The CUNY Dominican Studies Institute and its Commitment to Knowledge Dissemination
This web Tool is intended to disseminate as widely as possible the paleographic skills needed to access the vast archival record of the Spanish empire in the 16th and 17th centuries, and thus open new opportunities for more people to contribute to and deepen our current knowledge about those relatively unstudied centuries.
The broad mission of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute is to disseminate and produce knowledge about Dominicans and their culture, thus the particular selection of the sample manuscript documents selected for this first rendering of the Tool, all of them pertaining to early colonial La Española. Since the same handwriting styles were used throughout the Spanish empire in the Americas, the early Dominican documents are appropriate samples of handwriting styles used in all Spanish colonies as well as in the Spanish metropolis. Learning how to decipher the handwriting of 16th and 17th century Dominican documents, will allow users to read documents of the same period from any of the Spanish colonies that later became the majority of the Latin American nations as we know them today.
Expanding the number of researchers across the world trained in reading the kind of documents featured in this Spanish Paleography Tool could be an important step towards creating new knowledge about largely unknown periods of Spain’s and Latin America’s past. Documents generated before standardized forms of handwriting were disseminated in the Spanish-culture world, remain a considerable challenge for the development of new knowledge about a period that was fundamental in the development of Spanish-culture societies. The goal of this web tool is to ultimately democratize access to these sources and the information they contain and also open the door to new interpretations and perceptions about that past.