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

The translation of Maria Emma Mannarelli's Private Passions and Public Sins into English is long overdue. Ever since its first appearance fourteen years ago, this monograph has been a "must read" for historians seeking insight into sexuality, women's history, gender, illegitimacy, the family and society in colonial Lima and Latin America. It seems appropriate, as this monograph approaches its quinceañera to consider why it proved to be a methodological and thematic precursor, as well as a historiographical benchmark.

Private Passions remains methodologically innovative given its processual analysis and its gendered perspective. Mannarelli first explored baptismal records with the eye of a demographer, noting male/female ratios, distinctive baptismal designations of legitimates and illegitimates, and illegitimacy percentages among Lima's complex population of whites, castas, natives and slaves. Where she went beyond, was to interrogate the numbers to search the "why" of the statistics not only blending hard data with soft description but also exploring how distinctive variables might produce varying outcomes. For example, Mannarelli provided a processual analysis of variables affecting a range of topics including differing outcomes for mestizo offspring, sex ratios affecting illegitimacy, or the subsequent recognition, abandonment or adoption of illegitimate offspring. In the latter case, slave babies proved the least likely to suffer loss, given the mandate to identify the mother to pass on servitude. In contrast, children of whites were the most likely to have unknown parents often due to reasons of honor. They benefited however from enhanced possibilities of informal adoption either by the family or by outsiders. The pressures determining acknowledgement and abandonment balanced differently for casta newborns. Unlike slaves, their mothers were not forced to acknowledge parentage. Unlike whites, abandonment was less likely to lead to adoption given the infrequency that whites might incorporate them into families and the dearth of resources for adoption in casta households. Such a blend of quantitative and qualitative analysis and processual approach reveals underlying dynamics as critical to understanding as any particular outcome.

Private Passions also remains innovative given its insistence on analytical explorations of the relationship between gender and hierarchy. Even today, when histories of "gender" sometimes limit themselves to the world of women or "add some men and stir" Mannarelli rigorously sought those "ways in which social hierarchies are combined with inequalities between men and women" (p. xvi). Thus, when she explores topics such as sexuality, concubinage, adultery or slavery she does so from the perspective of both women and men. Private Passions proved to be a historiographical precursor providing an early analysis of themes that historians would subsequently explore in depth. Seminal topics and authors include analysis of the significance of honor and the distinction between private and public, (Ann Twinam, Sarah Chambers), recogimiento (Nancy Van Deusen), convents (Kathryn Burns), slavery (Christine Hunefeldt), and children (Bianca Premo).

The monograph shows its age when it relies on what have now become outdated and stereotypical descriptions of peninsular sexuality or descriptions of honor. English-reading audiences may also be confused by the failure to differentiate clearly between natural (children of single parents) and bastard (adulterous, sacrilegious) offspring—a distinction that is intrinsic in Spanish but not in English where law marked all illegitimates as bastards. Nor is there sufficient consideration of the complications of illegitimate inheritance including if property passed to a natural or bastard offspring, through the mother or through the father, or through a will or intestate succession. Spanish law protected the inheritance rights of legitimate offspring more than recognized in several discussions, so the conclusion that parents did not recognize their natural or bastard children because they feared it would interfere with passing property to their legitimate offspring is not convincing.

Such quibbles aside, Private Passions would be invaluable for graduate students seeking historiographical context. Moreover, it remains most accessible to undergraduates and continues as an indispensable...