Colonial Lima Research Articles

Punch-Cutting in Colonial Peru: Printers’ Type, Liberal Reform, and the Freedom of the Press

Abstract: The study of printing equipment is at the heart of book history, revealing much about the daily challenges faced by printers in the past. While comparatively little is known about printers’ supplies in colonial contexts, the scandal surrounding Tadeo López’ claim in 1813 to have invented type casting offers a unique insight into the craft in late colonial Lima—a major printing hub on the South American continent—during a historic moment of upheaval in the final decade of Spanish rule. Against the backdrop of the freedom of the press, proclaimed in Lima in 1811, print production increased significantly in the following years, even though it would still take a decade to achieve independence for Peru. By reconstructing the alleged invention of punch-cutting and type casting in Lima, the article argues that colonial printers and editors, once legally permitted, acted as reformists. First, the article characterizes the situation of printers in late colonial Lima, focusing on the legal and material restrictions on workshop supplies. The discussion then shifts to the collaboration between the printer Tadeo López and the engraver Marcelo Cabello, who worked as punch-cutter on López’ behalf. To assess the novelty of their experiment, this article examines the history of punch-cutting and the casting of type in Spanish America. For global book history, the Lima incident of 1813 serves as a revealing example of material restrictions, individual inventiveness, and political rivalries that shaped the operation of printing workshops in different parts of the world under imperial conditions.

Alms for the Rich: Impoverished Spanish Women in Pursuit of Making a Living in Late Colonial Lima

Abstract This article establishes the role white women played in shaping the urban labor force and the economy in late colonial times in Lima, roughly from 1790 to 1822. It focuses on the impoverished elite women who, by the end of the colonial period, had to ask for alms to avoid working with their own hands. An important part of the Limeño elites could not respond to the twofold challenge: the negative consequences of the economic and administrative reforms of the Bourbons, and the relative flexibilization of the social order in Lima by the end of the eighteenth century. Instead of adapting to new conditions, the Spanish elites generated a social discourse that reaffirmed status and ethnicity as a means to distinguish themselves from the “vicious” plebeian sectors. More than one thousand applications to Church relief programs serve as the main foundation of this article; they are made up of at least one fifth of the white female population of the city in 1806. The article enters into dialogue with studies on socio-labor practices and the history of gender and ethnicity by engaging with concrete experiences of poor elite women in a city considered to be the opulent center of the Spanish colonial power.

The transgressions to the checkerboard layout and the perception of the landscape in colonial Lima

Lima colonial siguió una distribución espacial tipo damero de espacios públicos y privados. Sin embargo, a medida que creció la ciudad, la transgresión a la cuadricula fue la norma por parte de los vecinos, sobre todo en la periferia de la ciudad, por lo que las autoridades, a través de las denuncias de los perjudicados, corregían, obligando a los infractores a deshacer lo hecho. Paralelamente, espacios con significados reconocidos y asumidos por la población limeña colonial surgieron, que las autoridades mantuvieron para gloria y disfrute de todos. El objetivo es debelar a través de algunos ejemplos el mantenimiento o no de la traza de la ciudad y la perspectiva de paisajes identitarios asumidos por los limeños y sus autoridades.

Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status through Religious Practices

Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status through Religious Practices

Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba's Plantations

It has long been recognized that the law of the Spanish empire was more supportive of manumission than was the case with other New World slave regimes. Adriana Chira's Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba's Plantations gives us a nuanced look at the role of law in regulating the lives and possibilities of freedom for quasi-free and enslaved persons in one Spanish venue, Santiago de Cuba in the nineteenth century. Chira's choice of Santiago, on the eastern part of the island, provides us with a particularly appropriate jurisdiction in which to look at the processes and strategies that people used to gain freedom or at least a freer status. Located far enough away from the large sugar plantations that would transform the worlds of race and slavery in Cuba in the nineteenth century, Santiago was a venue whose economic conditions supported a large free population of color engaged in small-scale farming. These conditions facilitated the growth of quasi-free people who were able to lawfully purchase shares of their own lives and to hope for eventual purchase of total freedom.In the first chapter Chira traces slavery and freedom in Santiago from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. With conditions more suited to tobacco farming than sugar cultivation, the region became home to numerous small farms and a population of African descent that was able to purchase free or partially free status. The Spanish crown, wary of possible slave rebellion, had policies that were designed to limit the number of African captives brought to the island. The crown also had policies designed to encourage or at least facilitate manumission. All of this contributed to the growth of a free population of color, many of whom might have logically seen themselves as stakeholders in the Spanish imperial system, as witnessed by their participation in the militia, utilization of the courts, and manipulation of political patronage.Because Santiago escaped the sugar boom that transformed Cuba in the nineteenth century, the region also escaped some of the harshness that came with the expansion of the plantation economy and the increase in the African slave trade. The east remained somewhat underdeveloped, which led to somewhat greater autonomy for Santiago's population of African descent. The revolution in Saint-Domingue would heighten the concerns of Spanish authorities over possible rebelliousness, as would the arrival of French-speaking refugees from Hispaniola. This new fear would lead to increased governmental and legal support for manumission.Chira takes us through Cuba's nineteenth century, including the earliest rebellions that would ultimately culminate in Cuba's independence. But it is in her discussion of how the slave and partially free population used the law to gain partial or full freedom that Chira makes her strongest contribution. Chira's portrait of nineteenth-century Santiago society is nuanced and textured, reflecting a society where race and color as well as slavery and freedom came in complex and overlapping layers. Phenotype might set a presumption as to an individual's color or racial status, but it was a presumption that might be overcome by social, economic, political, and military accomplishments. There were individuals who were free and others who were enslaved, but there was also the possibility of purchasing a part of one's freedom, a topic previously explored in Michelle McKinley's Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700 (2016). This possibility in turn made the law a vehicle for settling not only disputes between those who claimed ownership of an individual and those who claimed their manumitted status but also legal quarrels over fractions of ownership of human beings.Patchwork Freedoms is at its best in taking us through the legal processes that determined what quantum of freedom an individual was entitled to claim. The enslaved and quasi-enslaved people of Santiago became skillful navigators of the legal system, with an ability to use formal and customary law in the quest for greater freedom. They were also adept at using patronage networks, especially connections with free and quasi-free people of color that enabled slaves and partially free individuals to earn the money for self-purchase.With Patchwork Freedoms, Adriana Chira has helped to expand our understanding of race and slavery in the Spanish empire. Her localized study guides the reader through the varied considerations—economic circumstances, imperial rivalries, shifting racial ideologies, and political and legal change—that determined the fate of many peoples of African descent in nineteenth-century Cuba. The book is a critical addition to the burgeoning field of Afro-Latin history.

Achieve sustainable urban development in Lima Callao Megalopolis, Peru by 2050

<p>This paper is the product of the author’s academic research, personal reflection, professional experience, and technical suggestions on the urban evolution of Lima City, Peru, from 1535 to 2020, the urban planning evolution of Lima Callao from 1949 to 2020, and the sustainable development of Lima Callao Megalopolis, Peru, in 2050. From this perspective, the purpose of this paper is to think about the urban evolution of Lima from colonial Lima to big city Lima from 1535 to 2020 and the evolution of Lima Callao urban planning from 1949 to 2020. Similarly, technical proposals were submitted to promote the sustainable urban development planning of Lima Callao Megalopolis to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Peru’s independence (2021), the 500th anniversary of the Lima Spain Foundation (2035), and the second half of the 21st century (2050). Within the framework of the 2030 agenda for sustainable development, the new urban agenda, and the changing national reconstruction plan.</p>

Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective ed. by Margaret E. Boyle and Sarah E. Owens

Reviewed by: Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective ed. by Margaret E. Boyle and Sarah E. Owens Jean Dangler Boyle, Margaret E., and Sarah E. Owens, editors. Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective. U of Toronto P, 2021. Pp. 268. ISBN 978-1-4875-0518-9. This excellent collection of essays, titled Health and Healing in the Early Modern Iberian World: A Gendered Perspective, aims to shed new light on the roles of women and gender in health and healing in the early modern Iberian world from 1500 to 1800. Many readers will be familiar with this broad theme, but maybe not as it relates to the book’s inclusive lens, which encompasses the Iberian Peninsula and colonial Latin America. The editors state in the introduction that they seek to bring into dialogue healing practices from indigenous, continental Iberian, and African contexts, a goal that emerges as one of the volume’s many strengths. They further underscore the need to move beyond a series of narrow assumptions about early modern women and gender, such as the model of the healer-witch and women’s restricted social role as mothers. The volume covers topics from a range of areas and disciplines. It consists of an introduction and ten essays, which are divided into three sections: “Treatment Models” (four essays), “Representing Health” (three), and “Faith and Illness” (three). In the introduction, the editors situate the volume in the trajectory of recent work on the links between the humanities and narrative medicine, and of questions about health that arise in today’s continuing global pandemic. However, deeper engagement with these connections will have to be taken up elsewhere. The book’s more focused framework includes recent transatlantic approaches to science and medicine, and to women and gender, as well as the importance of studying gender with attention to women and men, as opposed to centering only on women, or on individual women as exceptional. This more ample approach makes the book a welcome addition to recent scholarly trends. The first essay is the outstanding critical case study, “Healing across Ideological Boundaries in Late Seventeenth-Century Madrid,” by Carolin Schmitz and María Luz López-Terrada, who explore the biography of María Sánchez de la Rosa, a healer in late seventeenth-century Madrid. The historical record demonstrates Sánchez de la Rosa’s expertise and renown, although it also shows the fragility and transitory qualities of women’s work, since the legal accusations and trials against her ultimately led to the demise of her reputation. In “Killer Skin Care: Gender and Venereal Disease Experiences in Colonial Lima,” Kathleen M. Kole de Peralta examines women’s treatment of venereal disease (bubas) in sixteenth-century Lima. Kole de Peralta’s superb work confirms previous findings that portray women’s healing as dangerous when occurring outside men’s control. Sarah E. Owens’s thought-provoking “Convent Medicine, Healing, and Hierarchy in Arequipa, Peru” illuminates the power struggles that ensued between male physicians who were assigned to late eighteenth-century convents and the indigenous and African women healers whom patients often preferred. The chapter also examines the European medicines and indigenous foods that were used in healing practice. Karen Stolley’s provocative “Leche and lagartijas: Injecting the Local into Eighteenth-Century Spanish American Medical Discourse” explores two substances, milk and lizards, to show how medical practices were managed in eighteenth-century Latin America. Lizards were used by indigenous cultures in the cure of cancer, inflammation, and ulcers, becoming part of what Stolley calls the “transatlantic pharmacopeia.” [End Page 458] Part two opens with Emily Colbert Cairns’s “Breastfeeding in Public? Representations of Breastfeeding in Early Modern Spain.” Colbert Cairns studies how, much like the present, representations of lactation from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century depict women’s bodies as “open to public debate” (116), and as further mediating larger social problems of racial purity, patriarchal control, and lineage. Sherry Velasco’s “The Queer (Evil) eye and Deviant Healing on the Early Modern Stage” explores the ways in which an entremés shifts the focus of the traditional blame for the mal de...

:Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima

:<i>Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima</i>

Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima

Exquisite Slaves centers on clothing and its unique ability to convey an unspoken language of status. Tamara Walker argues that dress served two purposes: it was central to elite dominance and claims of superiority, while it simultaneously provided the means for enslaved men and women to challenge those dominant norms. By examining material culture, Walker examines the racialization of Blackness in colonial and republican Lima, Peru. Her work engages scholars, such as Herman Bennett, Ira Berlin, and Rebecca Earle, who study the legal use and social ramifications of clothing by enslaved people throughout the Americas. Her work, however, shifts the focus to not just the bodies that wore the clothing but also the visual representation of clothing in print culture.Walker uses legal codes, edicts, newsletters, criminal cases, notarial records, wills, and runaway ads to delve into the body politics of Lima. Walker refers to these sources as “fragments” that reveal how clothing took on meaning through “writing . . . acquiring . . . selling . . . and wearing” (pp. 12–13). The book has six chapters that are organized thematically and demonstrate clothing's importance in a society whose bedrock was social hierarchy. The first half of the book details the body politics of dress and how it empowered both slaveholders and the enslaved to break the law; the second half explores dress in print culture and the intended audience for such publications.Chapters 1–3 reveal that Black bodies were constantly disputed spaces. Chapter 1 provides a social and cultural history of Lima centered on sumptuary policies. This chapter sets the stage for a discussion of body politics and highlights the measures taken by Spaniards to break sumptuary laws and use clothing to cover and create an ideal image of Blackness. Chapters 2 and 3 delve into the enslaved population's lived experiences of quotidian activities and their access to clothing. Chapter 2 focuses on the gendered roles of enslaved men and women and their self-fashioning, and their ability to politicize their bodies by way of dress. This self-fashioning often allowed both enslaved men and women to become empowered as they looked to acquire elegance and attire to reclaim their masculinity or femininity. Chapter 3 discusses the results of enslaved and freed men and women's acquired clothing. At times, Walker argues, the procurement of certain garments blurred the strict lines of social hierarchy to such an extent that enslaved and freed men and women reclaimed their coveted bodies, transforming them from units of labor to loving individuals. Her use of wills in this chapter not only reveals the clothing bequeathed to enslaved and freed people but also highlights the intimate relationships formed between slaveholder and the enslaved and between enslaved and freed families.The second half of the book delves into print culture and the visual representations of clothing. Walker's analysis of casta paintings in chapter 4 is to be commended for reminding us that Mexico was not the only place to create casta paintings; furthermore, her method of tracing over generations the use of garments such as headcloth reveals that the goal of these paintings was to emphasize social grooming and institutionalized whitening. Chapter 5 deals with runaway ads and their descriptions of dress. It stands in stark contrast to chapter 4, in which these casta paintings extolled whiteness purity over time. In this chapter clothing is used as a marker to capture rebellious acts of Blackness. Chapter 6 delves into the republican period and the paintings of Francisco “Pancho” Fierro, which depict Black men and women in elegant wear. These paintings suggest that the new republic was egalitarian. The book's epilogue examines the newspaper El Negro to reveal that in the republican period the use of elegant dress by enslaved and free Blacks brought humiliation, instead of emulation experienced in the colonial period. As a result, Walker's book ends with the racialization of Blackness in which Blackness is affiliated with deception and is deemed deserving of discrimination and mockery.Walker's book has stitched together various fragments that remind us that Black life matters and that Black lives constantly sought ways to reclaim their humanity. However, I have one small quibble with this otherwise creative and noteworthy book: Walker's thematic approach requires a careful read for those not familiar with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Peruvian history, a transformative period characterized by the racialization of Blackness. Students and experts interested in the African diaspora, material culture, racial identity, the formation of Blackness, and gender will surely benefit from this book. If clothes truly make the man, Walker skillfully demonstrates that enslaved women and men and freed ladies and gentlemen used clothing as shields that protected and projected their bodies to become representations of who they wanted to be.

Alchemy and Chemical Medicines in Early Colonial Lima, Peru

The article explores the use of minerals and the nature of chemical methods employed in Lima in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It does so through examining the availability of mineral resources, including pre-European knowledge of their use, through surveying the books and equipment used by physicians and apothecaries, and finally by examining prescriptions for medicines that were used to treat patients. It concludes that minerals were probably more commonly employed in medicines in Lima than in Spain but suggests that their preparation and use at this time drew on Spain’s alchemical tradition rather than on writings by Paracelsus and his followers. It argues that this did not reflect the effectiveness of censorship by the Inquisition.

Embodying the Sacred: Women Mystics in Seventeenth-Century Lima by Nancy E. Van Deusen

Reviewed by: Embodying the Sacred: Women Mystics in Seventeenth-Century Lima by Nancy E. Van Deusen Evan C. Rothera Van Deusen, Nancy E. Embodying the Sacred: Women Mystics in Seventeenth-Century Lima. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Nancy E. van Deusen, currently a professor of history at Queen's University, has published extensively on the history of colonial Latin America. In particular, her The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Ursula de Jesús (2004) offered an accessible translation of the spiritual diary of the Afro-Peruvian donada Ursula de Jesús and extensive discussion of her world. In Embodying the Sacred, van Deusen analyzes women's spirituality and early modern Iberian Catholicism by examining "the variety and complexity of the individual and collective spiritual pathways taken by renowned and lesser-known women religious figures" in seventeenth-century Lima (1–2). Some of the women in this book have been written about at great length. Nevertheless, she offers many innovative ideas about both well-known and more obscure women. The trenchant analysis in this volume will fascinate readers and will stimulate additional study of the subject matter. Part I—"Material and Immaterial Embodiment"—begins with Isabel Flores de Oliva, or Santa Rosa de Lima. Rosa was "central to the education of a select group of protégées living in the viceregal capital" (25). The women around Rosa learned through imitatio morum—learning from and imitating a wise elder's behavior. Then, during diocesan and beatification hearings, they "rendered the sensorial experiences they had had with their beloved spiritual mother into visible narratives" (45). Early modern readers had a broad understanding of the nature of texts. In addition to creating narratives about Rosa, women also read both the biographies of pious women and the bodies of women in an altered state of consciousness called arrobamiento, or communicating with divine beings. Interestingly, "because mystical transport fell outside the range of conventional behavior," witnesses had to develop a new vocabulary to describe these experiences (61). The final chapter in Part I focused on Ángela de Carranza, who encouraged people to "find meaning in her body and thus own parts of it, while also objectifying, fetishizing, and fragmenting it" (73). People venerated bodily fragments of deceased saints, but Carranza, a living being, made herself into a reliquary. She distributed her nail clippings to grateful people. She bathed publicly and people collected her [End Page 368] bath water. People even fought over her urine and feces. Eventually the Inquisition became involved. After a six-year trial, they condemned her in a 1694 auto-da-fé to silence and enclosure for four years. Part II—"The Relational Self"—begins with a chapter that utilizes a prosopographical approach to analyze hundreds of donadas. A donada had either been donated by someone or donated herself to a monastery in order to engage in service to God and the community. van Deusen offers a nuanced depiction of donadas. Some slave women refused to become donadas, even if doing so meant gaining their freedom. Other women, both free and enslaved, cherished the thought of suffering to gain eternal glory. "These supposedly subjugated women," van Deusen asserts, "did not simply accept the world imposed on them, but neither did they always resist" (115). In the following chapter, van Deusen explores how María Jacinta Montoya, the widow of Nicolás de Ayllón, "understood quite well the politics of sanctity in colonial Lima" (120). She pursued many different goals, most notably promoting her husband's candidacy for sainthood. In addition to corresponding with people throughout Europe and the Americas in pursuit of her goal, María Jacinta portrayed herself as a Mary Magdalene figure saved from her sinful ways by her husband's goodness. Her bid to make Nicolás a saint ultimately failed. She denounced herself to the Inquisition, who maligned her character and exposed her scheming. However, after her death, some came to see her as a visionary blessed by God. The final chapter offers another fascinating case study focused on Josefa Portocarrero Laso de la Vega's epic struggle to choose a religious vocation. The daughter of Viceroy Melchor...

Book Review: Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima, by Tamara J. Walker

Book Review: Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima, by Tamara J. Walker

Embodying the Sacred: Women Mystics in Seventeenth-Century Lima

In this rigorously researched analysis of the lives of holy women in colonial Lima, Nancy van Deusen offers an exploration of female networks and their particular relationship to embodied holiness. She uses women's engagement with material objects as a primary focus to link a series of case studies, as such objects had both spiritual and didactic potential. As religious women moved in and out of spaces that were exclusively feminine, they communicated theological, devotional, and spiritual knowledge to each other. The monograph argues that women used such knowledge to gain greater autonomy and power.Part 1, “Material and Immaterial Embodiment,” focuses on material objects and their crucial role in early modern spiritual practice. It is divided into three chapters, each of which discusses the ways in which religious objects—such as sacred art, devotional books, and relics of living saints—became animated through the process of devotional focus. It further demonstrates how the objects activated multiple sensorial experiences that heightened women's access to the divine.Chapter 1 centers on Lima's most famous holy woman, Saint Rose of Lima, and her relationship with her female disciples. Rose, van Deusen demonstrates, taught her disciples through her own engagement with statues, print engravings, and cloth. Rose's example communicated how touch in particular could act as a conduit to the divine. In chapter 2, van Deusen expands the theme of materiality and the senses by focusing on the bodies of female mystics and their embodied experience of divine union. Here she connects mysticism with the practice of reading, arguing that holy women transformed into a kind of text that could be read. Seventeenth-century beata Ángela de Carranza, the subject of chapter 3, promoted herself as a living saint through distribution of her body parts (hair, nails, etc.) as though they were relics, highlighting how pieces of bodies could act as evidence for holiness. Taken together, these three chapters reveal how gendered activities connected to wider Catholic beliefs about the divine power of material objects.Part 2, “The Relational Self,” shifts to a discussion of how holy women constructed self-identities in relationship to others—specifically within communities of women and their networks of sociability. Chapter 4 addresses the vocations of women of color as donadas in Limeño convents. Donadas were essentially servants who had been “donated” to convents, usually beginning as slaves to well-to-do nuns (p. 96). Van Deusen looks at large-scale patterns by analyzing the applications of nearly 500 women to take vows as donadas, arguing that their lowly status in the convent did not bar them from spiritual and social networks and that many were able to achieve meaningful spiritual lives.In chapter 5, the author turns to María Jacinta Montoya, who toiled for years on behalf of beatification of her husband, Nicolás de Ayllón. Nicolás was a rare example of a holy person who was at once of low social status (a tailor), married, and indigenous. María Jacinta's efforts were complicated by her support of the controversial beata Ángela de Carranza (the focus of chapter 3) and her entanglement with the Inquisition. But the chapter focuses on María Jacinta's efforts to position her husband's holiness in relationship to herself in a kind of mirroring, contrasting her sinfulness with his saintliness. The last chapter discusses a civil suit that erupted between an affluent mother and her daughter, Josefa Portocarrero Laso de la Vega, over whether the daughter could take vows as a nun instead of getting married as her mother desired. The conflict between the two revolved around how each understood the application of the theological concept of free will. The chapter demonstrates how the relationship between Josefa and her mother shaped important discussions about adult women and freedom of conscience in eighteenth-century Lima.In the conclusion, van Deusen draws together the main themes of the book's case studies and argues that networks of women played crucial roles in the spread of information about the divine among women. The first and second parts of the book could be connected a bit more clearly, as they occasionally felt like different books, particularly with the strong focus on theoretical frameworks in the first part and the employment of social history methodologies in the second. Nevertheless, van Deusen is deft at uncovering fascinating and little-known women whose lives reveal a spectrum of behaviors, beliefs, and activities that shed new light on early modern devotional practices. While the focus here is on Lima, it is easy to see how van Deusen's female religious culture reverberated throughout the Catholic world.

Making Medicines in Early Colonial Lima, Peru: Apothecaries, Science, and Society

Making Medicines in Early Colonial Lima, Peru: Apothecaries, Science, and Society

Mal Olorand Colonial Latin American History: Smellscapes in Lima, Peru, 1535–1614

AbstractNoxious airs from trash discards, irrigation canals, marketplaces, hospitals, and plazas vitiated colonial Lima's environment. Using olfactory history, this article examines how residents reacted to their pungent environs. Early modern Iberians believed that foul smells were harmful. Fully understanding this relationship, municipal leaders subjugated the San Lázaro district by relocating its indigenous population and moving noxious trades and institutions to the area. I argue that the concentration of miasmas in San Lázaro represents an environmental conquest. San Lázaro's ethnically and socially diverse population lived with unhealthy airs that threatened their health. By contrast, central Lima enjoyed fresher airs in locations primarily occupied by Spanish vecinos (male, landowning citizens, who were allowed to participate in local politics) in and around the Plaza de Armas, the cathedral, the viceroy's palace, and the municipal hall. The protection of central Lima's airs reveals that environmental management corresponded to social status and political power.

Ordinary Litigants: Women and Men, Slavery and the Enlightenment in Latin America

Ordinary Litigants:Women and Men, Slavery and the Enlightenment in Latin America Camilla Townsend (bio) Michelle A. McKinley. Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. x+ 294 pp.; ISBN 978-1-1071-6898-5 (cl); 978-1-3166-2010-6 (pb); 978-1-3167-3191-8 (epub). Bianca Premo. The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xiii+ 384 pp.; ISBN 978-0-1906-3872-6 (cl); 978-0-1906-3873-3 (pb); 978-0-1906-3874-0 (epub). Two colonial Latin Americanists have recently made landmark contributions to the study of the history of law. Michelle McKinley's Fractional Freedoms and Bianca Premo's Enlightenment on Trial both study the uses to which disempowered people put the court system, focusing on gender and race as intertwined categories of analysis. Their studies yield particularly rich results even for scholars outside the realm of legal history. McKinley frankly acknowledges that in the past generation there has been "a veritable boom in studies examining slaves' entanglement with the law" (7). Like many who study Latin America, she has found herself responding to the historian Frank Tannenbaum's thesis in Slave and Citizen (1947) that the enslaved in that region found themselves in dramatically different circumstances than those in North America because of their access to the court system (thanks to the Siete Partidas) and the existence of an alternate set of authority figures (the Catholic Church).1 She does not quarrel with his insight, but her focus is on the slaves themselves: "A study that takes as its subject slaves' use of courts implicitly differs from a study of the laws of slavery, although both approaches ultimately are shaped by the issue of agency and structure" (28). She wishes to underscore that if we move beyond the bounds of fully slave societies like Brazil and the southern United States, we find enslaved people with a much higher likelihood of having experienced intimate ties with slaveholders, and not just in a sexual sense. It thus becomes imperative that gender take a lead role in our analysis (10–11). Furthermore, she argues that "contingent liberty (or fractional freedom) was the reality that all—whether enslaved, freed, or free—accepted and to which they accommodated their lives" (11). [End Page 165] McKinley's book is so thorough that it can and undoubtedly will serve as a veritable encyclopedia on the ways in which slaves pursued "fractional freedom"—a somewhat increased liberty for themselves or their loved ones—in a mid-colonial society with slaves. Chapter one demonstrates how actively the enslaved were involved in shaping their own legal cases, no matter how much help they received from a procurador (attorney). It also documents the practice of the censura (public censure), about which very little has been previously known. At the request even of a slave, the church would send out announcements to be made from every pulpit in the region, calling for people to step forward as witnesses; "Does anyone here know if it is true that don Alonso freed the baby Inés at her birth?" Chapter two explores the tensions between the sacrament of marriage (the authority of the church) and enslavement (the authority of the state), demonstrating in fascinating detail how effectively the enslaved used these tensions—for instance, when an enslaved Peruvian man married in haste in Lima to avoid being sent by his master out to Arica (97). Chapter three, on affective intimacy, moves beyond the expected stories of masters forcing enslaved women into relationships. Here, McKinley looks at ways in which some people were able to hide their enslaved status in order to contract marriage with a free person, to the benefit of the children. Chapter four considers the question of relations between enslaved mothers and their children who were freed by their fathers at baptism. It demonstrates how vulnerable such freedom was and how necessary it was for the enslaved mothers to keep the fathers in the public eye, first in order to gain freedom for the children and then to protect them from re-enslavement. Chapter...

Colonial Sumptuary Laws - Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima. By Tamara Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. 232. $99.99 cloth.

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Michelle McKinley, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima 1600-1700

Throughout the pages of Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima 1600-1700, Michelle McKinley masterfully unfolds a dense archive material as a result of an extensive and committed research process which makes the reader see, as the author points out, ‘the law in action’ as well as the action of enslaved litigants over the law and the administration of justice, especially the ecclesiastical one. The author analyses from a micro historic viewpoint the ‘exp...

De integración e identidades. Portugueses en las cofradías limeñas, 1571-1680

El objeto de este artículo es identificar la capacidad de integración de los portugueses residentes en Lima entre 1571-1680, a través del análisis de los vínculos creados con las cofradías y hermandades de la ciudad. No hubo en la Lima colonial asociaciones de carácter nacional que agrupasen de forma exclusiva a los inmigrantes portugueses, como sí ocurrió, en cambio, en la España Moderna. De esta manera, el grupo extranjero que nos ocupa, puso de manifiesto su intención de procurar diversas estrategias para integrarse a la tierra de adopción.

Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700

Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700