Constituciones sinodales de Guamanga (1672, printed Lima 1677)
A provincial bishop's rulebook for an Andean diocese, printed with the abuses it was written against still legible in it: parish priests fined ten pesos a year for not auditing each confraternity, mayordomos who claimed their houses had burned with the account books, curas forbidden to take wine or sheep from the brotherhoods on pain of fourfold restitution — and a chapter arguing for Spanish that first prints Acosta's and Garcilaso's case against it.
Why this wins its question: Synodal constitutions are the densest surviving record of how colonial Spanish-American parishes were actually supposed to run, and almost none of them are read in English; the Huamanga book of 1672 is normally a bibliographic entry. Read page by page it yields what no summary carries: the exact fine for an unaudited confraternity, the burnt-account-book excuse the bishop had evidently heard once too often, the fourfold penalty on a priest who takes a sheep from a brotherhood, the two keys on the chest — and, on the language question, a chapter that states Acosta's and Garcilaso's objection in their own terms before overruling it with a royal cédula. The point is not that the bishop was benign. It is that the machinery of restraint and the machinery of coercion are printed in one volume, forty pages apart, and can be quoted from the same copy.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The book is the printed act of a diocesan synod held at Huamanga, in the southern Peruvian Andes, in June 1672 by bishop Cristóbal de Castilla y Zamora, and printed at Lima by Gerónimo de Contreras in 1677 — five years after the synod met.
Before it could be printed the text passed a civil review. The crown's fiscal at Lima, licenciado Juan de Peñalosa, certified on 25 February 1676 that "no ha quedado en su contexto cosa que se oponga al Real Patronazgo, ni jurisdicion Real" and that its author had attended to "la concordia de lo mas vtil, y al decoro de ambas jurisdiciones, sin macillar ninguna" — a bishop's rulebook cleared article by article by a royal law officer before the press.
Its treatment of the confraternities is an audit code. The outgoing mayordomo's balance passes to the incoming one "conque se escusaran los fraudes"; the parish priests must take the accounts of every cofradía once a year, on pain of paying the damages and interest of each one and a further ten pesos for each cofradía left unaudited in the year; and the older obligation to audit every four months is relaxed to annual in the same breath.
The rule names the evasion it was written against. "Porque algunos mayordomos han fingido que se les han quemado sus casas, y en ellas los libros de las Cofradias, porque no se tenga noticia de los bienes de ellas" — because some stewards have pretended their houses burned down with the confraternity books in them, so that nobody should know what the confraternities own — the synod orders the priests to keep the books themselves and leave the stewards only a day-book of expenses to be copied into the principal book at the year's end.
The same chapter caps what the clergy may take. The priests are forbidden, at the confraternities' feasts, to ask or compel the brothers or stewards to give them presents "de vino, aues, carneros, ni otros generos, pena de boluerlos con el quatro tanto" — wine, fowl, sheep or anything else, on pain of returning them fourfold — and are forbidden to name the alférez of the feast from one year to the next.
Two further limits belong beside those. Because the number of confraternities and of their alms-collectors was "tan crecido", no church or monastery may have more than three that beg publicly in the streets, the priest or superior naming them within twenty days and licensing the rest in writing; and the chest of the Blessed Sacrament confraternity is to have two keys, one held by the priest and one by the steward.
Chapter II is headed "Paraque se enseñe a los Indios la Doctrina en lengua Española" and argues for teaching the doctrine in Spanish. Its premise is the language count: it cites Acosta for more than seven hundred different languages in Peru, and records that the Inca had ordered his subject peoples to learn Quechua, "que llaman la general, aunque en sus Prouincias vsauan la que tenian especial" — the precedent for a single administrative language being, in the synod's own telling, an Andean one.
The chapter prints the case against itself. "Aunque digan Acosta y Garcilaso que no se puede quitar su lengua a los Indios, y que es mas conforme a raçon que los Españoles la aprendan" — although Acosta and Garcilaso say that the Indians' language cannot be taken from them and that it is more reasonable that the Spaniards learn it — the synod answers only that the reason of the royal cédulas is greater. The two authorities it names against its own conclusion are a Jesuit missiologist and a mestizo son of Cuzco.
What it then quotes is the crown's argument, not the bishop's: the cédula given at Ventosilla on 25 July 1605, which holds that the mysteries of the faith cannot be properly rendered even in the best and most perfect Indian language "sino con grandes absurdos e imperfecciones", that the founded chairs of the general language are "no es remedio bastante por ser tanta la variedad de las lenguas", and that masters are to be provided in the way least troublesome to the Indians and "sin costa suya", for those "que voluntariamente quisieren aprender la lengua Castellana". The order as printed is for voluntary learners at no charge to them; how it worked in practice is not evidenced by this text.
The costs are in the same volume and are not softened. Its own alphabetical index carries the entry "Auxilio Real en causas de idolatria cap. 6. n. 8" — the secular arm placed at the church court's disposal in idolatry cases — alongside "Alferazgos de Cofradias prohibidos" and "Arancel ha de estar fixo en parte publica"; and the constitutions for the vicars direct them to keep mestizos, negros and mulatos out of the Indian doctrinas of their districts unless married to Indian women of the same doctrina or holding real property there. A book that audits the priests also polices who may live in an Indian town.
The fee discipline it imposes on its own courts is explicit: suits are to be ended briefly, and litigants are to give the officials no "presentes, ni regalos … ni mas derechos que los que estan señalados por el arancel" — no presents, no gifts, and no fees beyond the posted schedule, which the index requires to be fixed up in a public place.
It is a derivative book by design, and says so. The fiscal describes it as worked through with "la concordancia de capitulos del Derecho Canonico, Concilios Tridentino, y Limense, y cedulas Reales", and its margins cite the Lima synods of 1613 and 1636, the Councils of Lima, Trent and the synod of La Paz of 1638 — which is the practical evidence that a body of Spanish-American diocesan legislation was circulating and being cross-read between Andean dioceses by the 1670s.