Private Passions and Public Sins: Men and Women in Seventeenth-Century Lima

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Emma Mannarelli’s study, first published in Lima in 1993 as a revision of her PhD thesis (Columbia University, 1992), now appears translated into English and therefore more accessible to a wider public. This book leads our historical attention toward illegitimate sexual behavior in seventeenth-century Lima involving married persons (adultery) and unwed couples. The author also explores the main consequences of these unions: female dishonor and illegitimate children. This matter, quite pioneering in 1993, maintains its relevance today. Mannarelli’s groundbreaking research has been essential reading for scholars interested in the study of the history of family, women, and sexual behavior in colonial Spanish America. However, as these topics have been the subject of an increasing number of publications in the last 20 years, we would have been eager to see in this edition an up-to-date bibliography.Due to its academic background, the structure of the work was unbalanced when first published and remains so, obscuring the author’s main findings. For example, chapter 1 deals with the Iberian family tradition, but Mannarelli does not achieve the purpose of explaining to what degree that model had real influence in Lima’s society. In fact, to do so would probably require another monograph. Something similar happens with chapter 2, when the author aims to reconstruct urban Lima in the seventeenth century as the scene where the stories took place. Useful information from demographical records, contemporary chronicles, and testimonies is pulled together, but again, the goals are too broad to be effective for the main purpose of the book.Probably Private Passion’s main contribution is the use of a significant body of documentary records, mainly from the Archivo Arzobispal de Lima. Among those, files concerning divorce trials and trials against cohabitation are highlighted due to the rich information they contain. The use of these legal cases was very innovative in 1993; even now we have scarce contributions that deal with this source for the viceroyalty of Peru during the seventeenth century.Despite this achievement, Mannarelli does not provide clear parameters to understand these files. The historical interpretation is questionable, as sometimes the author seems to forget that processes usually show transgressions and should be understood in a wider context. Yet, she claims to explain Lima’s colonial society in terms of sexual relations outside marriage. Even when she makes the effort to contrast these sources with baptismal records and other contemporary chronicles, she uses only two parishes that represent only 65 percent of Lima’s population in those days; nevertheless, from those records she makes the assumption that nearly half of the births in seventeenth-century Lima were illegitimate (p. xii). As for other contemporary chronicles, her hypotheses are supported by events selected for that purpose (pp. 39 – 40).A much deeper approach could be also demanded when Private Passions attempts to explain women’s dishonor in the seventeenth century using interpretations that certainly were not the ones standing in those days. That happens when Mannarelli refers to the variety of moral codes in relation to women’s sexual behavior (p. 122), mixing up contraventions and moral theories. Following that explanation, the assertion that a “kind of complacency with regard to sex out of marriage” (p. 41) was appearing in Lima’s colonial society has no foundation. On the contrary, we do know that marriages among castas increased during this century, even though, as the author points out, racial prejudice was obviously a reason for illegal cohabitation.Still, Private Passions is suggestive and interesting reading, especially when trying to look for the causes of illegitimate sexual relationships, such as the practice of promises of marriage that were used as a first step toward marriage and often opened the door to concubinage. The book has the benefit of raising this and many other issues that show the complexity of Hispanic colonial social dynamics.