Cuban Convents in the Age of Enlightened Reform, 1761–1807 (review)

This book (only 98 pages of text) is a delightful micro-study of a much-overlooked aspect of the wider historic Bourbon reform processes in America, namely the reform of religious institutions. Focusing on four Havana convents through different periods of the whole reform experience (1671–1769, 1770– 1782, 1782–1783, 1784–1796, 1796–1807), it traces the battles to control and modernize convents which had largely fallen into disrepute and become appendages of the Havana elite, rather than places of quietude and pious contemplation. Disrepute had come not from debauchery but rather from a steady departure from the original Tridentine principles of enclosure, poverty and the common life, to turn convents into a patronized extension of the criollo elite's highly comfortable existence for some of their families' younger and older females. For the Bourbons, it was more a case of ending social laxity and making the convents socially useful, in particular of giving them the wider educational function which Enlightenment principles demanded – an aim which the elite and the convents resisted, the former because it threatened their rights, the latter because, overflowing already with 'devotees', they could not cope with the increased number of inmates which an educational purpose would bring.

What this study therefore brings us is a detailed account of the arguments (legal and otherwise) around this battle, the accusations, the reform proposals, and the long-drawn-out process of change which was enacted eventually. In the process, we are also given a number of insights into other issues of the period: the desire of the Cuban colonial Church and the Spanish state to challenge, or at least bypass, the Pope (although the Pope sided with the idea of reform in the direction of an educational role); the decline of the religious Orders from their earlier 'heroic' role (as defenders of the indigenous and the imperial frontiers) to a comfortable position as pillars of the social establishment; and the social and cultural links between eighteenth-century Cuba and Louisiana. As a social history of the Havana elite, it works beautifully; as a microcosm of the wider Bourbon experience, and the tensions which it generated, it is revealing, turning the broad canvas into a more human picture. The detail is always fascinating, but the wider picture also comes through convincingly. It is archival history as it should be written.