Product Description

In Kathryn Burns transforms our view of nuns as marginal recluses, making them central actors on the colonial stage. Beginning with the 1558 founding of South Americas first convent, Burns shows that nuns in Cuzco played a vital part in subjugating Incas, creating a creole elite, and reproducing an Andean colonial order in which economic and spiritual interests were inextricably fused.

Based on unprecedented archival research, demonstrates how nuns became leading guarantors of their citys social order by making loans, managing property, containing unruly women, and raising girls. Coining the phrase spiritual economy to analyze the intricate investments and relationships that enabled Cuzcos convents and their backers to thrive, Burns explains how, by the late 1700s, this economy had faltered badly, making convents an emblem of decay and a focal point for intense criticism of a failing colonial regime. By the nineteenth century, the nuns had retreated from their previous roles, marginalized in the construction of a new republican order.