Royal instructions, viceregal notices. Writing the government in front of the New Spain's circumstances (16th century)

This paper aims to analyze a set of documents related to the New Spain's government: the royal instructions sent to the viceroys; the notices, memories and reports written by the viceroys at the end of their mandate. Thus, this article intend to examine the connections between the two types of documents in order to scrutinize the most frequent topics in each one as well as how those themes remain or are changed in the instructions and memories during the last four decades of the sixteenth century. To this end, this article proposes an approach simultaneously diachronic and synchronic in order to make possible, on the one hand, the sequential analysis of the same type of sources and, on the other hand, the relationship between the royal instructions and the notices from the viceroy. This paper assumes that the viceregal circumstances constitute active elements to the comprehension of the permanence and change in the structures of those documents, particularly in the royal instructions.