Persecuting Heresy: Prohibited books at the Colegio de Santa Cruz of Queretaro
Abstract
In order to understand how inquisitors identified bookish heretics within the institutions of New Spain, we must delve into the most common of the different strategies utilized for book censorship. One of these was expurgation, a mechanism that allowed for the elimination of certain parts of texts considered harmful or dangerous to religious orthodoxy. This article analyses a part of this process through the study of the inspection of the library of the Franciscan Collegiate School of Santa Cruz, in Querétaro, one of the inquisitorial inspections of the institutional libraries of New Spain, ordered in 1716. This analysis has allowed us to establish a relationship between the documents of the process and the expurgated books of the colonial period that have been preserved in libraries. Through the case-study of one of the protagonists, Friar Angel Garcia Luque, we can understand the labor of expurgation and rethink the closed-mindedness of New Spain’s inquisitors; a way of penetrating the written culture of this American territory.
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