Friday, February 20, 2015

Book #51

Mexican Inquisition Trial Manuscripts

I had an opportunity to take a workshop conducted by Gillian Boal a few years ago. She had studied the structure of the bound trial manuscripts that were produced during the Mexican Inquisition. This is my replica of one of those manuscripts. All the documents from a trial were bound together at the end of the trial and various pieces of evidence were included by binding them permanently into the book. My replica includes some little extra bits of paper, a small booklet, a feather, a noose, and a leather amulet with mysterious contents, all bound in among the pages.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

Beautiful. How do you bind things in books like this? Is there a tutorial or resource you recommend?

MyHandboundBooks said...

Thanks. I haven't seen any tutorials or other written instructions for this sort of thing. As I mentioned, I did this in a workshop with someone who had studied the original books - which not many have done, so the details are not very widespread. But generally, all these trial document manuscripts varied in construction - depending on who the individual binders were and depending on the contents that were needed. So there was no concrete set of rules - it was more like they each made it up as they went along. As you could do!

Helmi said...

Beautiful!

MyHandboundBooks said...

Thank you Helmi :)

Neefer said...

That's fabulous

Neefer said...

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/give/historyroom/panel10a.html

UC Berkeley Library History Room has a collection of 61 volumes from the Mexican Inquisition.

There's a pic on the website.

MyHandboundBooks said...

Thanks for the link, Neefer. Yes, that is where Gillian Boal was working when she taught this workshop.