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

Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru. By Kathryn Burns. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. xi + 307 pp., introduction, illustrations, appendices, glossary, bibliography, index. $49.95 cloth, $17.95 paper).

Burn’s study is no ordinary institutional history of one segment of the vast institution that is the church. Her investigation of convents in Cuzco not only adds to our growing knowledge of colonial and nineteenth-century women, especially those who chose, at some point, to marry a spiritual spouse and live a sheltered life; it also widens our perspective by specifically focusing on the “spiritual economy” of the region. By spiritual economy Burns refers to the dense network of interests and investments that tied the sacred world inhabited by nuns to the material world beyond enclosure. She clearly demonstrates the role of the convent in the reproduction of social power and prestige and, in the process, contributes to our understanding of gender, family life, marriage, and motherhood.

The organization of the book outlines the founding, growth, crisis, and decline of this spiritual economy. In chapter 1 Burns deals with the founding of the convent of Santa Clara, the recorded aim of which was to protect mestizas (female offspring of native and Spanish parents) by separating them from their (usually) Andean mothers and raising them amidst Spanish religion and customs, thereby creating culturally Spanish young ladies. Burns then shows how the convent acquired property, despite the nuns’ vows of poverty. She lists the wealth that the convent acquired through donations (including the dowries of the nuns), inheritances, and purchases and that eventually allowed the institution to serve as a credit source for local elite society. The nuns solved the dilemma of wealth by putting the title to resources in Santa Clara’s name; thus no particular nun was guilty of the sin of ownership. Chapter 3 conveys a case study of the transplanted Arequipeña convent of Santa Catalina and how the nuns remade themselves so as to gain acceptance in Cuzco.

The next two chapters deal with the daily life of the nuns and how they redefined the institutions of marriage and family to meet their purposes in a strongly hierarchical order. So distracted and boisterous had convent life become by the 1670s that Cuzqueños reacted to create a third, more austere, disciplined Carmelite convent, that of Santa Teresa. At the zenith of the nuns’ power and prosperity, their resources fostered their own collective well-being and the spiritual health of their benefactors. Debts to convents linked the women behind the walls to the world around them.

By the eighteenth century, pressures for ecclesiastical reform, especially under the Bourbons; the surfeit of debt in the region; and the Great Rebellion of Tupac Amaru (1780–81) undermined the symbiosis between the spiritual and secular sectors of the Cuzqueño elites. Eventually the property concentrated in the “dead hand” of the church was blamed for agricultural stagnation. It was left to the Republican regimes of the nineteenth century to confiscate assets; to force religious communities to provide loans to the government; to ease the renunciation of a nun’s vows; to create alternative public institutions to educate youth and to care for orphans, the disabled, and the elderly; and to decrease the interest on investments. All of these measures and others served to push the once-powerful and wealthy convents into a communal, more spiritual mode of existence.

This book is a good, nuanced example of cultural and social history that assembles solid empirical data to make theoretical contributions to the field. It expands our knowledge of church history while viewing it within a wider social, cultural, political, and economic context. For this reason, Burns’s work would make good collateral reading in many colonial history courses taught at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

 

Susan Elizabeth Ramírez, DePaul University and School of American Research

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