Thursday, 20 November, 2025
4:00pm-5:30pm
Emmanuel College, Room 119
75 Queen’s Park Cres E
The presentation aims to think of Habsburg Madrid as a multiethnic city, connected to the port city of Seville and to transatlantic networks, drawing Indigenous, mestizo, and African-descended petitioners, travelers, and longer-term residents from Spain’s transoceanic dominions. The research draws details on Indies petitioners and travelers from the Council of the Indies Books of Petitions (1572-95), where the governance chamber secretary, Juan de Ledesma, made summaries of larger petitionary dossiers. The presentation offers specific examples of Indigenous, mestizo, and African-descended vassals who either brought their paperwork to Madrid or through agents had their papers delivered at the Indies Council. Some Indies travelers resided in the Spanish Habsburg capital for several years, creating knowledge and information networks on the ins and outs of petitioning at court, and connecting Madrid and Seville to the greater Spanish Atlantic.
Felipe E. Ruan is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and the Director of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Brock University. His research on petitioning Peruvian mestizos has appeared in Colonial Latin American Review, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, and Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos. At present he is completing the book project “Juan López de Velasco and Lettered Empire: Bureaucracy, Knowledge, and Culture in the Hispanic Monarchy of Philip II (1556-1598).” Concurrently, he is developing the research project “Thinking Multiethnic Madrid: Indios, Mestizos, and Africans in the Spanish Habsburg Capital (1561-1700).”
