Relacion de las Costumbres de los Tagalos

Fray Juan de Plasencia's Relacion de las Costumbres de los Tagalos is a primary source, a late sixteenth century Spanish Franciscan missionary's firsthand account of pre-Hispanic Tagalog customs, religion and social structure in the Philippines, written within a few decades of Spanish colonization. Its value to historians is exactly that early date, preserving details of indigenous Tagalog religious practice, deities and social ranking that colonization was actively displacing and that survive nowhere else in comparable detail. Its limit is the same as any missionary account: Plasencia wrote as an agent of Christianization describing practices he ultimately aimed to replace, so his categorization and moral framing of Tagalog religion reflect a friar's sixteenth century Catholic viewpoint, and modern Philippine historians read the text as an invaluable but interested source requiring careful separation of observation from judgment.