This article focuses on a set of reports sent from the Spanish overseas territories in the New World to the Consejo de Indias (Council of the Indies) in Spain. Special attention will be paid to the annotations that appear in the margins of the documents, since they bring light to the activities that were taken over by a wide array of the Consejo ’s officials in order to treat the information that came from America. We will demonstrate that such activities—classifying, summarizing, but also linking documents to one another across time and space—were at the core of the process of decision-making in the Spanish monarchy. The main challenge of this research, however, is that most of the marginal annotations were anonymous, and that not all of them were written by the same person, nor did they have the same functions. In order to overcome those obstacles, we will combine a visual, paleographic, and textual study of the sources aimed at exploring the links between the overseas reports, the marginal annotations and the royal decrees to which they had given rise. In doing so, we will highlight the paradoxical nature of the archive which, through its classifying process, gives access to a wide range of documents and, at the same time, separates them from one another and even tends to erase the connections that used to exist between them. Examining the margins of the documents will thus enable us to better understand the relationship between archival techniques, political communication and the development of imperial legality in the Spanish monarchy.

中文翻译：

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文件的边缘，权力的中心：以 Consejo de Indias 的带注释文件和皇家档案馆中的合法性为例

本文重点介绍了从新大陆的西班牙海外领地发送到西班牙的 印度 议会（印度议会）的一组报告 。将特别注意出现在文档页边距的注释，因为它们使由 Consejo 广泛承担的活动更容易理解 的官员为了对待来自美国的情报。我们将证明，此类活动（在时空上进行分类，汇总以及将文档彼此链接在一起）是西班牙君主制决策过程的核心。但是，这项研究的主要挑战在于，大多数边缘注释都是匿名的，并且并非所有注释都是由同一个人编写的，也不具有相同的功能。为了克服这些障碍，我们将对资料来源进行视觉，古地理和文字研究，以探索海外报道，边际注释和引起它们的皇家法令之间的联系。在这样做的过程中，我们将强调档案的悖论性质，通过分类过程，可以访问各种文档，同时将它们彼此分开，甚至趋向于删除它们之间曾经存在的联系。因此，检查文件的边距将使我们能够更好地理解档案馆技巧，政治传播与西班牙君主制帝国合法性发展之间的关系。