The Bishop’s Utopia: Envisioning Improvement in Colonial Peru by Emily Berquist Soule (review)

The Bishop’s Utopia recounts Martínez Compañón’s achievements during his eleven years (1779–1790) as bishop of Trujillo, in the viceroyalty of Peru. Born in Navarre in 1737 and trained in Aragón and Guipúzcoa, he climbed the ranks of the Church hierarchy. He was named canon of Lima’s cathedral in 1772, then bishop of Trujillo in 1779, and finally, bishop of Bogotá in 1790. He died in 1791. His post in Trujillo involved acting as an intermediary in three separate contexts—(1) between the court in Madrid and the more remote corners of the Empire, (2) between Lima’s bureaucrats and Trujillo’s mine owners and workers, and (3) between reform-bent officials and Indian parishioners clamoring for reform. In Soule’s book, Martínez Compañón’s handling of these responsibilities is a showcase for what a socially minded and culturally sensitive representative of the Spanish Crown could do in the name of common good, in the wider context of Bourbon reformism and of a peculiarly Spanish brand of the Enlightenment.

Martínez Compañón left behind a rich paper trail—letters; instructions to his subordinates; questionnaires about the topographic, climatic, social, historical, and natural characteristics of his diocese; and the so-called Trujillo del Perú, nine volumes containing 1,372 watercolors documenting Trujillo’s natural history. Soule draws on this diverse material to highlight different aspects of the bishop’s accomplishments.

The first chapter introduces the bishop’s readings—an eclectic mix of the Church Fathers, chroniclers of the conquest and evangelization of America, and writers with specifically ethnographic interests in the origin of American man. These reading lists situate him squarely in the context of the debates about the inferiority of America that were raging during the second half of the eighteenth century. Soule aligns herself with recent scholarship to give shape and meaning to those debates.

In the following five chapters, the book comes into its own, rich with original scholarship and sensitive to the spaces that Martínez Compañón inhabited during his stay in Trujillo. In Chapter 2, Soule follows the bishop on his visita, his reconnaissance expedition around the diocese that took two and two-thirds years. Soule traveled to some of the same places herself to obtain a sense of the desolation of the mining town, the lushness of the jungle, the bustle of the city streets, and the solitude of prehispanic ruins. Like the questionnaires addressed to priests throughout the bishopric, the purpose of the visita was to gain knowledge about Trujillo, which resulted in his most audacious reforms—the foundation of towns and schools and the improvement of the lives of those working in the Hualgayoc silver mine. Soule presents these projects as case studies to reflect on how action at the local level can become entangled in, and frustrated by, wider networks of power and influence, involving far-flung interests—in Martínez Compañón’s case, as far removed as Lima and Madrid.

While carrying out reforms, Martínez Compañón amassed an impressive collection of objects—specimens of natural history and antiquities—and of images and descriptions of these artifacts. The Trujillo del Perú, the subject of the book’s sixth chapter, serves Soule as a starting point for one of the most debated questions in contemporary history of science: What role did indigenous informers play in the production of eighteenthcentury- Europe’s knowledge about the natural world? Soule rightly notes that we have little information about the actual participants in this process, but she pores over the watercolors, drawing on clues, to make Indian informers, collectors, preservers, or painters of specimens as visible as possible. She concludes that the Indians of Trujillo collaborated in the making of the Trujillo del Perú to help in the creation of a “utopian vision of Trujillo for the world outside to see and treasure” and “to celebrate the local identity of their...