My last two posts with Judith Mansilla discussed a dimension of law that consumed perhaps the greatest part of colonial Spanish Americans’ legal experiences: a world of verbal agreements, handshakes, and homemade contracts or bills of sale. But we confronted the historian’s dependence on the more official legal archive to provide us glimpses of this dimension, specifically on the civil case record where litigants and witnesses referred to their “pacts,” or “oral receipts.”
We should not, however, assume that this dimension of law was unsanctioned or fell into a category of the broadly “normative” as opposed to the strictly “legal.” (cont'd)
