Between the Sacred and the Worldly: The Institutional and Cultural Practice of "Recogimiento" in Colonial Lima (review)

In this extensively researched study, Nancy van Deusen delves into the complexities of recogimiento as lived by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century denizens of colonial Lima. Recogimiento was "a theological concept, a virtue, and an institutional practice" (p. xi). Over time its meanings changed significantly as Iberians, Africans, Americans, and their descendants used it to fashion honorable places for themselves in the viceregal capital known as the "City of Kings."

Lima itself during this period of Hapsburg rule was growing, changing, and undergoing transculturation. The black population became especially significant in this city: Africans and Afro-Peruvians made up half the population, which by 1636 had reached 27,400 (p. 238, n. 19). By the seventeenth century Lima was also on its way to becoming a "city of women" (p. 12). The ratio of women to men among Spaniards and mestizos was almost 3:2 by 1700, and around 3:1 among those classified as mulatto and black. As limeños defined themselves using concepts and institutional practices like recogimiento, they were, van Deusen reminds us, living in the midst of striking demographic and cultural transformations.

Her study proceeds chronologically and comparatively, drawing upon European and American antecedents of Peruvian practice. Chapter 1 examines recogimiento's roots in Spanish mysticism and the pre-Tridentine lives of beatas, then shows how the concept informed Franciscan efforts to educate daughters of the Nahua elite at a formative moment in the history of New Spain (to 1543). By the time the institutional practice of recogimiento reached Peru, however, its backers used it more to "remedy" than to educate. Chapter 2 shows that, rather than focusing on elite native women, they aimed at the mestizo children then coming of age. Recogimiento became an institutional means from the 1540s onward for delivering "social beneficence for orphaned or abandoned children" (p. 38). In Lima and around Spanish America, recogimientos were erected to raise and protect mestiza girls in particular. Lima's short-lived San Juan de la Penitencia, opened in 1559, makes an interesting contrast to the early Franciscan recogimientos in New Spain. Both used Franciscan beatas as teachers, but the Lima house seems mainly to have catechized and sheltered poor, orphaned mestizas.

From 1580 to 1620, van Deusen argues, the authorities' emphases shifted; recogimientos were now used to contain women's perceived sexual transgressions. This pursuit of order by containment opened new spaces, such as the Recogimiento de las Divorciadas (1589) and the Recogimiento de María Magdalena (1592), discussed in chapter 3. Here and in subsequent chapters, van Deusen gives us intriguing archival glimpses into the meanings of divorce for women of all kinds, from slaves to elites, during the period. Despite the considerable stigma and difficulty of divorce, women from every kind of background "requested divorces and annulments until both became more common and more readily secured in America than in Spain" (p. 88). This and other behavior perceived as threatening to the social order might land a woman in involuntary detention. This disciplinary recogimiento took place in a variety of institutional settings, including hospitals, convents, and private dwellings. Some women, van Deusen suggests, turned confinement to their advantage, using it for release and protection. Chapter 5 examines the ways recogimiento served Lima elites during the early seventeenth century as they consolidated their status. Education reemerges as a salient feature. Observant convents were important to this end. The Carmelite spirit also infused foundations such as the Recogimientos of Santa María del Socorro (1614) and del Carmen (1619). By the second half of the century, Lima was experiencing a boom in the institutional practice of recogimiento. By 1700, "more than forty-eight monasteries, convents, schools, and hospitals existed in Lima, and the thirty-nine...