CATALOGUE OF THE DOCUMENTATION OF THE RUIZ EMBITO FAMILY IN THE ARCHIVE OF THE VISCOUNTS OF ALTAMIRA DE VIVERO (Contains CD)
Synopsis
All scholarly studies concerning the Ruiz family have been predicated upon the documentation held within the Simón Ruiz archive. Although ownership of this archive pertains to the Simón Ruiz Foundation, it has been deposited for several decades at the Provincial Historical Archive of Valladolid. This comprehensive collection preserves over 56,000 letters dated between 1556 and 1624, in addition to numerous accounting ledgers and hundreds of bills of exchange. Indeed, the Simón Ruiz postal archive is comparable only to those of the Fugger family in Augsburg and the Datini family in Prato, rendering it a unique resource for the analysis of mercantile activities in sixteenth-century Spain.
Nevertheless, despite the extensive number of historians who have examined this family of merchants, this specific group of documents from the Vivero collection had remained unstudied. It was evident that this documentation had been detached at some point from the primary Simón Ruiz archive and remained untouched, awaiting discovery. Fortune, which frequently assists the researcher, permitted me—given my close ties to the town of Medina del Campo and the Museum of the Fairs Foundation—the opportunity to publish this invaluable body of information and to contribute further to the scholarship regarding the Ruiz family.
The epistolary nature of these documents precluded their individualized description during the descriptive tasks of the Intensive Projects conducted at the center. However, the potential significance of this collection prompted the decision to undertake the catalogue currently being published and to incorporate it into the corpus of research on the Ruiz family produced in recent decades.
How to cite: Peña Barroso, Efrén de la y Pinto Jiménez, Elena María (2015). Catálogo de la documentación de la familia Ruiz Embito en el archivo de los vizcondes de Altamira de Vivero. Valladolid: Ediciones Universidad de Valladolid.
Subjects:
Featured Subject Thema: NHT: History: Specific Events and Topics
Subject Thema: GB: Encyclopedias and Reference Books
Featured Subject IBIC: HBT: History: Specific Events and Topics
Subject IBIC: GB: Encyclopedias and Reference Books
