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, Duke University Press, 1999) 290 pp. $49.95 cloth $17.95 paper

This carefully researched, well-written study examines the important role of female religious organizations in the socioeconomic evolution of colonial Cuzco. According to Burns, nuns became central figures in local economic affairs, negotiating loans and liens, managing urban and rural properties, and engaging in business deals with local elites and colonial bureaucrats. Apart from providing a spiritual haven for pious women, convents also contributed social services to the city, such as caring for troubled women and needy children. These connections to the wider colonial socioeconomic order formed what Burns calls Cuzco's "spiritual economy," which reached its apogee in the seventeenth century before beginning a slow decline through the independence era. This study is based on local notarial records that yield much socioeconomic data about the role of colonial religious institutions, but they provide relatively little information about the complex spiritual life of the convents, which unquestionably shaped many aspects of the "spiritual economy" in colonial Cuzco.

Amidst the turmoil of the 1550s, Cuzco's Spanish elite sponsored the foundation of the city's first convent, Santa Clara, to cloister prominent mestizas--the daughters of the conquistadors and Andean women. Within a decade, the nuns of Santa Clara had forged alliances with local Spanish elites, such as Gerónimo Costilla, and indigenous lords (kurakas) to secure rural lands, urban property, and even grants of indigenous labor and taxes (encomiendas). Santa Catalina, the city's next convent, originated in Arequipa, but, by 1605, natural disasters in that city encouraged the Dominican order to relocate to the old Inca capital. Cuzco's elite regarded the new order as outsiders, however, and it took decades before the Dominican nuns could establish the social and economic ties necessary to ensure their prosperity. The final convent in Cuzco was the more austere Carmelite house of Santa Teresa, but it was a smaller institution that was always overshadowed by the more prominent Santa Clara and Santa Catalina.

By the late seventeenth century, the orders in both major convents had largely abandoned communal life in favor of keeping separate religious households, where the wealthier nuns maintained their own apartments staffed by servants and slaves. They even raised children of family members or local orphans and cared for women with special problems, such as an unwanted pregnancy or an abusive husband. The convents also reflected the rigid social hierarchies of the colonial order. Only women from prominent Spanish and creole families could pay the necessary dowry to become nuns of the black veil, who ran the largest households and monopolized leadership positions in the orders. The daughters of local Andean lords, or mestizas, could aspire only to become less prominent nuns of the white veil, who normally occupied lesser positions as servants within the convents.

During the apogee of the regional economy in the seventeenth century, Cuzco's convents solidified their social and economic prominence by making alliances with local Spanish and Andean elites. According to Burns, the religious houses secured this pivotal social role in Cuzco by accepting the daughters of Spanish elites, Inca noble families, and local kurakas. The nuns reinforced these social contacts by gaining the patronage of wealthy believers and establishing chantries to pray for the souls of deceased family members. They also forged business alliances with regional elites, extending credit and engaging in business deals that involved securing and managing urban property and rural land holdings, running textile mills, and buying and selling local produce. This whole symbiotic network of alliances ensured the prosperity of the convents, until a series of regional economic setbacks, culminating in the Andean rebellions of the 1780s, undermined Cuzco's spiritual economy. After independence, the orders became economically more precarious and increasingly removed from secular society.

Burns has pieced together the...