Translating Solórzano (2016-)
This project will produce a digital, bilingual Latin-English critical edition of the Disputationum de Indiarum iure, sive de iusta Indiarum occidentalium gubernatione (Madrid, 1639), commonly known as de Gubernatione, by Spanish colonial bureaucrat Juan de Solórzano Pereira. This text is a foundational work of Spanish colonial administrative jurisprudence. De Gubernatione has never been translated from the original Latin. In this text, Solórzano compiled and explained legislation that broadly governed the institutions and issues that were specific to the New World, such as the treatment of Indigenous peoples by Spaniards, the encomienda, the functioning of the church under Patronato Real, the responsibilities of colonial officials, and taxation.
This unique work by a highly trained lawyer and bureaucrat who had extensive New World experience offers unparalleled contemporary insight into how the institutions of colonialism were broadly constructed. Solórzano reflected on the reality of attempts to implement royal legislation and provides an academic context and justification of these colonial institutions. His work is therefore of immense value to scholars and students of colonial Latin America, legal history and intellectual history who will have unparalleled new ways to interact with this text through its translation and publication in a digital format.
This project is based at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt.
The Spanish Pacific, 1521-1815: A Reader of Primary Sources, ed. Christina Lee and Ricardo Padrón (2020 and 2024)
I have contributed to both volumes of this series, which was designed to increase the availability of sources from the early modern Spanish Pacific for a pedagogical context. My first text, ‘The 1604 Decree of Philip III Regulating Philippine Trade,’ was edited and translated for the first volume with Prof. Tatiana Seijas and examined a piece of royal legislation about the highly lucrative, transpacific commercial route between Asia and the Americas which passed through early modern Manila. My second text, ‘Two Friars Protest the Restriction on Missionaries Traveling to Japan (1604?–5)’, considered a long-running conflict between Spanish and Portuguese missionaries and their claims to undertake evangelical work in Japan.
Cristophorus Mylaeus, De Scribenda Universitates Rerum, Basel, 1551. (2019-)
I have also translated Book II (“de Prudentia”) of Cristophorus Mylaeus’s De Scribenda Universitates Rerum (Basel, 1551) for Mark Meadow (UCSB History of Art and Architecture), which he used for his 2021 article, “Quanta prudentia et usus administrandae reipublicae: Quiccheberg and Mylaeus on the utility of techne.”
The legislation of the Archdiocese of Santafé in the colonial period (2018)
This was a collaborative project with Juan Fernando Cobo Betancourt to produce the first complete edition of the ecclesiastical legislation of the New Kingdom of Granada in the colonial period with explanatory notes and a critical commentary. The edition is composed of four texts — the constitutions of the diocesan synods of 1556 and 1606, the 1576 catechism of Archbishop Zapata, and of the First Provincial Council of Santafé of 1625 — and I was involved in transcribing and translating the Provincial Council from the original Latin and also in compiling the critical apparatus.
This project was generously funded by the Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia in Bogotá and the resulting volume was published in 2018.