Summary: | In the Seventeenth Century Villa of San Antonio de Cajamarca, vice-royalty of Peru, almost one third of the authors of testamentary documents found in the departmental archives were indian people. We offer here two series of questions regarding this proportion. The first deals with the classification of testamentary documents amongst judicial sources, since they are more likely to be juridical sources at first glance. The second series of questions is related to the extent of individual will in the testament, since the testament is in most cases spoken and then put in a written form by a escribano. The hypothesis we provide tend to perceive the written testament as a potential piece of evidence made up of different wills, and the expression of the deeply personal volition of its author.
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