Non Sufficit Orbis

A copyist in the 1590s Archive of Simancas dreams of escaping to Peru

Sometime before 1608, a Spanish poet by the name of Juan de Arjona wrote an ode to the pig (see source 1). It survives in an unlikely place: an undated early modern book of religious poems, most dedicated to saints, which bears the title Mystic songbook (Canciones...

On 25 April, 1566, a field justice of the Spanish city of Coria, Extremadura went before a scribe with an alarming story - "a monstrous thing, and never before seen, and which repugnates nature." When a chicken had died laying eggs, a white male cat took it upon himsel...

"This is a transcript of a letter that fell from heaven to earth in which God wrote from his heart, and must be believed by all, which was found in Saint Mary the New which is seven leagues from Ávila, and goes like this..."

Jan Provost (Jean Provost). Sixteenth Century...

Men ran the Council of the Indies, so says every book and almost every document we know about it. Little wonder; during the Habsburg era all of its 458 officials and ministers were men. But in the late 1560s word on the street in Madrid was that the wives of important...

Welcome to Non Sufficit Orbis - a new blog about the history of the Atlantic world and beyond. 

My name is Adrian Masters. I'm a graduate student at UT Austin, and will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Austin at Texas's Institute for Historical Studies betw...