A conquista da consciência: métodos confessionais e extirpação de idolatrias na Nova Espanha e no Vice-Reino do Peru

Abstract

In the first half of the seventeenth century, there was a resurgence of repressive policies against indigenous religious practices in various territories of the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru. Rituals and images that had survived the first systematic attacks during much of the sixteenth century were the target of religious orders and ecclesiastical institutions —such as the Indians’ Provisorato— who sought by various means to suppress definitively any vestige of the pre-Hispanic past. This article aims to address this context of dispute based on a reflection on Catholic iconoclasm as a method of social discipline. It tries to understand the complexity of the phenomenon of the destruction of images from two types of sources: the manuals of confession and the manuals of extirpation of idolatries.