This is a guest post by Dasha Kolyaskina. Dasha is working in the Collection Services Division of the Law Library of Congress as part of the Library of Congress’s Junior Fellows Program. The program’s focus is to increase access to our collections for our various patron groups.
As a Junior Fellow at the Law Library this summer, I had the opportunity to work with the Hispanic Legal Documents Collection that the Library of Congress purchased in 1941. The collection of unbound manuscripts is housed in 96 document boxes, each with several hundreds of pages of material in Spanish, Catalan, Aragonese, Proto-Castilian, Portuguese and Latin. The boxes contain a wide range of legal and municipal documents from the mid-15th to early 20th centuries. The documents I worked with this summer have come from all around the Spanish-speaking world, but were centered in México, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, and Spain.
The material in the collection includes everything from provincial tax rolls to criminal proceedings but also contains customs documents, public notices and official correspondence. Items of particular interest include late medieval manuscripts and documents relating to the Spanish Inquisition as well as various decrees and statutes from Spanish monarchs and officials.