Canto, liturgia, ceremonial y culto en América Latina según la Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de Indias

Abstract

Most of the legislative sources for the study of liturgical music in Catholic churches in Latin America have already been explored. However, some of them, like the Compilation of Laws of the Indies of 1680, have not been systematically examined in search of new material on the subject. The present article shows the results of an exhaustive analysis of this compilation emanated from the Spanish secular authority in order to update and complement previous work on the chant, liturgy, ceremonial and divine worship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the New World. These results demonstrate conflicts of competence between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities that characterized the society of the Old Regime, and confirm the existence of a determination to achieve the uniformity within the forms of religious worship according to the practices rooted in the Peninsula. Because of this, the documents also show many specific details which are normally only found in ecclesiastical sources. This intensity of purpose and explication shown in the documents helps one to understand the environment in which liturgical music was developed.