Where There's a Will, There's a Way

The Significance of Scribal Variation in Colonial Maya Testaments

Bibliographic Data

ID7535865
AuthorsVictoria R Bricker (Tulane University, corresponding author)
Year2015
Volume62
Issue3
Pages421-444
Publication date2015-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthnohistory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0014-1801 • E-ISSN: 1527-5477
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00141801-2890169
OpenAlexW2531253414
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited18

The Archivo Notarial del Estado in Mérida, Yucatán, contains a large collection of approximately 550 documents in the Maya language from the municipal records of Tekanto, a small town located about 54 kilometers east of Mérida. The earliest Maya documents in the collection bear a 1590 date, and the latest was written in 1835. Of these many documents, 373 are wills or testaments. The collection is particularly rich in wills for the years 1724 to 1759. Only 56 wills mention bequests of property to heirs; the rest are brief, formulaic attestations of belief in the Catholic Church. They vary primarily in the names of the testator and the notary or scribe who wrote the will and in whether the funeral will include a sung or said Mass. There are also variations in how words are spelled in the wills, “errors” that are sometimes quite revealing about the amount of training the scribe received, how much influence a scribe had on his successor (and for how long), and how words were actually pronounced in Maya

Archaeology · Genealogy · Maya · Political science · Successor cardinal · Classics · Early Modern Women Writers · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Latin American history and culture · Law

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