The Sino-Iberian manuscript known as the Boxer Codex (also referred to as the Manila Codex) has several characteristics that attract polemics, such as its authorship, date of production, target audience, and the relative importance of Islamic, Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish sources and works. Those also make the manuscript especially appealing from the perspective of early modern studies of globality and literature. The Boxer Codex: Colonial Ethnography and Cultural Hybridism in the Philippines, a volume edited by Manel Ollé and Joan-Pau Rubiés, gives space to multiple voices and answers to the manuscript's most debated questions.

Manel Ollé and Joan-Pau Rubiés have divided the collection into four sections: an introduction, six articles, an appendix, and an index. The introduction and first two articles, which are tantamount to almost half of the volume's content, are written by the editors. John N. Crossley, Tsungjen Chen, Isaac Donoso, and Paulo Jorge de Sousa Pinto author the other four articles. The appendix contains a translation into Spanish of the seminal article by C. R. Boxer describing the “manuscript of Manila.” Using this distribution, the editors have created an informative volume on the historical environment in which the Boxer Codex was produced.

John N. Crossley, who published a monograph on the Dasmarinas as governors of the Philippines in 2016, advances with force the hypothesis that one of the Dasmarinas is the mastermind behind the Boxer Codex. He argues that this mastermind was helped by the Dominican Juan Cobo and his multiple contacts in the Sangley community, all of which made the manuscript's creation possible. Tsungjen Chen offers the first academic work focused on the manuscript's images. This chapter analyzes the images of the Xaque ethnic group, inhabitants of the mountains of Fujian, to emphasize the transmission of information via the Sangleys, who came from southern Fujian and spoke Hokkien. Isaac Donoso, who published a bilingual edition of the codex in 2016, brings the presence of Islam in the codex to the fore by focusing on the Philippines (137–40), Brunei (142–48), Aceh, and China (149–50). Donoso proposes that the detailed description of the Muslim structures in South Asia reflects both the long-standing expansion of Islam via commercial posts from Al-Andalus to China, and the consequent sixteenth-century Iberian project of de-Islamization of the commercial routes from the Molucca islands to the metropole (135).

Paulo George de Sosa Pinto reviews four reports of Portuguese origin. While emphasizing the non-Spanish nature of these sources about Achen, Patane, Sian, and Nueva Guinea, De Sosa Pinto does not give the impression that the Boxer Codex is a Portuguese project, that by some historical tribulation ended in Manila, unlike George Bryan Souza and Jeffrey S. Turley's edition of the codex. On the contrary, he carefully indicates that some of those reports collected information to be used in an eventual invasion launched from Manila. De Sosa Pinto also engages in an academic discussion with Charles R. Boxer's, and George Bryan Souza and Jeffrey S. Turley's edition of the Boxer Codex regarding the name of Patane, Panaricán.

One of the topics that repeats in the book is the authorship of this collection of reports and images. Juan Cobo's name emerges convincingly in several chapters as the editor of the volume (19, 22, 25, 91–109). Ollé makes a sophisticated contextualization of the role of Juan Cobo in the “complex and plural authorship” of the document (24–25). By emphasizing Cobo's relationship with the manuscript, the roles of other candidates, such as Martín de Rada, are diminished and even marginalized. This way, an implicit answer emerges to the George Bryan Souza and Jeffrey S. Turley edition published in 2016, which makes it clear that their choice for the author (or compiler) is Antonio de Morga Sánchez Garay (23–26). Ollé's opinion is also challenged by Isaac Donoso, also editor of another bilingual version of the Boxer Codex published in 2016, who seems to propose the second of the Dasmarinas governors as the author of the book (129–30).

The Boxer Codex: Colonial Ethnography and Cultural Hybridism in the Philippines demonstrates that there is a vigorous academic debate surrounding the Boxer Codex and the strongest aspect of is the historical contextualization of this ethnographical compilation. Both students and professionals will benefit from reading this volume, where the authors show the rapidly changing complexity of the South Asian, Chinese, and Philippine realities during late sixteenth-century colonial projects.