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...