Filippe Guaman poma de Aiala]

While duly entered in the 1729 catalog, the listing of the Nueva corónica there cannot be considered as a subject classification. It appears as number 46 in a miscellaneous list whose topics, in items 40 through 54, include: a dissertation on the kabbala, a work on political theory, a numismatics catalog, a verse-eulogy to king Frederick III of Denmark, an introduction to the Hebrew language, a work of Muslim history, a list of Ethiopian kings, a description of Venice, an introduction to the art of military fortification, several treatises on the arts of war, a work about the Netherlands, and an exposition on Swedish law. The languages represented include Latin, French, Danish, and German, as well as Guaman Poma’s Spanish.

Importantly, though, 1729 now stands as the new, undeniable date by which the autograph manuscript had entered the Danish royal collections. This fact, in turn, makes more plausible the speculation about the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno’s arrival in Denmark in the seventeenth century. Under such circumstances, the range of potential donors would be necessarily limited, pointing to Cornelius Lerche (1615-1681), who served as Danish ambassador to Spain from 1650 to 1655 and from 1658 to 1662.

Decades ago, the Peruvian historian Raúl Porras Barrenechea (1948, 79) mentioned Lerche as a possible donor, and Harald Ilsøe’s recent bibliographic investigations also lead in this direction. Although, as Ilsøe acknowledges, his observations provide only circumstantial evidence, I consider them sufficiently suggestive to be pertinent to this discussion and potentially fruitful for the ongoing investigation of the provenance of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno manuscript in the Danish Royal Library. In a personal communication to me of 13 May 2001, Mr. Ilsøe wrote: “The items on the shelves around the Guaman Poma manuscript in 1729 indicate that it was acquired under king Frederick III (1648-1670), that is, most probably before 1663, since the work does not appear in an extant list of acquisitions (“E 8” in the archive of the Royal Library) covering the period 1663-1671.”  In a personal letter of 26 May 2001, Mr. Ilsøe spelled out his line of reasoning:

The arguments for a king Frederick III provenance are still only circumstantial evidence and not proofs. Perhaps most important is the following fact . . . .: Except for the acquisitions from the Coyet and Reitzer collections, the manuscript acquisitions under Frederick IV (1699-1730) are apparently listed together in E 20, vol. 2, pp. 562-564 (cf. Ilsøe 1999, 604 and 614-618), indicating that the Guaman Poma manuscript (listed in E 20, vol. 2, p. 687) was acquired at the latest by ca. 1700. The chain of circumstantial evidence is as follows: (1) The acquisition was probably made before 1700, and (2) it most probably occurred under Frederick III, in 1663, at the latest.  

Hence, Jørgen Reedtz (d. 1682), who was the Danish ambassador to Spain from 1671 to 1680, and Laurids Ulfeldt (1605-1659), whose library, acquired by the Royal Library in 1662, included 163 Spanish books but no Spanish manuscripts, are excluded as earlier possessors. The acquisitions from Ulfeldt’s library are known from a printed catalog (cf. Ilsøe 1999, 214-234). It is possible that either the manuscript was acquired together with the library of Joachim Gersdorff (1611-1661) in 1661(we only have a catalog of his printed books), or that it was a well-chosen gift to Frederick III from Lerche, when he returned from Spain at the end of 1662.

Having been knighted in 1660, Lerche had good reason to express his gratitude to the king. The fact that Lerche owned manuscripts from the library of the Count-Duke of Olivares as well as a manuscript written in an “Indian” language (Ilsøe 1999, 364, no. 30), brings his Spanish collection into a higher class than any other collection taken from Spain to Denmark up to that point in time. We know, furthermore, that Gersdorff acquired Spanish books through Lerche, so either possibility points to an acquisition by Lerche, who was in Madrid during the years 1650-1662, except for a hiatus between 1655 and 1658.

The manuscript in an “Indian” language referred to by Ilsøe above is a collection of sermons, “Sermones sobre los Evangelios y fiestas del anno en lengua Matalzingne [sic] de las Indias,” written in the Amerindian language of Matlazinca. Located in today’s northeast Michoacán, Mexico, the area was known in the sixteenth century as Matalcingo (Gerhard 1993, 106); it was the site of production of Spanish missionary works in the Matlazinca language, including dramatic plays of the life of Christ (Edmonson 1985, 5). Lerche’s possession of this collection of sermons on the Christian gospel and liturgical feasts might or might not suggest an interest on his part in indigenous, precolumbian America; it could have been simply, coincidentally, among other manuscript materials that he collected.

It is of great interest that Lerche owned manuscripts acquired from the library of Don Gaspar de Guzmán (1587-1645), the Count-Duke of Olivares, the statesman and principal minister of Spain’s king Philip IV (1621-1665). As mentioned by Ilsøe (1999, 360-364), no less than six of the forty-six Spanish and Italian manuscripts listed in the 1682 auction catalog of Lerche’s personal book collection derive from Olivares’ library. Ilsøe’s findings and inferences thus keep alive Porras Barrenechea’s (1948, 79) conjecture that it was Cornelius Lerche who acquired the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno manuscript in Spain between 1650 and 1662.

One more piece of circumstantial evidence perhaps points to Lerche as donor. In 1993, Ilsøe announced that Daniel Gotthilf Moldenhawer (1753-1823), the renowned director of the Royal Library from 1788 to 1823, had “discovered” the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno more than a century earlier than Pietschmann and that he had hoped to publish segments of it (Ilsøe 1993, 28-32). Moldenhawer’s intervention was not gratuitous; he would have become aware of the potential value of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno because of his own Hispanist interests. He was the first director of the Royal Library to be well acquainted with Spanish language and culture, having spent two periods in Spain (1783-84, 1786-87), for the purposes, respectively, of scholarly investigation and diplomatic negotiation. He collected approximately 150 Spanish documents for a history of the Spanish Inquisition that he proposed to write but never accomplished. That collection of Inquisition materials was unequaled in Europe until twenty years later, when the Napoleonic wars opened Spain’s Inquisition archives (Henningsen 1975-76, 249-250).

Moldenhawer's knowledge of Guaman Poma can be deduced from his 1809 project for publication of a “Museum” of manuscript treasures of the Royal Library. This series of volumes was to include “Information on and samples from a chronicle of Peru that includes the history of the Inkas and the conquest of this kingdom, with a description of its domestic affairs illustrated with drawings” (“Efterretning om og Prøver af en Krønike af Peru, som indbefatter Ynkaernes og dette Riges Erobrings Historie, med en ved Tegninger oplyst Beskrivelse om dets indre Mærkværdigheder”). This mention of Moldenhawer’s 1809 project in 1825 by his successor, Erich Christian Werlauff (1823-1861), is the first printed Royal Library reference to the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (Werlauff 1825, 352; Werlauff 1844, 333).

Ilsøe (1993) has also found Guaman Poma’s work mentioned in the diary of August Hennings, a German civil servant visiting Copenhagen in 1802. Excerpts from this diary were published in 1934. According to Hennings, Moldenhawer held the opinion that the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, like other Spanish manuscripts in the Royal Library, had been “bought from the library left by a Spanish ambassador, a learned man who died in Copenhagen” (“aus dem angekauften Nachlasse eines in Copenhagen verstorbenen spanischen Gesandten, der ein gelehrter Mann war”). Unfortunately, Hennings’ account does not specify whether Moldenhawer had in mind an ambassador from or a (Danish) ambassador to Spain nor whether, as  Ilsøe points out, Moldenhawer’s view of the Nueva corónica’s provenance was conjectural or based on documentary evidence now lost.  

2.3. Misarranged Quires
1927 is a year of particular note in the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno’s long residence in the Royal Library. I have learned from the Royal Library’s archival documents, which were not available to me in 1977, that soon after Hestermann received the codex for collation, he drew the attention of the Royal Library to three problems: (1) the ordering of the manuscript’s pages was faulty; (2) the mapamundi could not be spread out due to tight binding (Guaman Poma’s pages 983-984 [actual pages 1001-1002]); and (3) the upper portions of three sheets had been torn out (Guaman Poma’s pages 702-703, 820-821, 822-823 [actual pages 716-717, 834-835, 836-837]). 

The manuscript was then returned from Hamburg to Copenhagen, and the Royal Library set to the task of loosening the binding, reordering the misplaced quires, and reenforcing the three torn sheets with gummed China paper. At this time, gummed China paper was also applied to the top portions of pages that had been damaged by the excessive amounts of ink that Guaman Poma had applied to them. The reader of the online edition can view directly the location of the China paper applications, make note of the three torn sheets, and appreciate the display of the spectacular mapamundi, now fully open. The problem of reordering the misassembled quires of the manuscript, however, requires a few words of explanation.

Using Guaman Poma’s own numbering of the pages as his guide, Hestermann pointed out in his letter to the Royal Library of 18 February 1927 (Journalsager 4271) that pages 190-397 and 1094-1129 were out of sequence. These sections correspond to actual pages 192-399 and 1104-1139 of the manuscript, that is, quires 5-8 and 22-23. It is impossible to determine when these misorderings occurred. They are surely not errors that Guaman Poma himself would have made. Table 1 summarizes the pre-1927 misplacements and their post-1927 correct sequencing. 

Table 1:  Catalog of Misordered Quires, Restored to their Correct Sequence in 1927     

2.4. Binding Activities
How many times was the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno manuscript bound? Here, the codicological evidence about Guaman Poma’s pagination makes it possible to state with certainty that the initial stitching together of the quires was done before the manuscript left Guaman Poma’s hands. Perhaps he also had it bound into a cover at that time. 

The perusal of Guaman Poma’s “Tabla” page entries “466,” “468,” and “712” on actual pages 1185 and 1186 reveals that he introduced the chapters’ page numbers after the entry of the calligraphic prose titles had been completed. Inserted subsequently, the page numbers are either squeezed into the space remaining between superscript letters and serifs or appear outside the normal borders of Guaman Poma’s text block. Number 468 shows it best:  Tucked in at the left of the superscript “o” that forms part of Guaman Poma’s abbreviation of “Juan” in his previously entered prose title,  the number “468” appears, at first glance, to be the number “4680”. 

Aside from the initial sewing of the manuscript under Guaman Poma’s direct supervision, we can point to a number of other visibly distinct binding operations. As I noted years ago (Adorno 1979-80, 16, 27, notes 5 and 6), the binding for which we have positive evidence, in the form of the book block’s incised and gilded edges, is likely to have occurred in the seventeenth century. The evidence of this early binding has been preserved because the manuscript’s margins were not recut in subsequent binding operations; the elegant finishing, which was rather uncommon in Spanish seventeenth-century bindings, was left intact.

This binding activity, done at an unspecified place and point in time after the manuscript left Guaman Poma’s hands, probably introduced the errors in quire sequence (quire 5 placed after quires 6-8, and quire 22 set into the midpoint of quire 23) that would not be rectified until 1927.

The third binding as well as the extant leather cover date from the reign of king Frederick VII (1848-1863), as indicated by the royal emblem that appears on the spine of the book. (See “Binding/Encuadernación” on this website.) We may call this the “Werlauff binding.” Probably acting on the information that his illustrious predecessor, D.G. Moldenhawer, had planned to publish parts of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno manuscript, Royal Library Director Erich Werlauff arranged for its rebinding. Thus the manuscript that Moldenhawer had deemed worthy of study and publication was newly preserved in the binding cover by which we know it. Since no one by that date had investigated or studied the manuscript closely, the errors of quire arrangement were perpetuated in this mid-nineteenth-century operation.

Although the gold-adorned leather binding was done under Werlauff’s direction in the 1850s, the American historian Philip Ainsworth Means described the manuscript in the 1920s as being bound in parchment. Upon recounting his September 1922 visit to Göttingen to see the manuscript in Richard Pietschmann’s care, Means (1923, 398) reported, “The bulky work is bound in ancient parchment.” How is this to be explained? When the manuscript was sent from the Royal Library on extended loan to Pietschmann in Göttingen, it is likely that its leather binding was sheathed in a special cover to protect it during the period of Pietschmann’s editorial work. In the brief visit that he paid to Pietschmann in Göttingen to peruse the manuscript, Means may or may not have made conscious note of the binding and simply reported on it according to an incorrect recollection. In any case, there is no evidence that the Nueva corónica appeared in an ancient parchment cover at any time after the mid-nineteenth century and the application of the Frederick VII era binding. 

The fourth major rebinding is the one for which the most complete information exists. This operation was prompted by Ferdinand Hestermann’s February 1927 notice to the Royal Library that the pages of the manuscript were misordered. We may conjecture that Pietschmann had discovered much earlier the faulty page sequence, but that he had not been hindered by it in the preparation of his transcription. For anyone reading and transcribing the manuscript as Pietschmann was doing, the correct sequence would have been readily perceived, thanks to Guaman Poma’s orderly presentation of materials and his employment of structuring devices (pagination, catchwords, etc.) that made clear how the manuscript’s elements were to be arranged.

When in 1927 the Royal Library’s conservationists loosened the binding of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno manuscript, reordered its quires, and applied China paper reenforcements, they did not prepare a new binding cover. Instead, they simply reapplied the Frederick VII embossed leather binding which was still well preserved, thanks no doubt to the sleeve that had protected it during the manuscript’s years abroad. The extant cover shows clear evidence of this reapplication process; it has received a new paste-down, front and back, and the call number is written in the hand of Dr. Ellen Jørgensen (1877-1941), Curator of Manuscripts from 1914 to 1941. The remains of the previous paste-down from the Frederick VII era can still be seen underneath the current one.

In seeking to restore the manuscript’s intended page sequence, Hestermann identified the problems and the Royal Library remedied them with ease because the manuscript itself gave a complete account of how its pages were to be ordered. Guaman Poma had employed four structuring tools: (1) a repeatedly updated pagination of the manuscript; (2) the simultaneous use of a catchword at the foot of every page to signal the word with which the next page’s text began; (3) the use of running heads, over virtually every page; and, finally, (4) his carefully prepared (though not updated) “Tabla de la dicha corónica” (actual pages 1179-1189).

Guaman Poma prepared his manuscript for its subsequent and eventual handlers (hopefully, in the royal court and later in the royal printing shop) according to his experience as a reader of printed books. Above the text block on every page he penned a running head that contained  a key word or words of the chapter’s title; at the foot of the text block on each page, he employed a catchword. He also carefully corrected catchwords to correspond to his pages’ new successors as he inserted new materials into the manuscript. Along with pagination, he used this means to indicate the proper placement of his late-added “Camina el autor” chapter, for which there remained no available space in the “Tabla” to make a desired entry. With close attention to detail, he modified the catchword on the page that was to precede the opening of  “Camina el autor.” Thus, “tratemos,” which cued the chapter of the months of the year, is crossed out and “a su casa” inserted (actual page 1103), making clear to the careful binder (or reader) that “Camina el autor” was to follow the chapter on tanpu, or royal inns, thus taking the place of the chapter of the months of the year, which now was to follow “Camina el autor.”

Although not a faithful reproduction of the ultimate contents of his book or its final pagination, Guaman Poma’s “Tabla” served as an indispensable tool in determining the intended chapter sequence. The portion of the “Tabla” on actual pages 1181-1182, for example, allowed Hestermann to identify, and the Royal Library to correct, the errors of placement that pertained to the chapters on Inka institutions. Guaman Poma’s efforts to order his book will be discussed in Section 3.5, below. 

While the prospect of misordered pages and quires might make the reader question the order and coherence of the work in general and its completeness in particular, as I did earlier (Adorno 1979-80, 14), the pre-1927 misplacements and their 1927 remedy lead us in the opposite direction, that is, to a further appreciation of the work’s remarkable integrity (see Section 4, below).

2.5. The Paris Facsimile Edition: No Universal Retracing
The Royal Library’s digital facsimile of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno definitively reveals that no universal retracing of the manuscript was produced for the landmark Paris facsimile edition of 1936. Although in 1979-80 I speculated about the possible retracing of the manuscript prior to the Paris publication and noted a few specific alterations, I also observed that “the quality of the Paris facsimile overall is excellent” (Adorno 1979-80, 19-20, 28, note 23). Thanks to the online edition, it is now possible to underscore the high quality of the print facsimile and set aside the claims, repeated most recently by Valerie Fraser (1996) and Juan Ossio (1999, 2001), that the 1936 facsimile is a result of universal retracing.

2.5.1. “Painting Out Bleedthroughs”
In the process of making detailed comparisons between the print and digital facsimile editions, I discovered that the monumental task in preparing the 1936 print facsimile was not to do retracings but rather to eradicate the ink “bleedthroughs” coming from the opposite side of the sheet. The importance and magnitude of the effort to eliminate these unwanted penetrations has not been apparent to readers acquainted only with the printed facsimile or other print editions. The new online edition, however, foregrounds the problem of bleedthroughs, which plagues the entire Nueva corónica y buen gobierno because Guaman Poma wrote or drew on both sides of all its sheets. Remedying the situation during the preparation of the Paris edition was a daunting challenge. 

The most noticeable and unsuccessful replacement is found on a drawing depicting the punishment of adulterers. Obscured in the photography or when painting out bledthrough verso images, Guaman Poma’s original “De ADVLTERAS” (“about adulteresses”) on line three was replaced by the nonsensical “De ADVETEIRAS” (actual page 308; Guaman Poma 1936, 306; Figures 1a and 1b).

The most difficult and complex cases of redrawing are found not on the pictorial pages but rather in the upper portions of prose pages. As in the case of “De Adúlteras,” the lack of knowledge of Spanish occasionally created an impediment when redrawing lines of Guaman Poma’s prose text. Lines three on actual pages 401 and 415, respectively, reveal the difficulty. The macron over the letter “q” to render Spanish “que” is replaced by a French circumflex, and “el moso” becomes “le moso” (Guaman Poma 1936, 399, 413; Figures 2a and 2b). The reader’s best guide to the minimal cursive rewritings in the Paris facsimile is to compare, as an example, lines three and four and three through six, respectively, on actual pages 395 and 397 (Guaman Poma 1936, 393, 395; Figures 3a and 3b). On page 395 the general heaviness and “smudged” appearance of the cursive letters, as well as the broad, inexplicable mark that appears between the “g” and “o” of “Rodrigo,” are the result of the nearly impossible task of painting out the bled-through images from the opposite side of the sheet. In this particular instance no attempt was made to write over Guaman Poma’s cursive script. Page 397, however, reveals clearly that an attempt was made to rewrite Guaman Poma’s cursive text because the overlying pen strokes are clearly not his own.

In this context, Fraser’s (1996, 283) statement that much of the facsimile “is in fact, a copy, probably a tracing on to an overlay” must be rejected. The examples of variation that she noted between the original manuscript and the Paris facsimile are not the result of its universal recopying but rather, in quite limited circumstances, the effort to compensate for the tiny losses to the text’s graphic integrity occasioned by the “painting out” of images that had “bled through” from the back of the sheet. 

Fraser (1996, 283) presented some examples that reveal, contrary to her hypothesis, how exceptional the actual cases of redrawing are. One of the instances she cited is that of the stars in the upper left hand portion of the mapamundi (actual page 1001). Here redrawing did occur in the printed facsimile in the form of little circles that appear inside some of the stars in the drawing’s firmament.

Two other examples of presumed modification result not, as Fraser claimed, from full-scale retracing. They stem, instead, from an attempt, in the first instance, to suppress images and text that have bled through from the reverse of the sheet and, in the second, the failure to do so. The first case pertains to the absence of shading on some of the June harvest’s potatoes pictured in the drawing of that month (actual page 1157; Guaman Poma 1936, 1147; Figures 4a and 4b). Fraser (1996, 283) asserted that the “copyist” “omitted the shading on some of the potatoes” while retracing the image.This is, however, a simple case of tiny pen strokes being lost when the ink that penetrated the verso from the recto was painted out. Further scrutiny of the same picture reveals also that after the unwanted ink penetrations were removed from the face of the kneeling female figure, a technician redrew her eye (incompletely), and replaced the original wavy line of her face-framing hair by a straight line that looks like the border of a cap. Again, the redrawing was occasioned by the effort to restore the pen strokes that the paintouts had eradicated; it was not part of an overall retracing effort.

In the second case, a small Greek cross, a so-called “cross formée,” appears, unmotivated, on the pictorial background of the drawing of Saint Bartholomew (Guaman Poma 1936, 92, 93; Figures 5a and 5b). Fraser (1996, 283) interpreted this to be the result of the “copyist’s” “tracing it through onto the recto where it appears without explanation.”  The perfect image of the cross formée that adorns the picture was not traced through from the opposite side of the sheet.  It was, rather, a case in which the technician correcting the text failed to remove, apparently by simple oversight, the bleedthrough from the other side of the sheet.

Finally, there is the case of the black or mulatto figure whipping a native Andean, which Fraser discussed with regard to Guaman Poma’s artistry (actual page 810; Guaman Poma 1936, 796; Figures 6a and 6b). Again, the matter of bleedthrough is pertinent. Fraser (1996, 283) asserted that the “soft downy growth” that appears on the chin and upper lip of the figure with a version of a cat-o’-nine-tails in hand, visible in Guaman Poma’s original drawing, was “an effect created, perhaps, by [his] dampening the paper or licking the pen nib.” This procedure seems highly unusual amidst Guaman Poma’s characteristically single, clear, thin-pen strokes. In fact, the effect was not created by introducing moisture while composing the original. It is instead a combination of the original drawing’s very thinly drawn curls combined with a bleedthrough from the verso. Here, the result that Fraser observed was not caused by an unusual technique employed by Guaman Poma on this single occasion but rather by the penetration of ink from the other side of the sheet into the exceptionally finely wrought drawing.

Overall, by their character and limited number, these instances reveal how faithful the Paris print facsimile was to the manuscript that it reproduced. Generally, imperfect renderings are caused by the inability to cover the bleedthroughs. Many tiny (and often nearly imperceptible) distortions thus appear not because of aggressive, post-photography manipulation of the images but rather from the reticence to manipulate them too much.

2.5.2. China Paper Applications
The second most important consideration, obvious to the online-edition viewer, is the presence of gummed China paper strips that have been applied to some two hundred pages of the autograph manuscript. There are approximately thirty such applications to the outer margins of the outside sheets at the front and back of the codex, which no doubt became especially worn from Guaman Poma’s handling, moisture, etc., before the manuscript was bound in a cover. Approximately 175 China paper applications are found across the vulnerable upper portions of heavily inked pages, mostly in the range of actual pages 100-600. Also affected, not surprisingly, are several pages of “Camina el autor,” which Guaman Poma wrote in Lima on loose quires that he would later tuck into the completed manuscript (see actual pages 1105, 1106, 1108, 1110, 1113, 1116, 1134). 

As mentioned above, the China paper reinforcements were applied in Copenhagen in 1927, just three years before the photographs for the Paris edition were produced by the Royal Library. Earlier, I erroneously cited these reinforcements as being partly responsible for obscuring portions of the facsimile text pages (Adorno 1979-80, 19). It was not the case. Transparent or nearly so in 1930, the China paper did not in itself adversely affect the quality of the photographic images. A useful example appears on the Nueva corónica’s page 68. The Paris facsimile edition reveals that the China paper application did not jeopardize the legibility of the text or necessitate an overall retouching (actual page 68; Guaman Poma 1936, 68; Figures 7a and 7b).

3. The Author’s Biography and His Composition of the Work

3.1. New Biographical Information about Guaman Poma
Many documentary discoveries in the past two decades have made it possible to advance our previous understanding of Guaman Poma’s life and activities. Coordinating these new archival discoveries with the contents of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, I have reconstructed Guaman Poma’s biography (see my introductory essay, sections IV and V, in the online edition on this website, or Adorno 2001, 27-40, 59-73). Old assertions, such as my own of two decades ago (Adorno, 1979-80, 8) to the effect that “almost nothing is known about the author Guaman Poma except that which can be gleaned from his own writings,” must now definitively be discarded.

3.2. Period of Composition of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno
It now seems likely that Guaman Poma began writing his work no earlier than after the end of the year 1600, not as early as 1585, as I had argued earlier (Adorno 1979-80, 16). New documentary evidence suggests that he would have turned to writing only after he lost his legal battles to land claims in the area of Huamanga and after he was exiled from that city on 19 December 1600. Acknowledging these hardships only allusively in the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, Guaman Poma nevertheless let slip the observation, in discussing the pretensions and criminal activities of “common Indians,” that he first became aware of such social disintegration—Andean society being turned “upside-down”—when he began his travels, that is, as he wrote, “in the year that we left, of 16[0]0 and afterward” (actual pages 872, 886). 

Although Guaman Poma announced in a letter to king Philip III on 14 February 1615 that he had completed his work (Guaman Poma in Adorno 2001, 86), we know that he did not put the final, finishing touches on it earlier than the first months of 1616. The signally important datum on this point is a note that he appended to his completed portrait of the eleventh viceroy, Don Juan de Mendoza y Luna (actual page 474; Figure 8). It reveals that Guaman Poma’s writing task carried him beyond December 1615, when Montesclaros’ regime drew to a close: “And he governed until the year of 1615 in the time of Philip III” (“Y gouernó hasta el año de mill y seycientos y quinze años en tienpo del Rey felipo el tersero”). Montesclaros left office on 18 December 1615. Although it is impossible to determine how extensive Guaman Poma’s 1616 emendations were, the date stands as the most fair and faithful assessment of his final editing of the work.  I consider below, in Section 4, the final phases of Guaman Poma’s efforts, from a point in time around his February 1615 letter to the king through an unspecified point in time in 1616.

3.3. Guaman Poma’s Overall Plan
Guaman Poma’s planning and execution of his book, quire by quire, is quite remarkable. The regularity of the first twenty quires, all “large,” reveals that he copied out his work onto the pages of the prepared quires in a pattern and arrangement well designed before their execution. As indicated above (Section 1.1.1), twice-folded sheets, each yielding four quarto sheets or eight pages, were used to make up most of the quires.  

Table 2: Quires and Chapters of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno

3.4. Textual Composition
Guaman Poma’s method of textual composition in this final version of his manuscript was to work page by page and from top to bottom in a single process.  (Pagination, catchwords, and marginal emendations were added later.) For the pictures, he always drew the frame-lines first, starting either with the running head or with the first line of the drawing’s title. This top line of text served as the top line of the frame; vertical and horizontal lines created the other three picture boundaries. In this procedure the title of the drawing was always created prior to the pictorial elements. When a picture title appeared beneath a running head, the running head was probably created first, as is the case for the prose pages. The procedure for these accompanying prose pages was less complex, but it followed the same top-to-bottom execution. This procedure is revealed by the accommodation of letters of the picture title to the running head above it; quick examples are the short “l,” the small “o,” the left-bent “h,” and the short “d” and “h” in the picture titles on actual pages 844, 874, 877, and 880, respectively. The running head uniformly constituted the top line of the text frame; occasionally, a large, calligraphic line of text was created beneath it. Afterward the text in script was written out, always within the boundaries of an invisible frame that give Guaman Poma’s pages of text remarkably uniform margins. 

The relationship of pictorial to prose text is always defined by the priority of the drawing over the page or pages of its verbal accompaniment.  Variations in the color of ink occasionally make this relational aspect evident, but the discernment of this compositional procedure is not dependent on the visual perception of differences in ink color. Each and every one of Guaman Poma’s 398 drawings, whether they appear on recto or verso pages, initiate a presentation that is only subsequently supplemented by being “put into words” in a page or more of prose. Two vivid examples are actual pages 636-637 and 708-709. In the first instance, Guaman Poma depicts a native assistant (fiscal) with the new parish priest, the former offering to the latter the writing tools that he has gathered up at the priest’s command. The priest replies that he is not interested in serving a community in which the means to expose his anticipated actions are so readily available; he tells the fiscal, “Tomorrow I’ll be on my way!” Although Guaman Poma writes the anecdote briefly into the picture, it is on the following page of prose that he spells it out more fully, indicating where it occurred, and commenting at length on the incident.

The other vivid example that I would mention that reveals how the prose text is conceived to support the primary visual text is found in the famous depiction of the “tariff” (“aranzel”) exacted from the Andean population by the Spanish colonial administration. Here Guaman Poma allegorizes the various officers of colonial government as real and mythical animal predators of the colonized Andeans. Identifying each beast with a colonial official in the picture, he elaborates these allegorical correspondences in the written account that follows (actual pages 708-709).

If the reader peruses each of the 398 drawings and reads the accompanying prose texts, it will be apparent that this “first-picture-then-prose” method was, for Guaman Poma, not only his compositional procedure but the very heart of his conceptualization of his work. The pictures announce, dramatize, and “presentify” the book’s contents; they are the work’s primary text, not its secondary “illustrations.” He designed, in fact, the majority of his chapters as alternating pages of pictures and prose. There are, meanwhile, significant differences in the quantity of material in the prose texts; some pages have generous spaces between lines of writing while others are tightly cramped. The reader who observes these differences will appreciate the fact that Guaman Poma’s pictures dictate the course and content of his exposition and that the alternating spaces he allotted for their prose complements restricted in length the verbal content to be communicated. He simply had to “make do” with the space available as he had allotted it, whether the supplementary prose text was long or short. 

Excellent examples of how the pictures structure the work, and how the prose texts were adjusted to the space he made available to them, appear in the crucial chapter, “Buen gobierno” (chapter 20). There Guaman Poma barely found sufficient space available between pictures to set forth his written account of the viceroy Francisco de Toledo’s administration that included Toledo’s execution of the Inka prince Tupac Amaru as well as his own related recommendations on native governance (actual pages 447-459). Another example is the contrast between his treatment of the then-distant second viceroy of Peru, Don Antonio de Mendoza (1551-1552) and that of the contemporary eleventh viceroy—the last one to rule during the writing of his book—Don Juan de Mendoza y Luna, the marquis of Montesclaros. Guaman Poma's lack of information about, or interest in, the long-gone regime of Antonio de Mendoza left him with so much extra space on the single prose page devoted to that administration that he had room enough, at the end, to introduce one of his famous harangues against “foolish and incapable and pusillanimous Spaniards.” In contrast, given his firsthand knowledge of Montesclaros' government, Guaman Poma faced a real challenge in squeezing into a single page of prose all that he had to say about that viceroy's governance (actual pages 439, 475; see Section 4.3.2, below).

There are only a few exceptions to this dual-medium compositional rule. Chapters that are exclusively or nearly exclusively prose texts consist of dialogues, preacherly harangues, commentary on previous chronicles, and the author’s narration of his trip to Lima (chapters 26, 27, 31, 32, 34, and 36).

3.5. The “Tabla de la dicha corónica”
The preparation of the “Tabla” constitutes the next distinctive phase in the construction of Guaman Poma’s work. It begins and ends on the sheets of the final two quires of the manuscript, starting on the verso page of quire 25 and occupying all of quire 26 (actual pages 1178-1187).  Both of these quires are made up of composite double sheets, that is, two single sheets with flap, pasted together, thus giving evidence of Guaman Poma’s struggle in managing diminishing resources. (The pasted-on single sheet that follows it, featuring the presentation statement and the coat of arms of Castille [actual pages 1188-1189], was probably added after the completion of the full manuscript at a much later point in time.)

A second level of organization gives us the three main divisions of the work, and it is provided by the body of the work together with the “Tabla.” Added to the two title elements of Nueva corónica and Buen gobierno and separating them, “Conquista” is announced by a bold calligraphic “CONquista” on page 370 (Figures 9a and 9b).  It is further distinguished from the other two units of the work by the running head, “CONQVISTA,” that appears on every page of this lengthy segment (actual pages 370-437).  The introduction of “Conquista” as one of the elements of the work’s tripartite organization is also made in the “Tabla,” in which we find the enormous letters “CON” announcing the “Conquista” presentation (actual page 1182; Figure 9b). 

There is yet a third level of organization that is also suggested by Guaman Poma’s calligraphy as it appears in the “Tabla”. He created, in large Latinate lower case letters, ten graphically distinctive segments that constitute yet another form of logical organization across the work’s three main divisions. These calligraphically-defined units and the chapters they include are: (1) the creation or “first age” of the world (chapters 1-3); (2) the history of the Roman Catholic papacy (chapter 4); (3) the origins or “first age” of the “Indians that God brought to this New World”(chapter 5); (4) the “fifth age” of the Indians of the world, that is, the history of the Inkas (chapters 6-18); (5) “CONquista,” or the conquest of Peru by the Spanish that includes the listing of the viceroys and the other entities of the “buen gobierno” (chapters 19-20); (6) the “history” of the various Spanish social groups in the viceroyalty, arranged in hierarchical order (chapters 21-27, 31); (7) the “history” of the various Andean social categories, also defined according to criteria of hierarchy and rank (chapters 28-30); (8) the survey of the cities and towns of the kingdom (chapter 33); (9) the listing of the royal inns, or tanpu, on the royal road (chapter 35); and (10) the chapter of the months of the year (chapter 37).

Consistent with the decimal-ordering system of Andean culture, Guaman Poma has organized his work at its deepest level according to the ten-part order that we find in several other creative instances in his book: the five (Augustinian) ages of the Judeo-Christian world which parallel his five ages of the indigenous Andean world (actual pages 22-32, 48-85); the decimal order of the Andean age-grade census presented in chapter 10 (actual pages 195-236); and, at the beginning of his chapter of moral “Considerations,” his evocation of ten, past-to-present ages of the Andean world. This last text begins with the ancient “first age” of the Indians and concludes with the current, tenth era, defined by Guaman Poma with a Quechua utterance: “our Christianity emerges and prospers” (actual page 925).

Within the ten-part organization of his work Guaman Poma gives prominence to the “Conquista” division, but there is no mention whatsoever of the “Buen gobierno”: There is no “Buen gobierno” entry in the “Tabla,” either in reference to the two-thirds of the work that appears under that title or to its important inaugural chapter (chapter 20). The viceroys and other civil and ecclesiastical officers that appear in the “Buen gobierno” chapter are placed under the heading “CONquista,” which is the fifth main entry of the ten that appear in the “Tabla.” In this context, Guaman Poma presents the civil and ecclesiastical leadership of viceregal Peru simply as the continuation of the succession of conquerors and (legal and illegal) governors that began with Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro. This is a strikingly subdued presentation, at best, of the offices of “good government.” Before the manuscript left his hands, however, Guaman Poma would reconsider the interpretation of viceregal governance implied by the “Tabla.” He would dramatically amend chapter 20 so as to represent by its means the most exemplary values of moral political authority (see Sections 4.3, 4.5, below).

3.6  Textual “Completion”
The construction of the “Tabla,” that is, the elaboration of its prose entries, undoubtedly constituted Guaman Poma’s near-final task in creating the text of the body of his book. After his painstakingly thoughtful creation of the “Tabla,” he went on to more mechanical and mundane tasks: sewing the book, paginating it, and entering a catchword at the bottom of each page.

3.7.  Repaginating Four Chapters to Compensate for a Previous Error
As Guaman Poma was completing his book by entering the page numbers into the “Tabla,” he likely discovered that he had repeated a sequence of ten numbers, and he subsequently attempted to rectify the error at another location, beginning the correction at his page 986, which he modified to 996. As a result of this repagination, I questioned whether previously there had been a short chapter tucked in between the pages of the manuscript that Guaman Poma numbered 985 and 996 (actual pages 1003 and 1004). Yet there appeared “no evidence of pages having been added or removed from this place in the manuscript” (Adorno 1979-80, 18). The Royal Library’s recent codicological survey confirms my earlier assessment: there is no evidence to suggest a one-time insertion or deletion of a unit of five additional sheets, the equivalent of ten pages, at this or any other point. (Only one sheet has been excised; see Sections 4.1 and 4.3, below.)

4. Final Renderings: The Coordination of Codicological and Textual Evidence

To the degree that we can recognize them, the final phases of Guaman Poma’s work are of great interest because they reveal his preoccupations as an author and artist as he drew his project to a close in 1615 and 1616. What were his final pursuits?  What new or renewed aims emerged as time, resources, energy, and opportunity ran out?  This is a question that might be put to any author, but in Guaman Poma’s circumstances as a Spanish-speaking Andean and a self-proclaimed “author and prince” in early colonial Peru, it takes on particular urgency. The question and its answers fully reveal the individuality of Guaman Poma’s authorship and the single-minded integrity of the work that he produced. 

On the issue of late revisions, the Royal Library’s codicological survey has allowed me to extend substantially my earlier conclusions about Guaman Poma’s emendation of this final, presentation copy of his autograph manuscript. In particular, the new information underscores the consistency and coherence with which Guaman Poma carried out the task of preparing this final copy. His meticulousness reveals his continual effort to produce a work that was internally coherent and complete, correcting earlier oversights or mistakes. At the same time, he made other judgments based on artistic criteria. In this regard, his thinking was as nuanced as that of any modern author and artist taking into consideration the demands of content and the prerogatives of design while managing each situation on its merits in light of complex criteria that sometimes conflicted with one another. The most impressive demonstration of his management of diverse, sometimes conflicting objectives is his repeated emendation of chapter 20 (actual pages 438-490), “on good government.”

I reconstruct below Guaman Poma’s progress through the final phases of his work’s preparation as he coped with diminishing resources and balanced his two highest priorities as author and scribe: first, to honor the requirements of content, providing important new information as he concluded his work, and, second, to satisfy the demands of esthetics by creating a homogeneous, harmonious manuscript book worthy of presentation to Philip III.

Overall, the need to balance the criteria of textual content and graphic beauty explains many of the apparent contradictions in the later phases of Guaman Poma’s execution of his work. I have long thought that his particular kinds of emendation to the final manuscript (marginal notations, added sheets, etc.) could be explained on the basis of an increasing shortage of writing materials. Today we know that there are a number of small quires fabricated out of single sheets (Section 1.1., above). And now we also know that there is only one example in the whole book (after it was bound) of deletion and rewriting—the successive Montesclaros portraits, to be considered below (Section 4.1)—which shows that Guaman Poma would allow himself to use fresh paper only if the issue were of the greatest importance to him.

The threat of a dwindling paper supply placed severe limitations on his freedom to choose among a range of options while reviewing his manuscript. It had a considerable impact on how, when faced with a wish to update it, he was forced to weigh the competing priorities of economy (Could the new message be limited to a correction to an existing page?), content (Could the new message be communicated fully, and how could the possibilities of misunderstanding be reduced?), and esthetics (Could the correction be made less obtrusive by grafting the new message onto the old one?).

4.1. Guaman Poma’s Additions to the Completed Manuscript
After completing the composition of his work, its emendation was an equally complex process, and there are several kinds of evidence for it: (1) significant variations in ink color; (2) overwritten decorative lines and flourishes that appear, colophon-like, in the lower portion of many prose pages; and (3) the cramped handwriting style that appears at the lower margin of many pages because the heel of Guaman Poma’s writing hand had to rest inches below the bottom edge of the writing surface of his already-sewn, fat book.

Table 3: Summary of Textual Emendations and Sheets Added to, and Excised from, the Primary Quire Structure

As summarized above in Table 3, the seven additions of sheets to the already-assembled quires are constituted as follows (see also Section 1.1.2):

Table 4: Sheets Added to the Completed Manuscript

(1) Guaman Poma inserted a single sheet with flap to accommodate the presentation of Don Juan de Mendoza y Luna, the marquis of Montesclaros, as viceroy of Peru (actual pages 474 and 475; see Figure 8). This inserted sheet in quire 10 (chapter 20) replaces a sheet cut out at the same place in the manuscript (see Section 4.3, below). Guaman Poma pasted in this single-sheet replacement after he had sewn and paginated the full manuscript and prepared the “Tabla de la dicha corónica” in which he had entered Montesclaros’ name, identifying him as the ninth viceroy of Peru, and marked down the page number of the Montesclaros entry (see actual page 1185).  He numbered the new sheet, as he had its predecessor, as 470-471 (actual pages 474-475). 

(2) Guaman Poma inserted another single sheet into the quire 10 (chapter 20) gallery of viceroys after he had sewn and paginated the manuscript and prepared the “Tabla.” This second addition precedes the Montesclaros entry in sequential page order of the bound book, but follows it in the sequence of his textual emendations. It was clearly made after the author had arrived in Lima with his “completed” manuscript. Significantly, the author never paginated this inserted sheet, and it bears the same watermark (Latin Cross over AI; see Section 1.2, above) as does the “Camina el autor” chapter, which was also written after Guaman Poma arrived in Lima (see Section 4.2, below). This inserted sheet is an account of  the previously overlooked tenure in office of Don Fernando de Torres y Portugal (1586-1589) (actual pages 466-467; Figure 10). The late introduction of the Torres y Portugal entry is also evidenced by the fact that it does not appear in the “Tabla” listing of viceroys (see actual page 1185). This sheet was inserted into the manuscript by stitching.

The Torres y Portugal insertion into the completed and bound manuscript at the time of the writing of the “Camina el autor” chapter in Lima results in the change in numerical listing that Guaman Poma subsequently made in the four viceregal portraits that follow it (actual pages 468, 470, 472, 474).  Thus, on both pages of the Montesclaros replacement entry mentioned above, where Guaman Poma had initially identified Montesclaros as the ninth viceroy, he now struck out “ninth” and wrote beneath it “tenth.” Guaman Poma did not repeat this plus-one adjustment in the already completed “Tabla” entries of the four viceroys.

(3) Prior to the sewing and pagination of his manuscript, Guaman Poma inserted into the yet unbound quire 13 a composite double sheet, that is, two single sheets with flaps (not pasted together). Symmetrically arranged in the quire structure, this addition became actual pages 636-637 and 646-647. Guaman Poma no doubt made this two-sheet insertion in anticipation of the need for additional space in elaborating his lengthy chapter on the parish priests of Peru (chapter 23). He appears to have intended his customary “prologue” to fill the two final pages of quire 13 (actual pages 672-673), but he used a third page as well, recto page 674, which was the first sheet of quire 14, to complete it. Thus he began his new section on native church officers, introduced by a drawing, on the verso (actual page 675). (This unit is identified as the final subsection of chapter 23, entitled “The native assistants of the parish.”)

(4) Also prior to the sewing and pagination of his manuscript, Guaman Poma added in quire 18 a composite double sheet, that is, two single sheets, symmetrically placed in the quire (actual pages 904-905 and 958-959). In this instance, only one flap remains partially visible. Two of these four additional pages became part of his chapter on “the Indians of this kingdom”; the other two went into his chapter of religious and moral “Considerations,” in chapters 30 and 31, respectively. Added to the yet unbound quire, these sheets were inserted prior to the redaction of these chapters, because the content and form of both presentations are continuous with, and fully integrated into, the texts in which they appear.

(6) In quire 20, he added a single sheet to extend his vigorous commentary on the silver mines of Potosí (actual pages 1066 and 1067). On the recto (1066) he depicted the coat of arms of La Plata, the seat of the royal Audiencia, or highest civil and criminal court in its jurisdiction, and, on the verso (1067), he presented a prose text emphasizing the central role in the fortunes of Spain played by the mines of Potosí as the “flower and eye, or, to put it more properly, heart of this [Spanish] kingdom.”

Guaman Poma made this addition after sewing and paginating the manuscript, and he left it unnumbered.  The lateness of its insertion is attested by the fact that, when he renumbered the last chapters of his manuscript to adjust for his ten-page error in pagination, these pages, like the “Camina el autor” chapter, were excluded (see Section 3.7, above). We can infer that actual pages 1066-1067 and 1104-1139 were not part of the renumbering project because he added them to the manuscript still later. 

The introduction of the 1066-1067 sheet is unique in the manuscript because while it was clearly a very late addition, it was nevertheless “integrated” into the already sewn manuscript because its flap appears in the other half of the quire.  Because the absence of pagination and catchword suggests the attachment or graft of the sheet onto the completed quire, and, paradoxically, the appearance of the sheet’s flap in the other half of the quire suggests its integration into the quire before sewing, we can only conclude that Guaman Poma himself tucked (but did not paste) the sheet into the quire and that it was integrated into the quire, by sewing and pasting, in a post-Guaman Poma binding operation.

(7) After the end of the “Tabla de la dicha corónica” Guaman Poma added a single sheet, pasting it onto the last page of quire 26 (actual pages 1188-1189).  Although the outer upper corner of the sheet is worn away, it is unlikely that it would have carried a page number since it follows the unpaginated “Tabla.” He used this sheet to close his book, and it is probable that he added it to the already paginated and bound manuscript. On the recto (1188; Figure 11) he created a typical colophon, identifying the work’s author by name, titles, origin, and location: “Don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, prince, author, of the Indies of the kingdom of Peru, of the city and environs of San Cristóbal de Suntunto, New Castile, of the province of the Andamarcas, Soras, Lucanas of the royal crown of the City of Kings of Lima, royal court and principal city of Peru” (“Don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, príncipe, autor, de las Indias del reyno del Pirú, de la ciudad y medio de San Cristóbal de Suntunto, Nueva Castilla, de la provincia de los Andamarcas, Soras, Lucanas de la corona real de la ciudad de los Reys de Lima, corte real y cabesa del Pirú”). He then composed a dedication statement, which remains blank with respect to the date and name of the designated recipient, the phrase “the lords”/“los señores” being subsequently cancelled: “It was presented before the lords. . .” (“Se presentó ante los señores . . .”  ).

On the verso he drew the coat of arms of Castile and León (1189; Figure 12). Presented in smaller versions on the frontispiece and on actual page 1065, this coat of arms is embellished here as on page 1065 with the Latin motto, “Ego fulcio columnas eius” (“I fortify its columns”), in a reference to how the “Indies of Peru” sustained Spain economically, notably, as portrayed here, through mining production (see also Section 4.3.2, below). 

Here (p. 1189) the manuscript book ends, but not its author’s final efforts.

4.2. Guaman Poma’s Late Introduction of Quires 22 and 23, “Camina el autor”
The most noteworthy late addition to the completed manuscript, “Camina el autor,” details Guaman Poma’s final journey to deliver his completed manuscript to the viceregal court. Twenty years ago, I judged this chapter to be a late addition to the manuscript on the basis of its textual references to events that occurred subsequent to Guaman Poma’s arrival in Lima, its absence from Guaman Poma’s “Tabla de la dicha corónica,” and the fact that Guaman Poma had renumbered the pages of  the following chapter on the months of the year (Adorno 1979-80, 27, note 13). Today, the new codicological evidence completes the analysis: “Camina el autor” (chapter 36) is the exclusive occupant of two quires, numbered 22 and 23 (actual pages 1104-1131 and 1132-1139, respectively), and they and the single-sheet Torres y Portugal insertion bear a common watermark that is not found anywhere else in the manuscript (see Section 1.2, above). 

4.3. A Sheet Cut Out and Replaced:  Montesclaros’ Governance and the Buen gobierno
Among Guaman Poma’s additions and corrections to the text of the completed Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, there is only one case of textual deletion and replacement in the entire manuscript: Guaman Poma’s successive portraits of Don Juan de Mendoza y Luna, the marquis of Montesclaros. This occurs between actual pages 473 and 476, as is evidenced by the two visible “flaps,” the second of which belongs to the newly inserted single sheet that became actual pages 474 and 475 (see Section 1.1.2). This second flap allowed Guaman Poma to tuck the new single sheet of which it was a part into the already “closed” quire in a way that made possible its later secure attachment by stitching.

The codicological structure and the contents of the chapter on “good government” reveal that it was produced in three phases: first, the sheets of the quire were written and drawn upon and assembled, then the single sheet of the new pages 474 and 475 was inserted, replacing the excised earlier sheet “474/475,” and, finally, the single sheet constituting pages 466 and 467 was added (see Figures 8 and 10 respectively). The discreteness and order of this three-phase assembly is borne out, significantly, by the respective appearances of the first, second, and third Latin Cross watermarks in these three distinct environments (see Section 1.2, above).

4.3.1. The Role of the Viceroy
When Guaman Poma prepared his “Tabla de la dicha corónica” (see actual pages 1184 and 1185), he set out the contents but not the title of chapter 20, “of good government.” As we saw earlier in Section 3.5, his entries consisted of the viceroys in succession as a continuation of the list of Spanish conquerors and early (official and unofficial) rulers of Peru, all listed under the heading “CONquista,” the fifth segment in his ten-part division of the work presented in the “Tabla” (See Figure 9b). We discover through his emendation of the work, notably the replacement Montesclaros text, that Guaman Poma modified the implicitly negative connotations about viceregal rule conveyed in the “Tabla” in order to foreground and elevate the role of the viceroys.

Guaman Poma’s most vivid recollections are of the viceroys Francisco de Toledo (1569-1581) and Luis de Velasco (1596-1604). He lauded Toledo for the general inspection tour of the viceroyalty that Toledo made at the beginning of his tenure. He described events of the viceroy’s journey from Lima to Cuzco in late 1570, including his visit to Huamanga, of which Guaman Poma seems to have been a personal observer. He praised Toledo for his legislation prohibiting Spaniards from living among the Andeans and other laws for setting limits on tribute payment. Two other historical episodes of Toledo’s rule brought Guaman Poma’s disapproval and condemnation. The first of these is found in his repeated, critical references to Toledo’s resettlement program, or reducciones, instituted to bring highland Andean communities closer to the areas where indigenous labor was needed (colonial cities, silver and mercury mines). The second is Toledo’s capture and execution of the last surviving Inka prince, Tupac Amaru (actual pages 446-454; Figure 13). (For Guaman Poma’s treatment of these events, see Adorno 2001, 34-35, 67-68.) 

Luis de Velasco is even more vividly recalled by Guaman Poma. He portrayed Velasco with the unusual feature of wearing eyeglasses, and he described some of his specific actions, such as his naval defense of Chile against the English (actual pages 470-471; Figure 14). Additionally, in his February 1615 letter to the king, Guaman Poma identified Velasco, the marquis of Salinas, as the former viceroy of Peru and current president of the Council of the Indies in Madrid, who would be able to vouch for him: “He has notice of my person from the time that he governed this kingdom” (“La [entera noticia] tiene de mi persona del tiempo que gobernó este reino”) (Guaman Poma in Adorno 2001, 86).

Since Velasco ruled from 1596 to 1604, it is likely that Guaman Poma came before him during the period of his litigation before the high civil court (the royal Audiencia) in Lima, on either or both of his 1597 and 1599 visits to appear before that body (Prado Tello and Prado Prado, eds. 1991, 375, 360, 369).  Porras Barrenechea (1948, 33) had earlier surmised that Guaman Poma was in the capital around 1600 or 1601 because of his claim of having informed Velasco about the need of the corregidores to heed the petitions and complaints filed by Andeans. Guaman Poma stated that the viceroy responded by placing a fine of one hundred pesos on offenders (actual page 832); Velasco’s ordinances of 31 July 1601 concerning corregidores had established just such a penalty.

A counterpoint to these vivid recollections is found in Guaman Poma’s early silence on Fernando de Torres y Portugal, the seventh viceroy, who in 1586 had granted the lands of Chupas in Huamanga to the Chachapoyas ethnic group against whom Guaman Poma’s family and the Tingo clan brought suit. When Guaman Poma started to participate in the litigation in the 1590s, he may have learned that Torres y Portugal had made the Chachapoyas grant (Adorno 1993, 68).  Yet if the initial absence of Torres y Portugal’s governance from Guaman Poma’s work potentially could be explained on that basis, his eventual, laudatory portrait and account of him cannot.  Hence, a simple oversight remains the best explanation.

Guaman Poma’s precise descriptive and interpretive account of the viceroy Montesclaros follows closely the pattern set for Toledo and Velasco. It includes an even more pronounced insistence on specificity because it contains the element of currency.

4.3.2. Guaman Poma’s Marqués de Montesclaros: Exemplary and Current Viceroy
Guaman Poma presents knowledge of  Montesclaros’ documented actions that he could have set down no earlier than 1609 but at a time during which Montesclaros was in full command of his rule with no transition to a successor in sight.  The notable feature of Guaman Poma’s portrait of Montesclaros is that he forecasts great deeds yet to be accomplished by the viceroy, which makes it possible for us to date the Montesclaros replacement entry before the end of 1615, when his rule ended (and of which Guaman Poma makes note on a late addition to the manuscript) (actual pages 474-475; Figure 15). The remarkably specific information that Guaman Poma presents regarding Montesclaros’ past actions, as well as the predictive remarks he makes about Montesclaros’ future accomplishments and eventual historical reputation, makes it possible to suggest textual reelaboration as an explanation for the single sheet replacement. 

Guaman Poma started his account of Montesclaros in the conventional manner that he employed in the case of the previous viceroys, characterizing the individual’s actions generally in the preterite: “He governed in peace and favored the lords and the other poor Indians” (“gouernó pacíficamente y faboreció a los prencipales y a los demás yndios pobres”). Then he described Montesclaros’ accomplished actions, which we examine below in detail. At this point, however, Guaman Poma turned to an assessment of Montesclaros’ governance in a predictive mode: 

He has performed other very holy works in the service of God and His Majesty as a Christian and as a caballero and lord, and in the future he will perform other very great and good works which will extend even further his service to God and His Majesty. By this [example] other caballeros will follow the true and straight path. Other viceroys will be envious of the fact that this very Christian man has shown so much favor to the poor Indians in the afore-mentioned mines.  From all this, the wealth of His Majesty will be multiplied if the Indians do not die first.  God and His Majesty will be grateful to him for writing about all his holy good works and service to Our Lord and His Majesty; it will be the legacy of this very Christian caballero in this kingdom and in the world 

Y a hecho otras obras muy sanctas en seruicio de Dios y de Su Magestad como hombre cristiano y cauallero y principal. Y adelante hará otras obras muy grandes y buenas por donde creserá más el servicio de Dios y de Su Magestad, por donde otros caualleros ciguirá el camino uerdadero y derecho. Otros bizorreys tendrán enbidia de que este cristianícimo a dado tanto fabor a los pobres yndios de las dichas minas. De ello multiplicará la hazienda de Su Magestad ci no se acaua de murir los yndios.  Dios y Su Magestad le agradeserá escriuiendo toda su santa buena obra y serbicio de Dios Nuestro Señor y de Su Magestad; que será memoria en este rreyno y en el mundo deste cauallero cristianícimo.

This switch that Guaman Poma makes in this verbal portrait from the preterite to the future tense is unique.  It indicates that Montesclaros was ruling when he wrote this text and, beyond that, that Guaman Poma wanted to change his usual account of past actions, either general or specific, in order to set forth the exemplary conduct of Montesclaros as a viable, current model for imitation. Even if the “other very great and good works” that Guaman Poma envisioned for Montesclaros were metaphorical, that is, that his past deeds were to provide examples for others to follow, or if Montesclaros’ further great deeds were to be carried out after he turned over the reins of government to his successor, the forward-looking thrust of this verbal portrait is clear.

In his desire to capitalize on the didactic possibility that this viceroy’s case presented to him, Guaman Poma probably decided to scrap his previous draft, created and entered onto sheet eleven of quire 10 before the manuscript was sewn and paginated, replacing it with this unique, open-ended text oriented toward the future.  He cut out the old sheet and presumably sewed in its replacement. (Attached to the quire during subsequent re-bindings, the single sheet is still only crudely sewn into the closed quire).

Montesclaros had formally assumed his post in Lima on 21 December 1607, and the present version of Guaman Poma’s text features actions that took place in 1608 and 1609. Guaman Poma makes reference to the viceroy’s personal inspection tours to the mercury mines of Huancavelica, which occurred in 1608, as well as to the silver mines of Chocllococha, in the region of Castrovirreina, that took place before the end of March, 1609 (see Latasa Vassallo 1997, 424-426, 494):

And at the command of His Majesty, he [the marquis of  Montesclaros] personally inspected the mines of Chocl[l]ococha, silver mines, and Huancavelica, mercury mines. He saw with his own eyes all the hardships and ill fate—so much death—of the Indians poisoned by mercury vapors and of how this afore-mentioned kingdom of Peru was becoming depopulated and of how it would continue to be depopulated in the future. He was to inform his Majesty about all this, about everything. Finding himself in the king’s favor, he wrote to His Majesty, informing him about everything on behalf of the poor Indians, so that proper remedies could be applied.

Y por mandado de su Magestad [el marqués de Montesclaros] becitó las minas de Chocl[l]o Cocha, minas de plata, y Guanca Bilca, minas de azogue. Con su persona los uido a uista de ojos todo el trauajo y mala uentura—tanta muerte—de los yndios azogados y de auerse despobládose este dicho rreyno del Pirú y de cómo se a de despoblarse más adelante. De ello auía de enformar a su Magestad de todo ello. Ya faborecido, escrito a su Magestad, enformándolo todo en fabor de los pobres yndios, para que se ponga en rremedio.

Guaman Poma here proves himself to be very well informed; his account is borne out by the documentary record. Montesclaros’ visit to the silver mines of Castrovirreina (Chocllococha) indeed had been mandated by a royal decree, as Guaman Poma writes; it was dispatched from Madrid on 12 December 1606. Furthermore, after his 1608 inspection of the Huancavelica mines, Montesclaros did submit, as Guaman Poma indicates, a long dispatch to the king; it was dated 14 January 1609. Montesclaros likewise prepared a formal report on 29 March 1609, after his subsequent inspection tour to the mines of Castrovirreina (Latasa Vassallo 1997, 426, note 1; 494, notes 457 and 460).

Guaman Poma personally knew and frequented the mining region of Castrovirreina and Huancavelica to which he makes reference.  He mentioned, for example, having heard a sermon preached there on Ash Wednesday in 1614 and of having stopped there later, on his way to Lima, where “his vassals recognized him and embraced him and told him about all the miseries that they suffered in the province and its mines” (actual pages 1114 and 1123). His knowledge of the area is demonstrated by his references to Huancavelica and its provinces of Angaraes, Tayacaja, and Castrovirreina.  In addition to these sites, he also mentioned, in the course of his writing, the settlements of Chocllococha, Angaraes, Huaytará, Santiago de los Chocorvos, San Pedro de Tambopata, Acara (Acoria), and San Cristóbal, as well as the Yauyos ethnic group (Porras Barrenechea 1948, 31, 32, note 19). Huancavelica was one of the four areas in the Andes of today’s central and southern Peru for which Guaman Poma’s references are sufficiently detailed to confirm his knowledge and experience of them; the others are Huamanga and the province of Lucanas in its jurisdiction, and, adjacent to Lucanas, the province of Aymaraes (see Adorno 2001).

The (predictive) historical role that Guaman Poma assigned to Montesclaros reflected his own abiding preoccupation about the exploitation and destruction of native Andeans in the mines. Guaman Poma’s views can be summarized as follows. He devoted a prominent section in the chapter on colonial Indian governance, corregimiento, to the subject of mining, initiating this internal sub-chapter with a drawing of the torture of native lords by miners and judges, and going on to review the conduct of the full range of mining officials, from coopted native Andean intermediaries to Spanish majordomos, who were responsible for the treatment of Andean laborers and conditions in the mines (actual pages 529-539; Figure 16). His emendations to the completed manuscript likewise reiterate the range and depth of his concerns about the human destruction caused in the mines, the need to regulate the conditions and compensation of indigenous mining laborers, and the enormous economic gain that mining production provided to the Spanish crown (actual pages 535, 977, 1005, 1066-67; see Section 4.1, item 6, above). Additionally, Guaman Poma praised Montesclaros’ predecessor, Don Gaspar de Zúniga y Acevedo (“Don Carlos Monterrey”) (1604-1606), for having “begun to favor the poor Indians because it disturbed him very much that the Indians died suddenly in the mines, that they died, poisoned by mercury vapors” (“Comensó a faboreser a los yndios pobres que le pesaua de que los yndios se muriese súpitamente cin confesarse en las minas, y que se muriesen asogados”) (actual page 473).

All these interventions support the importance of these concerns in Guaman Poma’s presentation of Montesclaros as the “very Christian, great alms-giver, and charitable friend of the poor” (“muy cristianícimo, gran limosnero y caritatibo amigo de los pobres”). Lauding Montesclaros for having seen “with his own eyes” the hardships suffered by Andeans and for having written to the king, “informing him about everything in order to favor the poor Indians,” Guaman Poma reveals his appreciation of the viceroy’s understanding of the critical issues of the day. Montesclaros’ interest in reforming mining abuses and searching for greater controls constituted, as Guaman Poma saw it, the viceroy’s greatest potential contribution to colonial governance in the Andes.

Guaman Poma made his presentation convey the fact that he wrote it at the time that Montesclaros was fully exercising that office. “He will accomplish more; he will be a model for others” is a message unique to the entire Nueva corónica y buen gobierno. No one, save Montesclaros, is cast in this presentified, future-oriented role. I believe that this important conceptualization, unique among the depictions of all other exemplary Andean or European personages in the work, was the cause for Guaman Poma to reconsider and recast his account of the eleventh viceroy whose term of office, ironically, he did see come to an end. Although Guaman Poma would not be the first author in history to fail to meet a self-imposed deadline for the completion of his work, it is clear that he anticipated an earlier filing date and that Montesclaros was to have been the living, current example of the exemplary viceroy that Guaman Poma wished to commend to king Philip III.

When did Guaman Poma make his replacement entry?  He had to have done it after the manuscript was bound, otherwise he would have substituted a full double sheet or, after cutting out the unsatisfactory Montesclaros entry, he would have pasted the replacement single sheet onto the remaining single sheet occupied by actual pages 484-485. Beyond the fact that the replacement was made after Guaman Poma initially “completed” his book, it is impossible to determine with certainty whether he prepared it in Lucanas or later in Lima. Because of Guaman Poma’s knowledge of the mining area, he did not need the new sources of information that Lima might have provided him. The  mining region of Huancavelica and Castrovirreina was for Guaman Poma a matter of “local” knowledge. Hence he could have made the decision to highlight Montesclaros in this fashion at any point after he “completed” the book in Lucanas and before he made his final revisions in 1616 in Lima.

Guaman Poma’s focus on Montesclaros invites us to take a look at the viceroy’s own writings.

4.4. Don Juan de Mendoza y Luna: Luz de materias de Indias (GkS 589, 2°)
Guaman Poma’s assessment of the most grave problems facing the viceroyalty are consonant with those outlined by Montesclaros in the final report he filed on his governance of Peru (Adorno 1979-80, 21, 28, note 29). Dated 12 December 1615, the viceroy’s report to his successor, Don Francisco de Borja y Aragón, the prince de Esquilache, warned of the errors in governing into which he himself had fallen, considered a broad range of complex and important questions regarding the governance of Peru, and analyzed the peculiarity of the Peruvian government with its two, mutually dependent but differentiated “republics,” one of Indians, the other of Spaniards.

4.5. The Central Role of Chapter 20
The thematic significance in the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno of Montesclaros’ “presentified” rule supports the story that the codicological evidence tells more broadly. That is, if Montesclaros’ regime was the “living,” current capstone of Guaman Poma’s exemplary presentation of good civil governance, it was nevertheless part of a much larger structure of models for colonial reform that Guaman Poma put forward.

4.6. The Author and Artist as His Own Scribe
The consideration of the codicological evidence that the autograph manuscript presents brings forth one entirely new dimension about Guaman Poma’s execution of his work. While we are familiar with Guaman Poma as an artist who also plays the role of author, or vice versa, the codicological inquiry teaches us what it means for that artist and author to serve as his own scribe. As he handles innumerable and difficult choices, we discover not the ineptitude of a self-taught Andean amateur, but an author and artist in control of his own medium.

4.7. Sealing the Text, Closing the Book: Frontispiece Calculations
After the insertion of the “Camina el autor” chapter Guaman Poma attempted to calculate the length of his work, and he entered his findings on its frontispiece. The frontispiece reveals that Guaman Poma made four such successive attempts to close and “lock” his book. For many years these notations were commonly misjudged to be Guaman Poma’s statement that his work was meant for those who were blind, that is, illiterate (“pliegos” read as “ciegos,” blind), and those who could see (“fojas” read as “ojos,” eyes). During my 1977 examination of the autograph manuscript I was able to correct this popular misapprehension; Guaman Poma was in fact tabulating the length of his manuscript. His calculations, however, are more complex than I had earlier supposed (Adorno1980, vol. 1., p. xxxviii, note 14; vol. 3, p. 1126, note 1).  

The key to interpreting these calculations depends on recognizing that they constitute a sequence; they are not parallel statements of a single status quo. The four different calculations exhibit several changes in ink color within each of the upper and lower tallies as well as between them. The upper tallies, read successively as 579 and 597 “fojas,” or sheets, yield 1158 and 1194 pages (See illustration). The lower tallies, read successively as 144 and 146 “pliegos” or units of eight, yield, respectively, 1152 and 1168 pages. The reading of these annotations in the high-resolution photographs prepared by the Royal Library reveals, even more clearly than does the digital edition, the superimposition of “ssays” over “quatro,” and the “6” over the “4,” that modifies “144” to “146” in the “pliegos” count at the bottom of the page. 

The “5979” sequence in the upper tallies can be disassembled in this manner:  It appears that the first entry was “quinientas y siete[n]ta y 9 oxas,” augmented, for clarity, by the introduction of the phrase “579 fojas,” yielding, in this calculation of words and ciphers, 579 sheets, or 1158 pages. The second calculation results in “quinientas y nobenta y siete oxas – 597 fojas”, with “nobe” overwriting “siete” of “siete[n]ta” to produce “nobenta,” with ciphers for “7” probably replacing those of the previous “9” (these are illegible). Correcting the numerical calculation, a “9” is inserted between “5” and “7” of “579” and a brown smudge is introduced to cancel the “9” of “579,” thus converting that number and phrase from “579 fojas” to “597 fojas.”

Since Guaman Poma never numbered the nine pages of his “Tabla,” it is to be expected that his tallies concern only the body of his work (See illustration).

The calculation of 579 sheets or 1158 pages corresponded to a moment prior to the ten-page adjustment Guaman Poma introduced at his page 986. At that point in time, however, he had already sewn the book, numbered the pages, recorded the appropriate page numbers in his “Tabla,” and written “Camina el autor.” The total of 1158 pages was produced by taking his initial pagination of the book through chapter 35 (the inns on the royal road), that is, page 1083 (actual page 1103), and adding the number of pages, 36 and 39, respectively, that corresponded to the chapters “Camina el autor” and “the months of the year”: 1083 + 36 + 39 = 1158. 

After Guaman Poma made in Lima a ten-page adjustment in the pagination of his book (see Section 3.7, above), he recalculated his page total. Adding 10 to the previous total of 1158 pages yielded 1168 pages. Dividing that number by 8 to obtain the number of folds of eight pages, he must have arrived at the incorrect number of 144, that is, 144 “pliegos” or units of eight. Repeating the exercise of 1168 divided by 8, he arrived at the correct number of 146; hence he corrected “144 pliegos” to “146 pliegos.”

His fourth and final tally of  “597 fojas,” yielding 1194 pages, must have occurred at a still later moment. Perhaps hurriedly seeking to “seal” his book and forgetting that he had already incorporated into his calculations the two, still-loose quires of the eighteen sheets of the “Camina el autor” chapter, he again added 18 to his earlier calculation of 579 sheets and arrived at the total of 597 sheets. This highest estimate of the manuscript’s length can be attributed to Guaman Poma’s counting the “Camina el autor” chapter twice. It does not reflect any potential intention to add to the finished book yet another supplementary chapter of eighteen sheets, because no such additional insertion is evidenced by any of his repagination efforts. Although his final calculation of 597 sheets was incorrect, it represents the culmination of a process whereby Guaman Poma prepared his work for an uncertain future as he closed it, for the last time, in 1616.

4.8. The “First of the New Chronicles”
Although we do not know at what point Guaman Poma modified the title of his work from El primero i nueva corónica i buen gobierno to El primer nueva corónica i buen gobierno (See illustration), we can speculate that it might have come at or near the end of his final revisions and emendations. It was in these final revisions that he attempted to strengthen the future-oriented goals of his remedial program and he may have felt that his focus had shifted heavily in that direction: The viceroy Montesclaros emerged as a living exemplar of just rule. Through his portrayal and other additions to the work, Guaman Poma emphasized the importance of mining to the Spanish economy and the threat of destruction it posed to Andean society. The priestly presence in Peru was also an object of intensified concern, and “Camina el autor” added an outraged lament about the horrors of the campaigns to “extirpate idolatry.” This late chapter also renewed Guaman Poma’s outcry about the devastating effects of mestizaje, racial mixing, on the Andean race and the social fabric of Andean Peru. The telling of history, one of the twin goals of the work, becomes, relatively speaking, somewhat eclipsed by its equal partner, the exposé of colonial abuses and the exposition of proposals for good governance.

We can imagine that it was at this point that Guaman Poma reconsidered the balance between the two focal points of his tandem project. Late revisions and inserted sheets aside, even by the datum of sheer page count the Buen gobierno exceeded the length of the Nueva corónica by several hundred pages, occupying almost two-thirds of the work. Did Guaman Poma decide that the balance had shifted, emphasizing, when all was said and done, the treatise on good governance over the treatment of Andean history?  If this were the case, then “history” might no longer be an equal partner, of interest for its own sake, but rather an instrumental tool within the larger work.

This “tool” could serve to establish his credibility as princely adviser by demonstrating his own base of knowledge in the society for which he sought to serve as advocate. It could also, as I have demonstrated elsewhere (Adorno 2000), “rewrite history” so as to make its course conform to the goals that Guaman Poma sought for the redress of personal and societal grievances and the return of Andean sovereignty. In this regard, perhaps he found that his chronicle ought not to be described as “first and new,” in which “first” and “new” carried synonymous or equivalent weight,  but rather as the “first new chronicle,” or the “first of the new chronicles,” which proclaimed its primacy in a new hierarchy of historico-literary values. It suggests, in part, that Guaman Poma viewed his work as the inauguration of a new departure in chronicle-writing that would correct the earlier, European-authored versions of Inka and Spanish conquest histories of Peru. His critical review of  previous chronicles (chapter 34) bears out this interpretation of his cryptic title insofar as it includes an implicit (but not subtle) defense of his own work.

The notion of historiographic “newness” as the combination of two, distinctive generic entities had been suggested by the Jesuit José de Acosta with whose works Guaman Poma was familiar.  Acosta (1962, 13) had called his own 1588 Historia natural y moral de las Indias “new” because it was in part “history and in part philosophy.” With or without Acosta as a guide (Guaman Poma referred to Acosta’s other works, not the Historia that contains the assertion), the notion of “newness” representing something that was a hybrid or result of a mixture would not have been unfamiliar to Guaman Poma. 

From our vantage point today, the interest that Guaman Poma’s work arouses is in the cultural domain, that is, in his handling of the institutions and conventions of Andean culture vis-à-vis his manipulation of those of  Spanish and European culture. One of the areas long ago mentioned but insufficiently developed on the European “side” of Guaman Poma’s cultural repertoire is the relationship of his work to those of advisement to the king on political, administrative, and economic matters. Guaman Poma’s proposals for reform constitute the backbone of his book, which he located within the literary tradition of counsel to the prince (Adorno 1974, 151-155). While elements representing a range of European artistic conventions and literary genres have been identified in Guaman Poma’s work, from Renaissance biography to Counter-Reformational sermons (Adorno 2000), perhaps the model that best serves to classify it according to the lights of  its own day is, in the end, the arbitrio. I emphasize “in the end” because the work’s definition took shape as a dynamic process; we see that Guaman Poma worked unceasingly at developing and emending its contents, as I have described them throughout this paper.

Arbitrio was the name given in the first half of the seventeenth century to treatises offering proposals for fiscal reform to save Spain from the economic ruin into which it was plummeting. The authors of such works were referred to, not always flatteringly, as arbitristas. They included lawyers, clerics, merchants, royal officials or “plain adventurers,” all of whom saw themselves as men of special social responsibility. Their approaches varied, from advocating economic or fiscal reform to proposing new mental attitudes deemed necessary if new sources of wealth were to be generated. (Guaman Poma fits in here.) No matter how grave the arbitristas’ assessment of the situation at hand, argues British historian Sir John Elliott (1986, 88-89), all of them were “imbued with the belief that something must, and could, be done.”

Given the fact that Guaman Poma’s proposals for reform were directed to king Philip III and that, at bottom, all his recommendations for political, ecclesiastical, and social betterment were to have as their effect not only justice for the Andean people (Guaman Poma’s first cause) but also the Spanish monarchy’s greater economic good (his most insistent rhetorical argument), the arbitrio classification is one that can be put forward with credibility. The notion of the arbitrio underscores the potential interest of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno in its focus on governmental and administrative affairs. It “makes visible” the dozens of the work’s “prologues,” easily seen as merely perplexing or miscast, from a literary historical perspective, in their placement at the end of the chapters they accompany. Spanning the entire work, from the Nueva corónica’s outline of imperial Inka policies through the Buen gobierno’s painstaking survey of social and ethnic groups that made up the Spanish “kingdom of the Indies of Peru,” Guaman Poma’s hortative “prologues” stand as the best evidence in revealing that the work was, as its title indicated, devoted to moving the reader--from the king to all his colonial vassals--to take up the cause of “good government”, that is, of justice. 

The prologues of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno can be readily accessed in the online edition through its table of contents. 

In all its dimensions, the intricate organization and layered construction of Guaman Poma's work, from its articulation of picture and prose to that of chapter and prologue, reveal the complexity and coherence of his conceptualization, as author and artist, and his success as his own scribe. In this regard, the coordination of codicological and textual evidence provides more than insight into aspects of the work’s conceptualization, now frozen in time, or even its systematic emendation, for the sake of charting one-time corrections and expansions. The codicological evidence in conjunction with the textual testimony give voice to the silent but dynamic process through which the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno gives an account of its material assembly and substantive realization. Together, these mutually supportive procedures turn the dead artifact into a living text and allow it to perform the juridically impossible act of being a “witness unto itself,” that is, a book that tells the story of its own making.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Mr. Harald Ilsøe, historian and former Research Librarian at the Royal Library, for his intellectual generosity in sharing with me his vast knowledge of the history of the Royal Library’s holdings. He responded to my queries from the bounty of his bibliographic expertise on numerous occasions and in great detail, for which I am profoundly grateful. Our exchanges were made possible by Mr. Ivan Boserup, Head of the Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books, who guided our conversation and, in effect, carried out my side of it by long distance and in Danish. He has also provided information in response to my countless queries about codicological matters, and he has been a most valued interlocutor on virtually every interpretive point in this paper. To Dr. Karen Skovgaard-Petersen, Senior Researcher at the Royal Library, I express my thanks for a complete and penetrating reading of the near-final draft. To Mr. Erland Kolding Nielsen, Director General of the Royal Library, I extend my deepest gratitude for the generosity with which he has made the Library’s remarkable resources available to me.

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© Rolena Adorno 2002