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

When historians use the term multivalency, it can sometimes seem artful evasion, but van Deusen proves that recogimiento indeed held multiple meanings for the colonial inhabitants of Lima. She skillfully untangles this knotty concept—early modern dictionaries presented no fewer than twenty-six variants on its definition—and extracts three essential strands running through it: theological precept, institutional practice, and gendered behavioral norm. Thus, the book treats the scores of institutions (often themselves called "recogimientos") that housed Lima's women and girls as much as the contemporary practices and beliefs surrounding female spirituality and virtue. Although the chapters are arranged more or less diachronically, van Deusen demonstrates that the meanings of recogimiento did not develop in a linear fashion, with one signification replacing another. Instead, she draws from the field of historical semiotics to explain how, by the seventeenth century, the colonial inhabitants of Lima vested the term with three principle meanings simultaneously. But, ultimately, the major theoretical framing for the work is the notion of "transculturation," the process through which colonial inhabitants reshaped dominant European cultural codes and practices to fit local conditions.

In order to separate recogimiento's local meanings from its hegemonic Spanish significations, van Deusen first traces the genesis and development of spiritual and sexual enclosure in Europe and Mexico. Originally a mystical practice involving stillness, silence, and separation from the world, the concept flourished among Spanish and Italian humanists just at the time when the Spanish conquered the Americas. When implanted in New World soil, recogimiento became more rooted in the "civilizing" processes of colonialism than in contemplative spirituality. In Mexico, the home of the first recogimiento experiments in America, the concept undergirded colonial programs for institutionalizing Indian children, protecting Spanish patrimony, and eventually "hispanicizing" the daughters of conquerors and Indian noble women.

A recogimiento for mestizas established in Lima during the 1550s lasted only two decades, in large part because it was founded just as the conquest-era association between race and recogimiento was beginning to unravel. The concept that replaced it drew not from the Spanish colonial project but from Catholic Europe's post-Tridentine anxiety about sexually wayward women. According to van Deusen, colonial officials in Lima readily adopted this shift in meaning because Lima was undergoing pronounced migration and growth. During the period from 1580 to 1620, the city was brimming with a broad array of women whom officials could classify as errant, including defiant daughters, concubines, slaves, and, increasingly, women involved in marital disputes, who were shut up in private homes, convents, hospitals, and a house for divorced women.

When it rolled off the lips of male officials, slave masters, and husbands who faced divorcing wives, "recogimiento" took on a decidedly disciplinary timbre. But, in seventeenth-century Lima, women of all castes and social classes inflected the term with their own meanings. From the evidence in divorce cases, van Deusen shows how some women utilized recogimientos—institutions established to contain them—as shelters from disagreeable domestic situations and abusive partners. Other women construed recogimiento as a virtue that they might possess by means of engaging in honorable behavior, whether they were enclosed in an institution or simply lived a "proper" life in their own homes.

The expanded participation of "worldly" women in the discourses of recogimiento converged with an expansion in the number of institutions dedicated to the older, mystical form of silent reflection. A new rash of recogimientos established during the second half of the seventeenth century—which included schools, convents and beaterios (lay spiritual houses)—provoked a response from the city's elite. Hoping to distinguish their daughters from the rest of the (corrupt) female colonial populace and to secure for themselves an elevated position in both the sacred and secular realms of Lima, the elite attempted to...