“If they remained as mere words”: Trent, Marriage, and Freedom in the Viceroyalty of Peru, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries

“Only God’s will [...] disposed to bind this true and sweet bond under which I live so happy and free.”

Diego Dávalos¹

The right of persons to marry without coercion and live their marriage freely was one of the foremost and frequently mentioned topics among synod and council fathers, moralists, and canon lawyers in colonial Spanish America. Within the territory of the viceroyalty of Peru, the recommendations of the Council of Trent in this regard took the form of a new set of ecclesiastical regulations, derived from synods and councils that occurred from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century.

Marriage freedom, much discussed at Trent, was finally defined in the Tametsi decree, which reinforced the doctrine that marriage required both parties’ free consent.² The ninth chapter of the Decreto de reforma (Reform Decree of November 1563) reminded temporal lords that they lacked the authority to “tyrannize marriage freedom,” thereby strengthening this principle. Nevertheless, and even after long debate, it was still found necessary to establish a punishment of moral weight for those who did not accept that freedom: those who deemed null marriages celebrated without parental consent. In this, the freedom principle was upheld, regardless of the fact that the Church did not approve of such unions.³ However, the Catechismus Romanus (1566) included a contrary statement: spouses were to avoid marrying against their parents’ will and without notifying them, pursuant to the principle of parental authority. This shift opened the way for parents, relatives, and lords to try to impose their will.⁴

A significant amount of historiographical work on marriage in the Spanish and Spanish American world has focused precisely on this difficult balance between freedom and the withholding of consent. Jesús M. Usunáriz, examining marriage lawsuits involving broken promise in modern Spain, has shown how the legal process was used by those who wanted to marry to resist paternal authority: the spouses knew that in these cases the Church would choose to protect freedom, overriding parents’ dissent.⁵ Examining parental authority in marriage choices in Mexico’s archdiocese in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Patricia Seed concurs in depicting the Church as the guarantor of free choice over parental and other family interests.⁶ More recently, Mónica Ghirardi has pointed out a remarkable increase in the number of processes involving broken promise in the second half of the eighteenth century, following on the strengthening of parental power that resulted from the Pragmática sobre el matrimonio de los hijos de familia.⁷ Concerning Lima’s archdiocese, many sources confirm that future spouses often sought exemption from banns from the ecclesiastical court, so as to evade family objections.⁸ In the absence of the banns, families who objected to the wedding would not have a chance to make their objection public.

More than 20 years ago, in a pioneering work, Aznar Gil showed the role of canon law in guaranteeing marriage freedom among Indians in the Spanish American territories, mainly through the actions of councils and synods. His study also included some references to slaves of African origin. According to Aznar Gil, the defense of marital freedom as seen by the councils and synods comprehended securing free consent to marriage, free choice of marital status (either by censuring an impediment to an Indian marriage, or by banning an imposed marriage), and freedom within an already celebrated marriage. Nonetheless, these principles were threatened, by Indians themselves (parents, lords, and caciques), by Spaniards (encomenderos, hacienderos), and by doctrineros (Indian parish priests).⁹

Two decades later, it seems relevant to revisit this topic, expanding from Aznar Gil’s perspective and drawing on additional sources. In the present work, the approach is wider, considering all of the social groups appearing in the documents, not only Indians. In addition, although I have limited the councils and synods studied to the viceroyalty of Peru, I have considered a greater number here than that used by Aznar Gil. For the elaboration of the present paper, I analyzed, directly or indirectly, the...