Father Botero’s revolution: A dispute over the sources of law. Antioquia, 1835-1848.In this research, conflicts born within the progressive definition of juidical forms and of knowledge that accompanied the re-establishment of institutions and power groups after the political break with Spain, are studied. This analysis is conducted through a case study, the story of an illustrated priest who in 1835 launched a lawsuit against the teaching of materialism and atheism under the Republican reclassification of knowledge. Father Botero’s revolution developed in the Candelaria Village and it establishes a historical example of a type of local resistance to the abolition and supplanting of old forms of juridical production and social organization. The Botero case serves as a pre-text to study a local response to the centralizing initiative regarding the abrogation of a material culture by the implementation of a model of formal ordering, of legicentric and liberal orientation, it illustrates a localized form of resistance against the implementation of the Republican model in Colombia. The dispute over the sources of law, the truth and knowledge in the transit to judicial modernity, through a case and a comprehensive documentary reconstruction exercise, a central problem of revolutionary judicial culture, is recreated. This research intends a way of making law history from specific cases, local history and unofficial documents as a form of pedagogical claim of small objects, those that test the actual operation of hegemonic mechanisms.
