Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua

10. Religion . . . and Resistance?

199 DOI: 10.5876/9781607322764:c10 10 Religion . . . and Resistance? Religious customs may be similar or different . . . [but] they all have one thing in common: they are tied to a specific place and a historical constituency. All practice takes place somewhere. —William A. Christian Jr. (1981: 178) Christian practice in medieval Europe can be differentiated spatially and temporally, a key variable being the role of popular, local cults versus that of the papacy and institutions of the Roman Catholic Church (Weinstein and Bell 1982: 182–91). Catholicism operated on two levels. One was “the Church Universal, based on the sacraments, the Roman liturgy, and the Roman calendar ,” whereas the other was local and particularistic, operating in a sacred landscape created from locally venerated “places, images, and relics, locally chosen patron saints, idiosyncratic ceremonies, and a unique calendar built up from the settlement’s own sacred history ”(Christian 1981: 3).“Local Catholicism”is a placebased set of beliefs, devotions, festivals, relics, and shrines devoted to a religious patron, either a saint or the Virgin Mary, believed to intercede against natural disasters (Christian 1981). Spain’s unique experience of reconquest, coupled with broader religious transformations in Europe,“led to a kind of Christianization of the landscape in the form of shrines and chapels,”1 followed by “a shift away from holy sites in the countryside”to more centralized, urban devotional activity (ibid.: 91, 199). As discussed in chapter 6, Spanish conquest of the “New World” was a collaborative military-religious enterprise between the kings of Spain and the Roman Catholic RELIGION . . . AND RESISTANCE? 200 Church, based on an agreement that the latter would allow Spain to exploit the foreign land’s riches in exchange for converting its heathen residents to Christianity.These circumstances led to a distinctive Spanish Catholicism that was carried to the Americas. local catholiciSm in pre-modern Spain Early Christianity had long been dominated by the proliferation of local cults and shrines based on relics of saints, preferably brought from the Holy Land but also relics of local martyrs, hermits, or bishops miraculously “discovered” as signs of divine intervention (Brown 1981: 188–94; Christian 1981: 21). Northern European saints tended to be associated with furthering establishment (elite, monarchical) interests, whereas those venerated in Iberia and Italy were more likely to have come from the lower classes,been involved in “intense family conflict ,” and lived lives working miracles for ordinary petitioners (Weinstein and Bell 1982: 182–83).In early modern Spain,the landscape was peopled not only by human inhabitants but also “by other beings . . . the remembered dead . . . fairies . . . giants . . . and the pantheon of supernatural figures associated with Catholicism” (Christian 2010: 75). By the thirteenth century, however, these cults of local saints were replaced by devotions to the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose popularity had swept across Christian Europe (Christian 1981: 123–24).2 Marianism During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Virgin Mary gained a marked following in Spain (Hall 2004: 19),3 as she already had in the Mediterranean area. Her heightened importance is at least in part a consequence of the introduction of religious imagery, as opposed to relics, as a focus of devotions: because of the belief in Mary’s heavenly assumption at death, there could be no remains of her body to be kept as relics (Christian 1981: 21). In addition, the Muslim takeover of the Iberian Peninsula, beginning in the south, meant local Christian shrines and relics of early martyrs were often destroyed or taken northward by those fleeing the Muslim advance (ibid.: 141). Attitudes toward the Virgin Mary were modified by churchmen during a time when women in general suffered an ambiguous, dichotomized status in Iberia. They were feared and despised and therefore had to be controlled because of the power of their sexuality (Boxer 1975; Grieve 2009). Chastity was prized above all other female virtues and was indexed to social, political, and moral order. Women were symbols of nations and the salvation of men’s souls; RELIGION . . . AND RESISTANCE? 201 virginity was equated with nation building and unchaste women with national downfall, evidenced in a legend about a beautiful Muslim girl seducing an early Christian ruler and precipitating the Muslim takeover (Grieve 2009: 114–15). Thus Marianism was particularly notable on the frontiers of reconquista in the southern peninsula: “Typically, the major church in a reconquered town would be named for Mary . . . It was usually located on the site of the...