Surviving Censorship in Early Modern Spain

Better known by the royal decrees that governed it than by its practice, book censorship in Early Modern Spain remains an elusive topic. How did it work in individual instances? Were there authors who defied it? I take up here two works, one an imprint published and expurgated; the other a manuscript, approved for printing but never published. Both reveal the marks of the censor’s pen (occasionally, knife) but also the literary personalities of the authors whose writings were scrutinized. Both works belong to the genre of “proto-anthropology” that studied civilizations ancient and modern, from the Old World and the New. Please meet Fray Jerónimo Román y Zamora and his Repúblicas del mundo [Republics of the World] and Fray Martín de Murúa, author of Historia General del Piru [General History of Peru]. Along the way we encounter their respective readers, “Dr. Odriozola” and Fray Alonso Remón, as well as the larger-than-life presence of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas. “Obedezco pero no cumplo” is an old Spanish saying that means “I obey but I do not comply”, that is, “I acknowledge your demand but I am not fulfilling its obligations”.1 I have chosen it to set the tone for the consideration of my topic, which is book censorship and those authors who defied it.2 Book censorship in Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is best known by its laws and its commonplaces. One of them is that if an author’s work was censored — either prohibited from publication or expurgated afterward — it shut down that author forever. Another is that, if an author’s work was not published in its day, it must have been because it was censored and prohibited from publication. But was this 1. All English-language translations are my own. 2. An initial version of this paper was presented as a keynote address at the Society for Textual Scholarship conference, “Ephemerality: The Precarious and the Preserved”, The New School and New York University, March 21, 2019. I thank STS Conference Organizer Stephanie Browner and Textual Cultures General Editor Marta Werner for inviting my contributions, respectively, to the conference and the journal. Textual Cultures 13.1 (2020): 29–74. DOI: 10.14434/textual.v13i1.30070 30 | Textual Cultures 13.1 (2020) always true? What about those authors who stood up to censorship? Institutional censorship, whether done by the church or the state, was bureaucratic and, like all bureaucracies then and now, it was inefficient and often arbitrary. Banking on this, fearless authors attempted to get around it. Let’s see how they fared. The Roman Catholic Church made its first move into book censorship, aimed at stopping the Protestant Reformation’s spread to Spain, in 1521.3 Although executed to preserve the “purity of faith”, church and state soon enough were working hand in hand, and the son of Charles V, Philip II, who reigned from 1556 to 1598, used the institution against his political enemies.4 A typical accusation was heresy, but it was often used to cloak the accused’s criticism of the state. Although heretical ideas were cause for censorship, they alone were not cause for imprisonment; when physical incarceration accompanied textual suppression, something more was at stake: this included, famously, the use of empirical methods to perform Scriptural analysis.5 (The reading and writing of novels were not targeted, 3. The first prohibitions of books in Spain came about during the reign of Charles V, when the Inquisitor General, Adrian of Utrecht, proscribed the entry into Spain of the works of Martin Luther. As Lea (1907, 3: 482) observed: Adrian’s “decree of April, 1521, is couched in the most absolute terms; the books in question had been prohibited by the inquisitors and spiritual judges, wherefore the tribunals were instructed to order, under heavy censures and civil penalties, that no one should possess or sell them, whether in Latin or Romance, but should, within three days after notice, bring them to the Inquisition to be publicly burnt; the edict was to be published in a sermon of faith and, after publication, any one possessing or selling them, or knowing that others possessed them and not denouncing the offenders, was to suffer the penalties announced by the inquisitors, while all ecclesiastical and secular authorities were ordered to render whatever aid might be necessary”. 4. As scholarship since the 1980s has taken the approach that the Inquisition was an agency of ideological control (Márquez 1980; Pinto Crespo 1983; Kamen [1967] 1985), Lea’s position of more than a century ago again gains currency: “The matters liable to condemnation were by no means confined to heresy, but covered a wide region of morals and of ecclesiastical and secular politics, for the Inquisition was too useful an instrument of statecraft not to be effectively employed in maintaining monarchical as well as clerical absolutism” (1897, 74). 5. Such was the case of Fray Luis de León, the Augustinian friar jailed for his Spanish translation and commentary of the Song of Songs (Cantar de los Cantares) along with other “offenses”. Rendering Scriptural texts in the vernacular was considered a theological infraction by the Inquisition. The censors’ quarrel R. Adorno : “Obedezco pero no cumplo” | 31 as has so often been claimed.) Although public and private morals deemed reprehensible were not overlooked, the gravest danger was posed by nonChristian religious belief and sacred custom. The prohibition and confiscation of books was the first form of Inquisitorial censorship, and it was augmented by expurgation. The Expurgation Index was created in 1570 by Benito Arias Montano, the Hebraist who edited the Antwerp Polyglot Bible; he is considered to have been of possible converso origin (Márquez 1980, 132). This method of censorship specified pages and passages for excision, not whole books for destruction (Rekers [1961] 1972, 16–7). Designed to censor imprints that were only partially or incidentally offensive to “good faith and morals”, it was a method of censorship that tended, in practice, to preserve more than it obliterated. Instituted under orders of Philip II for the Low Countries where neither the Roman Catholic Church nor the Spanish Inquisition had jurisdiction, Arias Montano’s Expurgation Index was adopted by the Spanish Jesuit historian Juan de Mariana for implementation in Spain, where it became a standard feature of the Spanish Inquisition from 1584 onward (Márquez 1980, 131–2, 143). With these institutional proscriptions as background, I want to look at two cases of individual courage in facing it; both were precarious, and both have been, in different and paradoxical ways, objects of destruction — and preservation. The first is an imprint that was published, then expurgated, then published again in a different but expanded version. Before one of its copies was seized from its private owner for expurgation, it tells a lively story of reader interest, and we will look at that, too. The second is a fair-copied, ready-to-print manuscript that received royal approbation, arriving at the threshold of publication without crossing it. This case reveals the internal workings, the “behind the scenes” phases of a book’s pre-publication. Both authors may well have uttered the phrase, “Obedezco pero no cumplo”, as they wrote the works by which we know them today. was not with poetry and eloquence but rather with the discipline of philology, which, challenging the allegorical, authoritative interpretation of Scripture based on the Church fathers, attempted to establish formal and empirical criteria that clashed with the dogmatic conceptions of the inquisitors. As the cultural orientation of Christian humanism, philology was often considered Hebraist and rabbinical in its preference for literal rather than symbolic meanings, and its inquisitorial persecution continued to the end of the sixteenth century (Márquez 1980, 40–1, 104–8). 32 | Textual Cultures 13.1 (2020) Fray Jerónimo Román y Zamora’s Repúblicas del mundo (1575, 1595) My first example of “Obedezco pero no cumplo” is Fray Jerónimo Román y Zamora (1536–1597). He was a member of the Order of Saint Augustine in Spain, and he wrote some twenty books on a wide range of religious topics, most of them concerned with the Augustinian Order, of which he was appointed official chronicler in 1573 (Moral 1897, 14–6). He was active from the 1560s to the 1590s. His encyclopedia of “all the customs of all the peoples of the world, ancient and modern”, titled Repúblicas del mundo (1575, 1595), followed the model of Johann Boemus’s immensely successful Manners, laws and customs of all nations, published in Latin in Augsburg in 1520.6 When it appeared in 1575, Román’s Repúblicas del mundo consisted of two volumes. Volume one treated Hebrew and Christian civilizations, and volume two, ancient and modern non-Christian (“pagan and barbarous”) civilizations, including those of the Ottoman Turk, the “Moors” (Muslims), and the pre-Columbian and early Spanish colonial Americas (“las Indias Occidentales”). Román’s two-volume Repúblicas del mundo was censored and expurgated. It appeared in 1581 and 1583 on the respective Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions’ indices of prohibited books and, in 1584, on Gaspar de Quiroga’s Spanish index of books to be expurgated. It appeared subsequently on the indices of censored books in Rome in 1590, Madrid in 1612, and Lisbon in 1624. Because the work was mandated for expurgation, I wanted to examine its evidence in available copies. I studied the first-edition imprint (1575) at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale Univer6. Reprinted many times, the 1542 edition of Omnium gentium mores, leges, & ritus ex multis clarissimis rerum scriptoribus included the appearance of materials on the New World. In 1556, Boemus’s work appeared in Spanish, translated by Francisco Tamara and published in Antwerp under the title, El libro de las costumbres de todas las gentes del mundo y de las Indias (John Carter Brown Library 1980, 1: 51, 85). Boemus’s work appeared in some twenty-three editions in Latin, Italian, French, and English as well as Spanish, between 1536 and 1611, according to Hodgen, who describes Boemus’s goals to assemble, on a “broad geographical plan, with the geographical features subordinated to the ethnological, [. . .] the range of human custom, ritual, and ceremony”, and “to inform his readers concerning the laws and governments of other nations” so that they could “form intelligent judgments as to ‘what orders and institutions’ were ‘fittest to be ordayned’ in their own lands for the establishment of perfect peace” ([1964] 1971, 132–3). R. Adorno : “Obedezco pero no cumplo” | 33 sity, the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana, and the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; I examined the second-edition imprint (1595) at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. Based on this evidence, I have cobbled together the account that follows. We begin with the title page of volume two of an expurgated copy of Repúblicas (see Fig. 1) and follow it with the notice that expurgation has been performed on two copies. In one, the handwritten notice is pasted onto the “Yo el Rey”, or royal authorization-to-print page; it is dated August 3, 1589. In the other, the notice of expurgation is handwritten prominently on the title page of volume one, affirming that it had been executed “according to the new expurgation mandate of 1612” (see Figs. 2 and 3). Nevertheless, its intrepid author soldiered on: Román published an expanded, three-volume edition of Repúblicas in 1595. The title page of its volume one carries a printed announcement that the work has been “expurgated according to the expurgation order of the Holy Office”, that it has been examined by many learned men, that it includes much new material (“diversas Repúblicas, que nunca han sido impressas”), that many of the original Repúblicas have been substantially rewritten by the author, and that the work contains abundant, helpful indices (see Fig. 4). Román did not fear censorship; he openly challenged it. Let’s examine the evidence of censorship of the edition of 1575. The República gentílica: Román announced in his prologue that, after completing his principal tasks of writing about Hebrew and Christian civilizations (Part One, which corresponds to the work’s volume one), he realized that his readers — both the learned and the unschooled — would love to know about ancient pagan cultures, and he confessed that, in his youth, these had been the objects of his keenest interest. Thus he wrote the República gentílica. Like other members of the clerical elite, Román had untrammeled access to the world of learning regarding both ancient pagan and modern non-Christian cultures, and he was so secure in his orthodoxy that he sometimes appeared to be heterodox. Among them all, no civilizations, ancient or modern, had been, in Román’s view, so “good at being bad” as those of the ancient Greeks and the Romans after them. So thought one of Román’s readers, too. Examining here the Beinecke imprint, I identify its evident reader-owner as “Dr. Odriozola” (see Fig. 1).7 He inscribed his name in the upper right-hand corner of the title page. 7. The surname is clearly “de Odriozola”, but I cannot make out the abbreviated first name, so I will call him “Doctor” because of his curiosity and learned interests. 34 | Textual Cultures 13.1 (2020) Figure 1. Jerónimo Román y Zamora. 1575. Repúblicas del Mundo. 2 vols. Medina del Campo: Francisco del Canto. Title page, volume 2. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. R. Adorno : “Obedezco pero no cumplo” | 35 Figure 2. Handwritten expurgation notice on royal authorization page. Jerónimo Román y Zamora. 1575. Repúblicas del Mundo. 2 vols. Medina del Campo: Francisco del Canto. Volume 2, unnumbered folio. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 36 | Textual Cultures 13.1 (2020) Figure 3. Handwritten expurgation notice on title page. Jerónimo Román y Zamora. 1575. Repúblicas del Mundo. 2 vols. Medina del Campo: Francisco del Canto. Title page, volume 1. Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. R. Adorno : “Obedezco pero no cumplo” | 37 Figure 4. Second edition with printed explanation of expurgation performed. Jerónimo Román y Zamora. 1595. Repúblicas del Mundo. 3 vols. Salamanca: Juan Fernández. Title page, volume 1. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. 38 | Textual Cultures 13.1 (2020) Figure 6. Dr. Odriozola’s drawing of a mounted Mars. Jerónimo Román y Zamora. 1575. Repúblicas del Mundo. 2 vols. Medina del Campo: Francisco del Canto. Volume 2, 38r. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Figure 5. Dr. Odriozola’s drawing of Venus swimming. Jerónimo Román y Zamora. 1575. Repúblicas del Mundo. 2 vols. Medina del Campo: Francisco del Canto. Volume 2, 21v. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. R. Adorno : “Obedezco pero no cumplo” | 39 Figure 8. Dr. Odriozola comments on author’s sharp wit and notes ancient drunken revelries. Jerónimo Román y Zamora. 1575. Repúblicas del Mundo. 2 vols. Medina del Campo: Francisco del Canto. Volume 2, 48v. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Figure 7. Animals for sacrifice or veneration in ancient times. Jerónimo Román y Zamora. 1575.

3. The first prohibitions of books in Spain came about during the reign of Charles V, when the Inquisitor General, Adrian of Utrecht, proscribed the entry into Spain of the works of Martin Luther. As Lea (1907, 3: 482) observed: Adrian's "decree of April, 1521, is couched in the most absolute terms; the books in question had been prohibited by the inquisitors and spiritual judges, wherefore the tribunals were instructed to order, under heavy censures and civil penalties, that no one should possess or sell them, whether in Latin or Romance, but should, within three days after notice, bring them to the Inquisition to be publicly burnt; the edict was to be published in a sermon of faith and, after publication, any one possessing or selling them, or knowing that others possessed them and not denouncing the offenders, was to suffer the penalties announced by the inquisitors, while all ecclesiastical and secular authorities were ordered to render whatever aid might be necessary". 4. As scholarship since the 1980s has taken the approach that the Inquisition was an agency of ideological control (Márquez 1980;Pinto Crespo 1983;Kamen [1967] 1985), Lea's position of more than a century ago again gains currency: "The matters liable to condemnation were by no means confined to heresy, but covered a wide region of morals and of ecclesiastical and secular politics, for the Inquisition was too useful an instrument of statecraft not to be effectively employed in maintaining monarchical as well as clerical absolutism" (1897, 74). 5. Such was the case of Fray Luis de León, the Augustinian friar jailed for his Spanish translation and commentary of the Song of Songs (Cantar de los Cantares) along with other "offenses". Rendering Scriptural texts in the vernacular was considered a theological infraction by the Inquisition. The censors' quarrel as has so often been claimed.) Although public and private morals deemed reprehensible were not overlooked, the gravest danger was posed by non-Christian religious belief and sacred custom. The prohibition and confiscation of books was the first form of Inquisitorial censorship, and it was augmented by expurgation. The Expurgation Index was created in 1570 by Benito Arias Montano, the Hebraist who edited the Antwerp Polyglot Bible; he is considered to have been of possible converso origin (Márquez 1980, 132). This method of censorship specified pages and passages for excision, not whole books for destruction (Rekers [1961(Rekers [ ] 1972. Designed to censor imprints that were only partially or incidentally offensive to "good faith and morals", it was a method of censorship that tended, in practice, to preserve more than it obliterated. Instituted under orders of Philip II for the Low Countries where neither the Roman Catholic Church nor the Spanish Inquisition had jurisdiction, Arias Montano's Expurgation Index was adopted by the Spanish Jesuit historian Juan de Mariana for implementation in Spain, where it became a standard feature of the Spanish Inquisition from 1584 onward (Márquez 1980, 131-2, 143). With these institutional proscriptions as background, I want to look at two cases of individual courage in facing it; both were precarious, and both have been, in different and paradoxical ways, objects of destruction -and preservation.
The first is an imprint that was published, then expurgated, then published again in a different but expanded version. Before one of its copies was seized from its private owner for expurgation, it tells a lively story of reader interest, and we will look at that, too. The second is a fair-copied, ready-to-print manuscript that received royal approbation, arriving at the threshold of publication without crossing it. This case reveals the internal workings, the "behind the scenes" phases of a book's pre-publication. Both authors may well have uttered the phrase, "Obedezco pero no cumplo", as they wrote the works by which we know them today.
was not with poetry and eloquence but rather with the discipline of philology, which, challenging the allegorical, authoritative interpretation of Scripture based on the Church fathers, attempted to establish formal and empirical criteria that clashed with the dogmatic conceptions of the inquisitors. As the cultural orientation of Christian humanism, philology was often considered Hebraist and rabbinical in its preference for literal rather than symbolic meanings, and its inquisitorial persecution continued to the end of the sixteenth century (Márquez 1980, 40-1, 104-8).

Fray Jerónimo Román y Zamora's Repúblicas del mundo (1575, 1595)
My first example of "Obedezco pero no cumplo" is Fray Jerónimo Román y Zamora . He was a member of the Order of Saint Augustine in Spain, and he wrote some twenty books on a wide range of religious topics, most of them concerned with the Augustinian Order, of which he was appointed official chronicler in 1573 (Moral 1897, 14-6). He was active from the 1560s to the 1590s. His encyclopedia of "all the customs of all the peoples of the world, ancient and modern", titled Repúblicas del mundo (1575,1595), followed the model of Johann Boemus's immensely successful Manners, laws and customs of all nations, published in Latin in Augsburg in 1520. 6 When it appeared in 1575, Román's Repúblicas del mundo consisted of two volumes. Volume one treated Hebrew and Christian civilizations, and volume two, ancient and modern non-Christian ("pagan and barbarous") civilizations, including those of the Ottoman Turk, the "Moors" (Muslims), and the pre-Columbian and early Spanish colonial Americas ("las Indias Occidentales").
Román's two-volume Repúblicas del mundo was censored and expurgated. It appeared in 1581 and 1583 on the respective Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions' indices of prohibited books and, in 1584, on Gaspar de Quiroga's Spanish index of books to be expurgated. It appeared subsequently on the indices of censored books in Rome in 1590, Madrid in 1612, and Lisbon in 1624. Because the work was mandated for expurgation, I wanted to examine its evidence in available copies. I studied the first-edition imprint (1575) at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale Univer- .] the range of human custom, ritual, and ceremony", and "to inform his readers concerning the laws and governments of other nations" so that they could "form intelligent judgments as to 'what orders and institutions' were 'fittest to be ordayned' in their own lands for the establishment of perfect peace" ([1964] 1971, 132-3). sity, the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana, and the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; I examined the second-edition imprint (1595) at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. Based on this evidence, I have cobbled together the account that follows. We begin with the title page of volume two of an expurgated copy of Repúblicas (see Fig. 1) and follow it with the notice that expurgation has been performed on two copies. In one, the handwritten notice is pasted onto the "Yo el Rey", or royal authorization-to-print page; it is dated August 3, 1589. In the other, the notice of expurgation is handwritten prominently on the title page of volume one, affirming that it had been executed "according to the new expurgation mandate of 1612" (see Figs. 2 and 3). Nevertheless, its intrepid author soldiered on: Román published an expanded, three-volume edition of Repúblicas in 1595. The title page of its volume one carries a printed announcement that the work has been "expurgated according to the expurgation order of the Holy Office", that it has been examined by many learned men, that it includes much new material ("diversas Repúblicas, que nunca han sido impressas"), that many of the original Repúblicas have been substantially rewritten by the author, and that the work contains abundant, helpful indices (see Fig. 4). Román did not fear censorship; he openly challenged it. Let's examine the evidence of censorship of the edition of 1575.
The República gentílica: Román announced in his prologue that, after completing his principal tasks of writing about Hebrew and Christian civilizations (Part One, which corresponds to the work's volume one), he realized that his readers -both the learned and the unschooled -would love to know about ancient pagan cultures, and he confessed that, in his youth, these had been the objects of his keenest interest. Thus he wrote the República gentílica. Like other members of the clerical elite, Román had untrammeled access to the world of learning regarding both ancient pagan and modern non-Christian cultures, and he was so secure in his orthodoxy that he sometimes appeared to be heterodox. Among them all, no civilizations, ancient or modern, had been, in Román's view, so "good at being bad" as those of the ancient Greeks and the Romans after them.
So thought one of Román's readers, too. Examining here the Beinecke imprint, I identify its evident reader-owner as "Dr. Odriozola" (see Fig. 1). 7 He inscribed his name in the upper right-hand corner of the title page.
7. The surname is clearly "de Odriozola", but I cannot make out the abbreviated first name, so I will call him "Doctor" because of his curiosity and learned interests.  I will attribute to him a dizzying variety of marginalia, which has been entered sometimes in marginal notes but most generally in delightful little drawings. His exuberance is notable: He underlined passages and wrote marginal notes (Román 1575, 2: 79r), drew the pointing hand to signal interesting expositions (Román 1575, 2: 83v); he pictured Venus swimming in the nude (Román 1575, 2: 21v) and depicted Mars, the Roman god of war (Román 1575, 2: 38r), exactly as Román had described him (see Figs. 5 and 6). He drew dozens of animals (Román 1575, 2: 6r, 24v to 25v, 33v) which appeared either as objects of veneration (including the human "male member", 7r, not shown here!) or as sacrifices to various deities. He admired the author's cleverness ("Agudeza del autor") and he gleefully made note of the places where ancient Roman prostitutes held parties of ribald drunkenness for their clients (Román 1575, 2: 48v) (see Figs. 7 and 8). But then, in 1585, Dr. Odriozola's treasured and, to him, highly entertaining book was subjected to Inquisitorial censorship. This meant that Inquisition officials of the jurisdiction, or perhaps local municipal officials, because all were "tasked" with pursuing infractions in private libraries (see footnote 3), entered his home and inspected his library. One of his acquaintances, or perhaps a disgruntled employee of his household, might have tipped off local officials. Had he bragged too boisterously about his remarkable library? Had he kept his prized books out of the hands of family members so that one of them became the jealous informant? We will never know, but we find evidence that Dr. Odriozola annotated and "illustrated" his copy of Repúblicas prior to Inquisitorial expurgation because some of his marginal notes can be seen alongside the subsequently expurgated passages (Román 1575, 2: 10r) (see Fig. 9).
In this example, Dr. Odriozola adds comments about the drunkenness ("Borracheras de estos brujos") that accompanied the worship of ancient Greek gods. Here Priapus, the son of Bacchus and Venus, is featured; his statue, as Román's now-expurgated text declared, had an enormous male member, "as large as the statue itself, which the women carried in procession, following the playing of a flute and singing 'Bacchus, Bacchus'" (Román 1575, 2: 10r-v). Román had written such expositions by relying on, and comparing, classical sources such as Diodorus Siculus, Pliny, and Virgil. Dr. Odriozola's edification, however, seems to have come from the sheer delight of reading about pagan ritual practices.
The expurgation of the República gentílica resulted in passages censured for their treatment not only of the gods of the ancient Greeks, but also Roman sacrifices and feasts and, occasionally, a custom of present-day Christian friars. Of this volume's three hundred and fifty folios, thirteen folios (twenty-six pages) have been inked over and three folios (six pages) have been cut out. From their immediate context and chapter titles, we can infer that the three excised folios and two of the thirteen inked-over folios pertained to "the antiquity of the trade of prostitutes (rameras) and bad women", with Román naming some who were "famous in the world" and describing their use of cosmetics. Here Román's playful sense of humor emerges. Through the inked-over passages, we can read that he had introduced the chapter by saying that he was not going to write about virtuous women "because it would be impossible to treat this topic except in a very long book" (!). Thus, Román continued, he would write about "bad women, who easily will fit into the space of a short chapter" (1575, 2: 300v). He excused himself with his feminine readers, those "who are fond of reading about new things", for his "excessive curiosity and diligence" on certain matters, unexpected in a friar writing on these topics ("demasiada curiosidad y diligencia en un frayle" [(1575, 2: 300v]). What are we missing? The three now-excised folios that had appeared at the beginning of this exposition were devoted to the topic of "the corruption of the flesh".
Among ancient Roman festivals, Román described one, held during the month of August that he considered to be "very entertaining" ("muy graciosa"). The "principal ladies" of Rome went in pilgrimage to the temple of Venus that stood at the Porta Collina, where, he observed, They carried with great devotion the likeness of a male member, and they presented it at the temple, and they went about this festival so devoutly that there was no other that was celebrated with as much reverence, the cause of which I would divulge, but, as I am a member of a religious order, I prefer not to. And so that I not be called malicious, I defer to the reader, and I refrain from telling about other things that the ladies did at that festival.
(1575, 2: 54r) As is obvious, Román's humor expressed itself in suggestive, even saucy, comments, but of all the passages excised from the ten books of the República gentílica, perhaps none is more delightful than Román's commentary about the drinking vessels favored by friars like himself. Writing about the development of the mechanical arts in ancient times in his chapter titled "About the inventors of ceramic vessels and the one who discovered the wheel for making them", he commented on the form and size of the ancient manufactures, comparing them to drinking vessels of his own time: They say that these [vessels] were made in the shape of a ship, or of another boat, yet I do not know which corresponds to those of our own times, except that we would say that they are the drinking cups and large vessels that we friars prefer, so [large] that it seems that we want to throw ourselves into or swim around in them, notwithstanding the opinions of certain gluttons who would pretend that this size is within proper limits.
(1575, 2: 263r) The censor struck the phrase "that we friars prefer, so [large] that it seems that we want to throw ourselves into or swim around in them". This example reveals the level of scrutiny that the expurgators applied to minute details, not overlooking even the briefest of objectionable passages. (We will find the same close attention paid in the examination of Murúa's manuscript.) The República Cristiana: Román was on thin ice here, too, because his treatments of Christian doctrine and practice were expurgated on the sacraments of baptism (1575, 1: 351v) and communion (1575, 1: 105v, 206r, 216v), the conduct of the church councils (1575, 1: 224r, 225v), and the persistence of heresy among modern-day Christians (1575, 1, 259r, 260r, 261v). 8 Heresy was a topic that Román took up with gusto, announcing as the title of one of his chapters: "Of the beginning of heresies that arose in the Church, among other very curious and pertinent things". One of the expurgated passages is preceded by his statement: "To speak of all heresies is impossible [. . .] but, nevertheless, I will say something about some of them with which I intend to fill out this chapter and please the curious reader" (1575, 1: 260r).
The excised passage concerns a historical figure of special importance in Spain: Arius, the fourth-century presbyter from Alexandria, who was the source of Iberian Arianism. 9 Arius's views had threatened to open the way to a resurgence of pagan polytheism attended by a myriad of interme-8. The Beinecke Library only has volume two of the 1575 edition, so to examine volume one, I relied on the Lilly Library's copy. 9. Román described Arius as one of the "most famous heretics in the world and one who gave the Church great grief" for his conviction about the Holy Trinity, namely, that of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the Son [Jesus Christ] was not eternal like the Father. Román concluded, "This was a serious and difficult point that perturbed the universal Church and unsettled many saintly and learned gentlemen with the novelty of the idea" (1575, 260r). Arius's claim threatened the unity of the primitive Church; it provoked in the year 325 CE the convening of the Council of Nicea, which was the first general or ecumenical council of the Church; some two hundred and twenty bishops gathered and diate gods and demons (Bokenkotter [1977(Bokenkotter [ ] 1990. 10 The looping cancellations of expurgation attempt to erase this vivid historical reminder about Spain's own heretical religious heritage (Román 1575, 1: 260r) (see Fig. 10). The República hebrea: Román's portrayal of ancient Hebrew and modern Jewish history opened the first volume of his work. He explained in his Prologue that he did so following San Isidore of Seville regarding "those who first gave laws in the world and that, although Moses -that very holy man -was not the first giver of laws, he was the first who brought forth divine law" (1575, 1: 2v). For this reason, the República Hebrea takes priority of place in Román's magnum opus.
Books do not bleed but to see attacked the living traditions they describe creates a visceral reaction: As we would expect, Román's account of Jewish customs and rituals received the most severe expurgation. What is surprising is that Román knowingly defied Inquisitorial censorship on this point: he would have known full well that the discussion of Jewish tradition was proscribed by the Indices of 1551 and 1559. Of the twenty-four chapters of Book One of the República hebrea, which is devoted to religion, the two chapters that describe "the feasts and solemn days with which the Hebrew people honored the Lord" have been expurgated. One chapter is inked over (Román 1575, 1: 30v), and the other has been entirely cut out, as the foliation of this spread reveals (Román 1575, 1, 30v-38r) (see Fig. 11). 11 Lamentably there is no remaining reference to the specific topics of the excised chapter, but the contents of the expurgated chapter can be read through its inked cancellations. Román begins by noting that the feasts and solemn days of the Jewish people are many and very festive, which, I discover, are divided into two parts, as are ours today, because there were ordinary feasts and special ones, just as we have our major feasts and the regular one that occurs every seven days. They also had their ordinary feasts, which were on Saturdays and others that were celebrated from one month to another [. . . .] Now I would like to take affirmed the chief dogma of the Church, that is, the belief in the divinity of Christ. 10. The Visigoths brought the Arian heresy to Spain in the fifth century and some followed the Arian creed even after Recaredo (r. 586-601) converted to Roman Catholicism, which was then introduced into the Visigoth population more generally (Chapman [1918] 1965, 30-1). 11. Regrettably, the flaps remaining at the gutter on direct autopsy are not visible in this TIFF image.
up the first, for it is important to know which feasts God commanded, and which ones, afterward, were instituted by the Hebrews themselves.
(1575, 1: 30v; my emphasis) Román here calls out the similarities of Jewish and Christian ritual because it seems, as with his acknowledgment of Moses as the first giver of divine law, that he wants his readers to be aware of Christianity's sacred source and antecedent. Expurgated in the edition of 1575, these two chapters are omitted altogether from the 1595 imprint, where the chapter numbers have been adjusted to exclude them. Nevertheless, the evidence of the materials removed remains in the 1595 edition, because the contents of these suppressed chapters appear in Book One's summary of its contents. 12 12. "The first book deals with the religion and divine cult that God established among the Hebrews [. . . .] Then we take up their ministers and sacrifices, including the most solemn feasts observed by the people" (Román 1575, 1: 1r). Book Two of the República hebrea consisted originally of eighteen chapters concerning matters of government, war, the administration of justice and the like. These are left untouched, but the two chapters pertaining to rites of sacramental life (marriage and burials), as well as the description of sacred books, have been censored. Three folios have been cut from the volume as the foliation of this spread reveals (Román 1575, 1: 46v-50r) (see Fig. 12). Although now entirely missing, the two chapters describing sacred books are identified by the summary of their contents and authorship ("how many holy and canonical books there were, [and] who was the author of each one of them") (Román 1575, 1: 48r). This section had included a discussion of "the three orders of Hebrew books", which Román categorized as "juridical, prophetic, and hagiographic" (1575, 1: 50v). The only portion of this exposition not to be expurgated concerns sacred Hebrew books that had been lost.
Finally, the conclusion of the República hebrea was expurgated. This pertains not to Jewish culture as such but rather to Román's views on the fate of the Jews throughout history, particularly in Spain. He begins by recounting how the emperor Hadrian banished the Jews from Jerusalem, and how "thus, from this time forward, they have never been residents or tenants or lords of the holy city of Jerusalem, or of their country" (1575, 1: 67v; 1595, 1: 78r). Román continues by observing that the Jewish people of his day are "the most mistreated people of all peoples and nations in the world": "There has been no nation where they have not been abused and exiled nor any city where they have not suffered injury, being killed or exiled or having their properties taken from them" (1575, 1: 67v-68r; 1595, 1: 78r).
Up to this point in the text of the editions of 1575 and 1595 nothing is suppressed; they carry the same content. However, Román's subsequent remarks, in which he implicated Spain in the perpetration of these unconscionable atrocities, are all inked over. Here he challenged those readers who did not believe what he wrote to read the histories of Spain, in which they would see the testimony of the outrages that have been committed against the Jews and, in spite of some of them having converted to Christianity (of which I believe there are few who have done so truly), there are none more persecuted than they are. Whether it be in public places, in churches or city councils, in religious congregations, wherever it might be, they are detested and abhorred. May the people of this nation pardon me, for in truth I am loathe to speak ill of them.
(1575, 1: 68r) 13 In this final statement, which can only be read through the censor's ink, we come to the conclusion of the República hebrea. In total, some twelve folios of the original ninety have been cut out, and passages on two or three more have been inked over. Suppressed are the accounts of rituals and traditions that the censors considered dangerous because they portrayed sympathetically the fundamental customs -the visible markers -of Jewish life. They obviously also objected to the author's statement of sympathy for the Jewish people and the assignment of guilt to Spain for crimes committed against them. Nevertheless, Román's courage and outspokenness were not 13. This excision, and some that will follow in Murúa's manuscript, merit transcription in the original Spanish: "Sino lean nuestras hystorias de España, y verán qué estragos han sido hechos en ellos, y aun con ser ya Christianos (que creo que pocos lo son buenos) no los pueden llevar. Sea en repúblicas, sea en yglesias y cabildos, sea en congregaciones de religiosos doquiera, son malquistos y aborrecidos: y perdónenme los de esta nación, que en verdad yo quedo corto en decir mal de ellos" (Román 1575, 1: 68r). deterred by the censorship that he surely knew would befall his work. It had been worth a try. The República de las Indias Occidentales: Immediately after the publication of Román's Repúblicas del mundo, the Royal Council of the Indies, which was the policy-administering body of Spain's American territories, entreated Philip II on September 30, 1575, to authorize the Royal Council of Castile to retrieve all copies of Román's Repúblicas and remove from its account of Spanish dealings in America its final two chapters. The Royal Indies councilors railed against the "dishonoring" of the first conquistadores, placing in jeopardy their prerogatives -that is, their perpetual domination over the native peoples and products of the lands over which the conquistadores were trustees -and for conveying "other indecent and insolent" ideas. 14 Here Román had followed closely a manuscript version of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas' Apologética historia sumaria, a major treatise that circulated mostly in manuscript up until the twentieth century. This was the theoretical work, or rather, a proto-ethnographic treatise, that denied the existence of a natural hierarchy among all the cultures of the world, ancient and modern, including the Americas. Although without personal experience in the Americas, Román's interest, like that of Las Casas, was the dignity and welfare of the autochthonous peoples and the need to protect them from exploitation and abuse under Spanish colonization. Decrying the destruction of the Inca state, as well as that of the Aztecs, Román characterizes the Spaniards' executions of native princes as regicide; on this and other conquest matters, Román closely echoes Las Casas's devastating accounts of the conquistadores' ruthlessness. 15 There is no evidence of suppression of the República de las Indias Occidentales in the imprints of Román's work that I have seen, nor would I expect there to be any, for this reason: The Royal Council of the Indies' complaint against the king, and the Royal Council of Castile on his behalf, reflects -and allows us to glimpse -their institutional differences. The court-appointed officials of the Royal Council of the Indies criticized their peers, the court-appointed officials of the Council of Castile, for overlook-14. The Royal Council of the Indies' Consulta is reproduced in Torre Revello 1940, xxv. The institution of trusteeship (the encomienda) was a major source of colonialist exploitation and abuse of the native populations because under the private control of the trustee (the encomendero) they had no recourse to a higher court of appeal. 15. For Román's reliance on Las Casas's works, see Adorno 1992, 818-20. ing, or for being indifferent to, Román's injurious, anti-conquistador arguments and thus for having granted, irresponsibly, approval of the work's publication.
The Royal Council of the Indies demanded that henceforth all works dealing with the Indies be submitted to their body for approval. If the Royal Council of Castile, under instructions from the king, did not act to suppress Román's published work, it was because the matter was out of their hands; their mandate was to make judgments about books prior to publication. If the Inquisition's censors, who step in subsequent to publication, paid no heed to Román's representation of Indies affairs, it was because their mandate was to be vigilant over matters of private morals and Christian conduct, of adherence to the teachings of Christian doctrine and belief. Nevertheless, the issues raised by the Royal Council of the Indies regarding Román's work would be of great consequence for our second case, Fray Martín de Murúa's Historia General del Piru.

Fray Martín de Murúa's Historia General del Piru (1616)
My second example of "Obedezco pero no cumplo" is that of Fray Martín de Murúa (c. 1566Murúa (c. -1615, a member of another mendicant order, the Order of Mercy; he was from the Basque region of Spain. 16 Murúa wrote a history of the Incas of pre-Columbian Peru, where he served as a missionary friar to convert native Andeans to Christianity. He was active in Peru from the 1580s until he returned to Spain in 1615 and wrote without hesitation about the Incas, the present-day Andeans, and the colonizing Spaniards. He examined in great detail the ancient rites of the Incas and the ongoing, traditional rituals of the Andean peoples a half century after the Spanish conquest of Inca Peru; he did not shrink from admitting the failure of evangelization. In the same work he wrote a scathing critique of the We recall here the request, back in 1575, by the Royal Council of the Indies to withdraw Román's Repúblicas del mundo from circulation; it followed the royal decree of 1556 by Philip II, prohibiting the publication of any work on the Americas that did not have prior approval of the Royal Council of the Indies; this was followed by another in 1560 demanding the confiscation of any such books and reiterating that all books written about the Spanish Indies required pre-publication approval from the Royal Council of the Indies as well as that of Castile. 18 This reiteration of blanket orders reveals their ineffectuality. But it also tells us that, as time wore on, Murúa's Mercedarian advisors in Madrid, if not Murúa himself, would have been well aware of the challenges facing any author who wrote on Indies topics; among them, the history of the Incas, their conquest by the Spanish, and the state of affairs in colonial viceroyalty of Peru, were especially sensitive.
The manuscript of Murúa's Historia general del Piru received royal approval for publication in May 1616. Why was such a work, thoroughly vetted and approved at all levels, not published? Here we must ask a related, unexpected question: Can pre-publication approbation ever look like censorship? Frozen in time in its approved-for-publication, pre-publication state, Murúa's manuscript book offers a glimpse at a significant, unwritten portion of the history of censorship available only through the materiality of the manuscript, which serves as a witness to its own mutilations.
The complete title of Murúa's work is "General history of Peru, on the origin and descent of the Incas, which treats of their civil wars as well as those occasioned by the arrival of the Spanish, and includes the descrip-17. Murúa's first manuscript, known as the Galvin Manuscript, was published in a facsimile edition in 2004; his second manuscript, known as the Getty Manuscript, was published in 2008. For the relationship between the two manuscripts and their making, see Adorno and Boserup 2008. 18. These decrees are reproduced in Torre Revello 1940, xii-xiv. tions of its cities and regions and many other notable things". Let's take a look at the manuscript's frontispiece to get an impression of its author (Murúa 1616, 2r) (see Fig. 13). This striking composition contains elements that serve both literary and bureaucratic ends. Its ornamental shield has at its center the eyes and ears of the historian-witness, with the coat of arms of Castile above and that of the Order of Mercy below. The shield is flanked, on the left, by the coat of arms of the viceroyalty of Peru and, on the right, by another, which was intended to represent the Inca kings in the style of European heraldry. This composite image brings together the Old World and the New, the crown and the cross, the Spanish viceroyalty of Peru and the fallen Inca empire -in short, all the elements of Spain's transatlantic empire pertinent to a history of Inca Peru.
Let's look even closer: The Latin motto on the shield interprets the meaning of the eyes and the ears, into which the putti trumpet. Reading clockwise around the rim of the shield from the upper left, and then down its center, the motto announces, "We testify to what we have seen and heard" (Testamvr qvod vidimus e.t. audivimus). Repeating this clockwise movement, we read, moving down the right edge of the page, "I perceive with pricked-up ears, just as I have penetrated and discovered much with [my] lynx-like vision", and, at the left edge, reading vertically from bottom to top, "If this work does not ring like sweet music in your ears, O reader, you must illuminate it with your mind's eye". While this imagery is conventional, its warnings are pointed: The reader is advised to be prepared to learn from the author, and if the reader finds the work's contents wanting, he is invited (or dared!) to try to best the author, if he can. Murúa was an author proud of his work and fearless in presenting it. We will soon learn about the extent of that fearlessness.
The other point of interest on the title page is the swirling rubric that appears at its foot, just above the stricken phrase, "In La Plata [Sucre, Bolivia] around our year of 1613". This rubric has been entered on the recto of virtually every one of the nearly four hundred folios of the manuscript. Its final occurrence is found on the verso of the last inscribed folio (Murúa 1616, 387v), where it is accompanied by the signature "Gerónimo Núñez de León". Núñez de León was the royal notary or clerk of the royal chamber who rubricated the entire manuscript (see Fig. 14).
The real test of the work's approval, however, had come earlier; here are its results. First is the approval of the chronicler and historian of the Mercedarian Order, Fray Alonso Remón (Murúa 1616, 8r). (Keep Remón in mind; he figures prominently in what follows.) (see Fig. 15). His statement is complemented by the approval by the Order's master general, Francisco    de Ribera, who authorized the manuscript to be forwarded to the Royal Council of Castile. The manuscript book was then sent to the royal court and, six months later, the king's censor, Pedro de Valencia, completed his evaluation on April 28, 1616, recommending that the Murúa's Inca history be granted a license to print (Murúa 1616, 9r). Completing this quartet is the royal decree signed "Yo el Rey" (I, the King), and countersigned by the royal secretary, Pedro de Contreras (Murúa 1616, 11r) (see Fig. 16). It includes at the bottom of the page the tasa, which fixed the period of production of the book and its sale price; this statement, written and signed by the royal notary Núñez de León, is dated, as is the king's decree, May 26, 1616. I take up the previously-stated questions in reverse order: Can pre-publication approval look like censorship? Why was the work not published?
This royally approved manuscript was a final clean copy (puesto en limpio), of Murúa's work; prepared by two scribes, the second took over from the first at the approximate midpoint of the manuscript. Murúa himself then went over it in its entirety and made slight modifications on more than one hundred of the three hundred ninety-nine folios; these instances reveal his painstaking proofreading and textual corrections. 19 But there is another distinctive hand at work, and we readily recognize it as that of Fray Alonso Remón.
Fray Alonso Remón, careful editor and friendly censor: Remón may rightly be called an editor of Murúa's manuscript because of the many instances in which he corrected Murúa's word choice, deleted his statements of excessive self-praise, and altered verb tenses from present to past. In a few instances Remón and Murúa seemed to have been working in sequence if not in concert: Murúa overrode Remón's emendation of Murúa's original text because Remón had misidentified the site of a particular event and, on another occasion, he had eliminated Murúa's useful cross-reference to entire folios. Remón was also responsible for eliminating some of the watercolor drawings (there are a total of thirty-seven in the manuscript), such as the one of Pachacuti Ynca Yupanqui, for the sake of producing, in print, only one portrait painting per Inca. Thus appears the instruction, in Remón's hand, "no se a de pintar": "this one is not to be reproduced" (Murúa 1616, 40v) (see Fig. 17).
The distinction between editorial correction and censorship is often a fine one, and in the case of Remón's review of Murúa's manuscript, it was decidedly so. Beyond the discrete, limited corrections and additions that Remón entered in Murúa's text, he also undertook a systematic review of the whole manuscript. In this process he eliminated dozens of passages and, in a few instances, entire folios. Yet his efforts amount to what I would call "friendly censorship", because it was clearly designed not to condemn Murúa's work but rather to ensure its passage through the appropriate royal channels to publication. 20 It was, after all, Remón's signed, formal recommendation of the manuscript that initiated in Madrid the series of events that culminated in the awarding of the all-important royal license to print (see Fig. 15).
The first clue that Remón's was the hand at work comes from the evidence of the excision of a single folio and the repairs made to compensate for it. On an otherwise blank verso appears a chapter title, scrawled in Remón's hand, "On the current government of the kingdom of Peru" ("Del gobierno que oy tiene el reino del Peru") (Murúa 1616, 318v) (see Fig. 18). That title was originally found on the following folio, which has been excised, its removal being registered by the jagged stub at the gutter (which, I regret, is not visible); the now-following folio begins with a passage that has been cancelled because it concluded the censored discussion of the cut-out folio; note the cancellation style of undulating lines, which do not obliterate but merely strike out the unwanted words (Murúa 1616, 319r) (see Fig. 19). As the member of a religious community, Murúa would have been aware of the conflicting interests between ecclesiastical and civil institutions of colonial Spanish governance. Despite that awareness, he must have offered on the now-excised folio a highly negative assessment of Spanish civil governmental policy and conduct.
Overall, Remón excised two types of text: (1) passages critical of Spanish actions -that is, Murúa's views on the ruthless conduct of Spanish soldiers during the conquest and the greed of present-day Spanish settlers and clerics -and (2) passages describing in detail native Andean practices and beliefs considered worthy of condemnation by the Christian (Roman Catholic) Church. Remón had made no effort to render illegible these canceled texts. He may, in fact, have wanted the royal censor to see exactly what he had excised, which would provide assurance that Remón's work could be trusted with confidence.
Remón muted or canceled Murúa's negative statements about conquistadores' and colonialists' conduct throughout the manuscript. If some of Murúa's colonial South American recommenders had tolerated or even 20. Adorno 2008, 103-15 contains a detailed account of all these interventions.   applauded Murúa's negative views on the Spanish conduct of the conquest of Peru, the Mercedarians close to the royal court and the king's councils in Madrid did not -could not -concur. Similarly, although some of Murúa's South American endorsements explicitly lauded his detailed descriptions of Andean rites and practices, pointing out that this material would be helpful in indoctrinating the natives in the Christian faith (1616, 3v, 5r, 6v), such descriptions could well have seemed scandalous and provocative to a Mercedarian official at the seat of royal power, far from the field of evangelical struggle in Andean America.
The chapter in the Getty manuscript that has been subjected to the most intense scrutiny, producing blanket cancellations, is titled "How Pizarro confronted [the Inca captain] Chalco Chima and Atahualpa and ordered the death of Atahualpa" ("Cómo el Marqués Pizarro careó a Chalco Chima y Atao Hualpa y mandó matar a Atao Hualpa") ( Murúa 1616, 134v to 137r). This chapter reveals that Remón made not one but two passes over the manuscript to assure its ultimate approval. I take folio 136r as the best example (see Fig. 20). Remón's first pass over the text resulted in the undulating scrawls that cancel some seven lines in the middle of the page. Here, Murúa had written that those who killed the Inca prince Atahualpa may be "burning perpetually in hell" because with a single act they committed several injustices: the first, by imprisoning someone against whom they had no justifiable reason or cause to make war; the second, by not setting him free; the third, by making themselves the judges of a person over whom they had no authority; the fourth, by being guided by their passions; and the fifth, even if the war had been just and carried out fairly, the conquistadores had no right, once the ransom they demanded of Atahualpa was received, to kill him.
In this same pass over the manuscript -which I identify by the use of undulating lines that we saw in Figure 19 -Remón canceled passages on the topics of native customs, such as marriage practices (Remón deleted Murúa's references to them as violations of natural law) (Murúa 1616, 23v, 169r); he excised lists of organic materials used for shamanic practices such as killing enemies, repelling the attentions of a member of the opposite sex, engendering the affection of such a person, and performing various types of divination (1616, 288v, 289v, 291r). He also suppressed a reference to male genitalia (1616, 214v) as well as a comment about the role of luck (fortuna) in human affairs (1616, 127v). Spanish colonial governance was the topic most subject to Remón's expurgations in this first pass over the text of which we have already seen examples (1616, 318v, 319r) (see Figs. 18 and 19). He also deleted a comment about the abuses suffered by the Andeans under Spanish rule (1616, 319v), and he struck comments about the corruption of Spanish colonial government officials (1616, 322r, 323v) as well as Murúa's remarks about greed among the Spanish missionary clergy (1616, 316r). 21 Now we consider Remón's second pass over the manuscript, and to do so we return to folio 136r (see Fig. 20). Here we saw that in his first pass Remón canceled Murúa's scathing condemnation of the execution of Atahualpa, enumerating the injustices of the Spaniards' nefarious deeds in doing so. This second pass is executed with straight horizontal lines. Overall, and like the first-pass undulating-line suppressions, the bulk of these straightlined, second-pass cancellations censor accounts of events pertaining to the capture and execution of Atahualpa as well as descriptions of native Andean ritual practices in pre-Columbian and colonial times. In this chapter 63 (Murúa 1616, 134v-137r) they are used to eliminate the sharp thrust and long harangues of Murúa's critique of Pizarro and the Spanish war of conquest. Thus Remón cancels the entire opening paragraph of this chapter, suppressing Murúa's tirade on greed as the source of all evil, which he closes with the admonition: "What law is not kept, what commandments not broken, what brother not killed, what faith not violated, what friendship not rent asunder, what truth not obscured, what justice not being done and remaining undone: Of all this we have a good example in the present chapter, by the actions of the marquis Don Francisco de Pizarro and the Spaniards against the unfortunate Atahualpa" (1616, 134v). 22 On folio 136r the four straight-lined cancelations just above the seven undulating lines call on the offices of divine judgment. Murúa writes: "Just thou art, O lord, and fair are thy judgments, even about the evils that men 21. Remón's scrutiny reached an extraordinarily minute level of detail. He struck the characterization of the eleventh viceroy, Juan de Mendoza y Luna, as "most worthy" (meritíssimo), eliminated the qualifier "learned" (docta) from the description of Fray Pedro Guerra's preaching, and removed "royal" (real) from the description of the Mercedarian habit (Murúa 1616, 320r, 327v, 328r). In these instances, which reveal his aversion to exaggeration and hyperbole, Remón revealed himself more as an editor than a censor. 22. "Que ley [no] guarda, que mandamientos no quebranta, que hermano no mata, que fee no viola, que amistad no quiebra, que verdad no obscurece, que justicia no deshaçe y deshecha. Desto tenemos buen exemplo en el presente capítulo en lo que sucedió al marqués don Francisco Pizarro y los españoles con el desdichado Ataohualpa". by their inclination and depraved will do to deprive thee of an infinity of good things; it could be that this king [Atahualpa], by his death, paid for the offenses that had been done against thee, and may he be cleansed by thy grace and may he now be rejoicing". 23 Remón continues this secondpass inspection and deletes the remainder of the page, which described Atahualpa's ransom as "the largest and highest ransom that had ever been heard of or paid, since God created the earth until the present day, for the imprisonment of any king or emperor or private citizen", and he concludes with Seneca's admonition that "one's bond should be kept with those to whom one has made a promise", adding: "And this we see and know, all of us who live in the Indies, from the first to the last of all those who were present at the death of this unfortunate king" (Murúa 1616, 136r-v). 24 With the diagonal slashes along with the large X and its careless ink blots thrown over the bottom half of this page, we can imagine Remón exclaiming, "No, no, and again, no!" What we have seen in Murúa's strident condemnation of the conduct of the Spanish conquistadores is its assessment and approval of the moral conviction and rhetorical tone of the writings of Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas. In the 1570s, the viceroy of Peru, Francisco de Toledo, had written that he would carry out the royal order to confiscate Las Casas's works, which were, he asserted, held dear by all the friars of the Peruvian viceroyalty and responsible for doing great harm to the kingdom. 25 Nearly a 23. "Justo eres, señor, y justos son tus juicios y de los males que los hombres con perversa inclinación y depravada voluntad hacen tu sacas infinidad de bienes; pudo ser que este Rey y con aquella muerte pagase las ofensas que contra ti auía hecho y especial lavado con tu gracia oy se esté gozando". 24. "Pues dize Séneca que asta a los que no tiene fee ni palabra se les a de guardar supuesto que se les da y promete una cossa. Y ansí vemos y sabemos todos los que en Indias vivimos que desde el primero asta el último de quántos se hallaron en la muerte deste desdichado Rey". 25. On September 24, 1572, the viceroy Toledo wrote to the Spanish king Philip II: "The books of the bishop of Chiapas and the other works printed without being licensed by the Royal Council will be confiscated as Your Majesty requires, for those of the bishop of Chiapas were the heart of most of the friars in this kingdom, to which they have brought much harm" ("Los libros del obispo de Chiapa [Bartolomé de Las Casas] y los demás ympresos sin licencia del real consejo se yrán recojiendo como vuestra magestad lo manda, que los de chiapa era el coraçón de los más frailes de este reino y con que más daño han hecho en él") (Levillier 1924, 4: 442). Las Casas's tracts were privately printed in Seville in 1552 and 1553, before royal pre-publication approval and licensing were mandated in 1554.
half century later, we find that Murúa was one of Las Casas's enthusiastic adherents. His declarations about the sins committed by the conquerors to satisfy their greed and the need for the Spaniards and their heirs to make restitution to their Andean victims (and to their heirs) echo with high-decibel intensity the fundamental Lascasian message that resonated throughout the decades following Las Casas's death in 1566. Upon reviewing Murúa's manuscript in 1615, Remón would have taken into account the state's aversion to any discussion critical of Spanish conduct in the Indies. His "friendly censorship" helped Murúa's cause accordingly.
Official state censorship: We find additional cancellations in another style, which are cramped, having been painstakingly entered to render the stricken words entirely unreadable (Murúa 1616, 379r) (see Fig. 21). This was the state censorship that occurred prior to publication. Again we find that the censorial eye pays close attention to controversial matters at the level of their most minute detail. There are only five such cancellations in Murúa's voluminous manuscript. (Remón, in effect, had done the bulk of the censor's work.) All five of these brief cancellations are illegible upon ocular examination of the manuscript, but their topics can be readily identified. The first cancellation is not the subject of the chapter, which is the reign of the tenth Inca, Tupac Yupanqui, but rather the introduction of the Christian faith in the Andes (Murúa 1616, 48r). The second excision refers to an aspect of the negotiations used to convince the surviving Inca prince, Tupac Amaru, to surrender to his captor, Martín García de Loyola (Murúa 1616, 195r). The third concerns Fray Diego de Martínez's mission to the bellicose Chunchos (indios de guerra) (Murúa 1616, 325r). The fourth, a single word, pertains to the royally granted privileges enjoyed by the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco (Murúa 1616, 334v), and the fifth comments on the vast new wealth available to Spain, thanks to the silver mines at Potosí (see Fig. 21). 26 Strikingly different from the other types of cancellation markings in the manuscript, the illegibility produced by these pen strokes points to the work of a royal censor. As we have seen, Román's expurgated Repúblicas del mundo of 1575 provided many examples. The tightly looped scrolling 26. These dozen lines of text may remain illegible: Ink testing done at by the Getty Research Institute in 2005 on the first of these passages (Murúa 1616, 48r) revealed that the ink of the original text and the subsequent application of cancellation ink could not be separated because they were found to be in the same spectral range. line, which corresponds nearly exactly in size and height to that of the text to be eradicated, was a successful means of obliterating a line of text either handwritten or printed. Such is the case here, and it is at wide variance with the techniques employed by Remón to eliminate controversial passages without any special effort to obliterate them. In fact, the style of Remón's cancellations reveals that, once he decided where to introduce them, he could enter them rapidly and expeditiously. This is quite different from the cramped and painstaking obliterations in the few instances introduced by the royal censor. The telling detail that identifies with certainty the royal censor's hand is the cancellation of the first two syllables of the word "imperial" (ympereales), turning it into "royal" (reales) (Murúa 1616, 334v). This seemingly trivial emendation makes an important technical distinction. The current monarch, Philip III (r. 1599-1621), and his father, Philip II, did not hold the title of Holy Roman Emperor, as had Philip III's grandfather, Charles V. 27 Modifying the word from "imperial" to "royal" in reference to the privileges enjoyed by the ancient Inca city of Cuzco was a small but significant correction. The precision of this emendation, plus the longer excisions that speak of the (lack of) progress of the Catholic faith in the Americas and of the bounty bestowed on the kings of Spain by the wealth of Potosí, leave little doubt that these acts of censorship were carried out at the court, by or under the supervision of, the royal censor Pedro de Valencia.
The most lengthy of these cancellations gives the full flavor of the court's concerns; I translate it here: "It does not seem otherwise but that God wanted to grant to the kings of Spain, in payment for the firmness of their faith, a sign, in this life, of the new riches that He will grant them in the next, that is, in heaven by means of that great mountain [Potosí], which is the source of the greater part of the monarchs' grandeur" (grandeza) (Murúa 1616, 379r) (See Fig. 21). 28 From the royal censor's point of view, Murúa's attribution of the glory of Spain's rulers to the material wealth provided by the silver of Potosí was objectionable enough; com-27. The title had passed in 1558 to Charles's younger brother Ferdinand, king of Bohemia and Hungary, after Charles abdicated the throne in 1556 and divided the states over which he was sovereign between his brother Ferdinand I and his son Philip II. 28. "Que no parese sino que Dios quiso a los Reyes de España en pago de la firmeza que tienen en la fe a dalles en esta vida una señal de las nuebas riquezas que les a de dar en el cielo con el cerro de donde procede la mayor parte de su grandeza".
pounding it with the notion that this earthly wealth was a sign of God's promise of their eternal spiritual reward, albeit predicted by a mendicant friar, was entirely unacceptable. Yet with these few objectionable passages deleted (Remón, we are reminded, had done yeoman's work in this regard), the Getty Murúa was ready for -and received -the coveted royal approval (see Fig. 16). Our other question remains: Why was the Historia General del Piru not published in its day? There are many possible causes, but I offer the one I find most plausible. 29 On the topic of Inca history, there was laid on the table of the royal Castilian court at that very moment one of the most widely heralded works of its time: El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's Comentarios reales de los Incas. Its Primera parte (Part One) had been published in Lisbon in 1609, and its Segunda parte (Part Two) was now at the court in Madrid, awaiting the final inspection that was required to start the presses rolling.
In fact, and this may be the greatest irony of all concerning the fate of Murúa's Historia General del Piru, El Inca Garcilaso's Segunda parte manuscript had been approved by the royal censor Pedro de Valencia on January 6, 1614, and, having been rubricated by the king's notary (Gerónimo Núñez de León), the royal license to print ("Yo, el Rey") was issued on January 21, 1614. Now, in 1616, the manuscript had been typeset and Garcilaso's printer, with a printed copy in hand, awaited its royal inspection and comparison with the previously approved manuscript. On November 12, 1616, the court's officially appointed reader, the licentiate Murcia de la Llana, declared that the printed version corresponded to the manuscript. Thus, only five days later, on November 17, 1616, Gerónimo Núñez de León executed the tasa, declaring that the king and his council had seen and licensed for printing the Segunda parte de los comentarios reales and that it could now be sold for a fixed period of time at a royally set fair-market price (Varner 1968, 376). 30 29. There were additional factors that would have been at play, including the competition between Murúa's work and two other publishing projects that received Mercedarian support: Remón's own history of the Mercedarian Order, Historia general de la Orden de Nuestra Señora de la Merced (1618-1633), and the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo's Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (1632) in which a Mercedarian friar, Bartolomé de Olmedo, was given a featured role in the conquest of Mexico. See Adorno 2009, 34-6. 30. The pertinent documents are referenced in Medina [1898Medina [ -1907Medina [ ]1968 Garcilaso did not live to see the Segunda parte in print; he died on April 23, Another factor was the wide international acclaim that El Inca Garcilaso's Primera parte de los comentarios reales de los Incas was already achieving. For example, the Comentarios reales made its debut in a partial English translation in London only some eight years after the Segunda parte appeared in print, and this was eight years before its first translation into French was published. 31 In his Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625), the English Protestant minister and compiler of historical narratives Samuel Purchas translated into English and published portions of both the first and second parts, hailing Garcilaso's history of the Incas as "a jewell, such as no other Peru Merchant hath set to sale" ([1625] 1906, 17: 412). The novelty of Garcilaso's native heritage as an "Inca-Spaniard" appealed greatly to Purchas, for being "of the bloud of the Incas, or as others call them, Ingas, Emperours of Peru, by the mothers side, his father a Spaniard"; Purchas offered his reader the opportunity to "heare a Peruan speake of Peru", and to supplement the accounts of Spanish authors by collecting "such things as either they had not, or had by false information received and deceived their Readers, whom this Authour correcteth out of better intelligence"; emphasizing his delight at having native accounts on which to rely, Purchas adds: "Besides, hee seemes to hold counterpoise, as drawing things from their originall, with our Mexican Picture-antiquities" ([1625] 1906, 17: 311). 32 It seems that there was no room, or rather, no financial support, for a second comprehensive history of the Incas of Peru, especially since its antecedent was authored not by the likes of a Spanish mendicant friar but rather by a "son of the Incas", the male offspring of an Inca princess and a Spanish captain.

Colophon
The writings of Jerónimo Román y Zamora and Martín de Murúa have more in common than I would have thought when I decided to put them together to explore the topic of censorship. One of the most distinctive similarities that comes clear only under this type of autopsy is their shared regard for the ideas of Bartolomé de las Casas. Murúa's friendly censor Remón had an axe to grind with Las Casas regarding the Dominican's assessment of the Mercedarians' role in the Spanish conquests, and he readily perceived the Lascasian legacy in Murúa's Historia General del Piru, which condemned the execution of the last Inca princes as regicide. Remón, like the viceroy Toledo fifty years earlier, understood that Las Casas "was the heart" of the friars of Peru, and he certainly found it to be true in the case of his Mercedarian confrere. As Remón's slashing pen strokes suggest, he must have been struck forcefully by this realization as he helped Murúa, the veteran missionary friar, prepare his work for royal censorship and, hopefully, approval and publication.
In the portion of Repúblicas del mundo devoted to the República de las Indias Occidentales, Román y Zamora's reading of Las Casas's work is even more overtly in evidence. Román named "the bishop of Chiapas" on several occasions, and when he praised the principles of governance instituted by pre-Columbian Amerindian peoples, he took the opportunity to remark on the prerogatives of the Christian prince. He made the argument that Christian sovereigns should not seek to prohibit by law all the sins and vices that their subjects might commit or practice but rather feign indifference and allow certain vices to go ignored, because to attempt to eliminate all vice would be as futile as trying to control men's thoughts, whereas -it should be remembered -the only true function of the law was to conserve a just and ordered state ([1575] 1897, 1: 272-3). I discovered that Román's source for this rumination was Las Casas, and that his argument came virtually word-for-word from Las Casas' Apologética historia sumaria. 33 I think Murúa understood that his decades abroad working in the missionary field of Quechua-speaking colonial Peru did not prepare him to face the demands of a royal court whose intimate workings he had not experi-33. Román paraphrased the text of a manuscript copy of the Apologética historia sumaria, which was one of Las Casas's many works that were not published but circulated in manuscript in the decades following his death. See Adorno 1992, 818-20 and Casas [1527-1560] 1958 enced personally. And if he was, as it seems, infirm at that point in his life, all the more so (see footnote 16). Somewhat earlier, Román y Zamora had been surrounded not by native, neophyte new Christians but rather by old and new books in which, I believe, he found his vocation -just as the fictional Don Quijote would do in his personal provincial library -and like Don Quijote, Román y Zamora sallied forth in the pursuit of justice. Along the way, Román y Zamora, like Murúa after him, never doubted the importance or validity of the principle of intellectual freedom. Both subscribed to it. This is what prompted them to respond to censorship by declaring, in the spirit of their historical and fictional counterparts Las Casas and Don Quijote: "Obedezco, pero no cumplo". Yale University