Milton in Revolutionary Hispanoamerica

In 1905, five years before the onset of the Mexican Revolution (ca. 1910–20), the Chilean historian and bibliographer José Toribio Medina Zavala published his Historia del Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición en México (A history of the tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Mexico), which he dedicated to the Mexican president Porfirio Díaz as a token of friendship and admiration.1 Medina devotes an entire chapter of his lengthy account of the life and deeds of this American branch of the Spanish Inquisition to the matter of prohibited books. In chapter 23, the historian relates how, given an evident growth in (illegal) book commerce between the Iberian Peninsula and the Viceroyalty of New Spain, and Mexico in particular, the Inquisition eventually found itself struggling to exert efficient control over the overseas book trade.2 The situation became so troublesome in the second half of the eighteenth century that, according to Medina, “los Inquisidores no lograban echar mano á ninguno que tuviese los libros que diariamente iban anatemizando” (Inquisitors did not manage to lay their hands on those who possessed the books that they anathemized on a daily basis).3