Hyperlexia and colonial legal culture: caciques, and litigation in the andes, 1550 – 1640

• Gerardo Francisco Ludeña González

  , Universidad César Vallejo, Lima - Perú

  Author

  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4433-9471 (unauthenticated)

• Renzo R. Honores Gonzales

  , Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima - Perú

  Author

One of the marked features of colonial society was its normative profusion. An enormous sea of cédulas and ordinances was a facet that early prompted many authors to dedicate themselves to studying, classifying and organizing this complex body of regulations. This effort was many times promoted and sponsored by the colonial authorities, especially by the viceroys, both in New Spain and in the Andes, or in the viceroyalty of Peru. Naturally in the Council of the Indies the jurists were in charge of carrying out large compilations.

In the viceroyalty of Peru, in the seventeenth century, there are great publications and compilations, the Curia Philipica published for the first time in Lima in 1603 by the Asturian Juan de Ebbia Bolaños, with a second part of the brilliant procedural document “ the labyrinth of land trade ”, likewise, great compilers of rules of local and metropolitan origin were the legal advisers of the Viceroys such as Gaspar de Escalona y Agüero, Diego de León Pinelo and Tomás de Ballesteros, the latter less known,
although very important for the compilation of the Ordinances of Peru (1695), which was even re-published, without significant changes, in the 18th century.
The use of the norms as invocation privileges was central to the litigants’ strategy. Together with this legal production, Andean colonial society was the scene - according to the testimonies of its protagonists - of a visible litigation, that is to say, of a extended use of the judicial system; thus, the hearings, the corregimientos, and the town councils were overwhelmed attending to pleytos. In sum, litigation was a characteristic of many sectors of the colonial population, the result of a legal society in which rights had to be settled in the judicial courts with the presence of legal professionals.

1. Gerardo Francisco Ludeña González, , Universidad César Vallejo, Lima - Perú

   Abogado, magister en Derecho por la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Doctor en
   Gestión Pública y Gobernabilidad. Código ORCID: 0000-0003-4433-9471

2. Renzo R. Honores Gonzales, , Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima - Perú

   Abogado por la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Doctor of Philosophy in History (Florida International University).

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