These materials were transcribed by Pablo Pastells, S.J. during the last decade of the nineteenth and the first thirty years of the twentieth century, documenting the history of the Jesuit Order and its work in the Americas and Philippines, including the Patronato Real and colonial education. The documents are official and semi-official in nature, drawn chiefly from the Archivo de Indias in Seville, but also from other Spanish public and private archival collections, as well as Jesuit archives. The collection is divided into two parts:

• Seville Collection (Colección de documentos de Sevilla)
  Materials relating to the Jesuit Provinces of Paraguay, Chile, Perú, Quito, Nuevo Reino de Granada, Mexico, and the Philippines, drawn from the Archivo General de Indias in Seville.

• Barcelona Collection (Colección de documentos de Barcelona)
  Materials relating to the Philippines, drawn from the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, the Archivo General de Simancas in the Province of Valladolid, the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid, the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, and the primate archives of the Jesuit Provinces of Madrid, Málaga, Loyola, Manila, and Mexico.

Summaries of the contents of the Pastells documents may be found at the beginning or, in some cases, at the conclusion of each volume of transcripts. A card index to this collection, including Pastells’s original summaries and other information, is available for consultation in the reading room of the Vatican Film Library. For further information on the history and contents of this collection, see:

• Franciscos Mateos, "La colección Pastells de documentos sobre América y Filipinas," Revista de Indias 27 (1947): 7-52
• John Francis Bannon, S.J., "The St. Louis University Collection of Jesuitica Americana," The Hispanic American Historical Review 37 (1957): 82-84
• Lowrie J. Daly, S.J., and Edward K. Burger, S.J., "Some Notes on the Pastells Collection at Saint Louis University," Manuscripta 24 (1980): 99-105
• Guadalupe Jiménez Codinach, The Hispanic World 1492-1898: A Guide to Photoreproduced Manuscripts from Spain in the Collections of the United States, Guam, and Puerto Rico = El mundo hispanico 1492-1898: guía de copias fotográficas de manuscritos españoles existentes en los Estados Unidos de América, Guam y Puerto Rico (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1994), 415-425