Private Passions and Public Sins: Men and Women in Seventeenth-Century Lima (review)

The issues addressed in this splendid book, such as the rampant illegitimacy, widespread extramarital relations, and child abandonment that were endemic in colonial Latin America, have been the concern of important monographic studies published in the last two decades. Mannarelli’s work, however, deserves special attention. It is a classic piece that has inspired and oriented scholars in the field since its original publication in Spanish fifteen years ago. Mannarelli provides a unique model for understanding a seemingly anomic society. She gives coherence to the multilayered patterns of family life and sexual habits of men and women of Lima, Peru, placing them in a broader social and racial context. She demonstrates that affective and sexual habits that resulted in illegitimacy, abandonment of children, and mistreatment of women were not confined to the margins of society, but pervaded all social groups. She explains how the inequalities among men and women in their intimate relationships, family formation, and raising of children served to strengthen the socio-racial hierarchies in Colonial Lima. Finally, Mannarelli highlights the trajectory of women, central characters in the story.

Mannarelli offers an appraisal of the kaleidoscopic world of “illicit” sexual liaisons in seventeenth-century Lima, founded on the baggage of patriarchal values brought by the Conquistadors, and on the unique characteristics of an urban setting like Lima. She weaves together an impressive array of archival documents on divorce cases and consensual unions from the Archiepiscopal Archives of Lima and National General Archives; baptismal, inquisitional, and notarial records; census data; legal treaties; and ancient codices as well as contemporary social commentary. The outcome is a terse narrative in which the micro-history is skillfully integrated into a wider interpretation of a society regulated by its own moral conventions, colonial legal norms, local customs, and gender and social hierarchies.

Addressing the extended extramarital relationships, Mannarelli argues that the Church and civil authorities were unable to fight against these transgressions since they also frequently engaged in inappropriate sexual behavior. Furthermore, because consensual unions usually occurred among individuals of different social and ethnic backgrounds, there were few incentives to enforce marriage.

Mannarelli discusses the prevalent double standard applied to judging adulterous couples. Society and the law were more lenient with male transgressors than with females’ infidelities that cast greater dishonor on husbands and created uncertain identity of the progeny. Nonetheless, Mannarelli argues that women also felt dishonored and degraded by their husbands’infidelity. Indeed, women were deeply hurt by their couples’ violent behavior when involved in illicit liaisons, while men’s main concerns pertained to loss of their image and good name in the public sphere.

In dealing with illegitimacy, Mannarelli focuses on its structural nature and discusses the different social status of children born out of wedlock and the many options available for some to ensure legal recognition, inheritance, and access to the social privileges of their progenitors. For the majority, however, such prospects were elusive. In fact, illegitimacy functioned as a device to keep each social group in place, and little interest was given to their legal integration in society.

The book covers other important subjects such as the place of women in society, the different codes of behavior for women according to their race and social standing, and the confinement of white children born out of wedlock in special institutions to protect their parents’ honor.

Mannarelli has made an important contribution to our understanding of how sexual transgressions served the ends of reinforcing the rigid social and racial structure of Lima during the seventeenth century. This classic study fully deserves close attention by scholars and students in the field and certainly merits the wider circulation that will result from its translation.