The documents below consist of two kinds of writing: a series of dalit—a kind of devotional poetry praising the works of missionaries written by Tagalog natives—and an excerpt from a bilingual confessional manual by a Franciscan friar typical of guides used by Spanish priests to aid them in hearing the confessions of native converts. Both sets of documents were published in the Philippines during the early part of Spanish colonial rule between the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. In trying to understand these texts, we might begin by asking: what is relationship between the discourses of devotion and the practice of confession?

In the vernacular devotional poems, praise is directed to the book itself. Referred to by the Spanish word libro or by the vernacular term, sulat by the Tagalog poets, the book comes across as the object of esteem radiating a kind of magical power. For this reason, it was a source of great fascination and attachment for native converts. This intense fascination may have to do with the novelty of the book as such: the very first book published in the Philippines after all was the Doctrina Christiana (1593), a catechism that contained a confessional manual. In the printed books introduced by the Spanish missionaries, Latin letters replaced the native baybayin script.