Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (review)

The topic of this book is the role played by three convents (Santa Clara, Santa Catalina, and Santa Teresa) in the economy and society of colonial and early republican Cuzco. And the story is a fairly familiar one. The convents were a place for women to live and contemplate God, without bringing dishonor to elite families. The convents educated and cared for girls, and in the case of the first—Santa Clara—the intent of the Cuzco cabildo (town council) that established the convent was to educate the mestizo daughters of the conquistadores and bring them into the Spanish world away from their indigenous mothers. The convents also contributed to the development of the regional economy by making loans to landowners and others, and a symbiotic relationship evolved between the convents and first families of Cuzco. The convents made a place for daughters, and used the dowries to invest in loans and liens (censos) that produced interest income used to support the activities of the convents. Certain elite families promoted the convents, and made donations. The convents also owned houses and rural property that they rented or directly exploited, using indigenous labor.

In the eighteenth-century Cuzco landowners found their estates overly burdened by censos, and increasingly could not make interest payments on time. The Cuzco economy stagnated, and the nuns and their lay representatives spent considerable time trying to collect arrears or going to court to embargo estates. The great rebellion of 1780–1782 further disrupted the Cuzco economy, making it more difficult for the nuns to maintain accustomed standards of living, and this was followed by the actions of the crown in the 1790s and early 1800s that extracted forced loans to cover growing war-related deficits. The consolidacion policy of 1804 attempted to squeeze even more money from the different groups within the church, including the Cuzco convents. The prolonged independence struggle in Peru and the reform tendencies and anticlericalism of the new republican regime further affected the convents. The government seized convent owned lands, and established schools to educate girls. New laws also allowed women to renounce their vows and leave the convents. The city fathers tore down sections of the convents to make room for wider streets. In 1865, a law allowed landowners to cancel their censos, and the nuns found themselves having to depend on the government for operating funds. The Peruvian government enforced a more genuine poverty for the nuns, who during the height of the convents in the seventeenth-century had been able to live an elite lifestyle while clinging to a claim of poverty.

Burns describes two focal points of activity within the convents: the grille that separated the nuns from the outside world, and the individual cells maintained by many of the nuns. The nuns conducted business at the grille, and visited with family members. There normally was another nun assigned to the grille to listen to the exchanges, to ensure that nothing inappropriate was said. The cell was the private world of the nun within the convent, and at times housed young girls being raised by the nuns and even servants. Some questioned how genuine the vow of poverty was when viewed against the backdrop of the world the nuns created in their individual cells.

Burns has produced a well-documented and easy to read case study of convents in Cuzco. However, there are some problems with the way in which the author attempts to situate her study within the context of historiography. Burns claims that, when viewed in Andean historiography, nuns have been viewed as marginal, as not playing an important role in colonial society. To support her assertion, she creates a straw man by only very selectively citing several older studies dealing with female orders in Peru (the author claims she is talking about the Andean region, which includes several other countries). Studies the author does not cite cover similar...