Early Modern Spain

MEXICO 212 N.45 / 1585 / Informaciones of Baltasar Dorantes de Carranza: Transcription notes

Transcription

The document is mostly easy to read, but the hand changes frequently. Although two scribes are mentioned, this is almost certainly a copy of the original document produced by them.

The Page

The transcription follows the original document as closely as possible.
Page breaks and carriage returns follow the original.
The orignal document marks paragraphs with a υ in the margin, sometimes underlined. This usually indicates a new question in the interrogatorio. The symbol is replaced here with “”.
The original document signals new witnesses in the margin either as υttº, ttº, or tº. This is shown uniformly as “t[estigo]o –” in the text.
The original document divides different paragraphs from one another with varying degrees of space. For the sake of clarity a line is left here.
Where the original marks the end of a paragraph with a line or similar form of rubric this is indicated “---”, but the lines and other markings such as a cross that indicate the top and bottom of a page are not indicated.
With the excpetion of three of the folios there is no pagination in the original document. The page numbers followed here reflect the number assigned t[estig]o the scanned images in the AGI.

The Text

All variations of spelling are retained: e.g. “mucho” and “muncho”, but
the occasional capitalisation of letters in the original has been supressed.
Where it is not clear which letter the copyist intended, the letter most closely resembling the mark on the page is transcribed here; this most commonly happens with confusion surrounding “b” and “v” and “u” and “v”.
There are no accents in the original except for the tilde over the “ñ” which is retained.
Full stops have been eliminated. They are rarely used in the original and are indistinguishable from marks showing from the other side of the folio in the copy used here made from the scanned digital image.
Abbreviations are not expanded and only the letters marked in the original are recorded: e.g. “q l” for que el. The only exception is the frequent “to” which has been expanded to “t[estig]o” throughout.
Superscript abbreviations are not shown as such: e.g. “jº” for Juan is shown “jo”.
and the very few interpolations above the line are not indicated as such.
Magestad is abbreviated in the original as “mag” with a cross above and which is rendered in the transcription as “mag+”.
Crossings out in the orginal are indicated and deciphered where possible.
Mistakes cealry attributable to the scribe or copyist are not supressed but signaled conventionally: “[sic].”
“[sic]” is also used where the scribe varies from usual practice, e.g. “hacer” for the usual “haçer.”
Where a word or letter is illegible the lacuna is marked […].
Where possible as much of the original has been transcribed; where this does not make sense and the accuracy of the transcription is uncertain this is marked [?].

The Translation

The original document contains the bulk of an official legal report, the purpose of which was to establish the veracity of the claims on which Baltsar Dorantes based his petition for royal favour. It is not a narrative and is of no literary merit, being a transcript of witness statements elicited under oath and during cross-examination based on the interrogatorio, or official list of questions.

The brief summary above will help to orientate scholars and provides a general overview of the information contained in the document. The purpose of the translation is as an aid to scholars working with the Spanish transcription and it therefore closely follows the original, a document that is unpunctuated and contains many scribal errors. Thus, while every effort has been made to render the sense in correct English and basic word order has been changed in places for this reason, no attempt has been made at inteterpretation by suggesting meaning through translation where the sense is not clear in the original. Your attention is drawn to the continuous failure to identify the subjects of verbs and object pronouns, although it is usually easy to understand who is referring to whom.

The only exceptions to the absence of editorial intervention are:

the use of commas not present in the original in order to provide a minimum of punctuation so as to made the documents slightly easier to read;
the use of full-stops to mark the end of paragraphs; and
the occasional addition of words, usually prepositions, that help to render the Spanish in reasonably familiar English Full-stops mark the end of paragraphs only.

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