Early modern Spanish American poetry (c. 1500-1700) is a fascinating but little-studied aspect of Hispanic colonial culture. Spanish American poetry was transmitted in material ways, not simply as an intellectual and literary phenomenon. Poetry was considered as a written and oral object, disseminated, conditioned and controlled by a range of societal players both within and beyond the urban space. While the obvious networks of interchange connected the European metropolis to the burgeoning colonies, there were also cross-regional connections in Central and South America. As performance art, poetry connected with other art forms in the region - music, painting and sculpture - but as an act of devotion it also intersected the history of early American religious culture. This wide-ranging and highly interdisciplinary volume offers pioneering work bringing together scholars from both Europe and the Americas, North and South.