Bodies to Reveal and Conceal: Baroque Dynamics of Obscenity (Heresy) and Modesty (Saintliness) in Feminine Bodies in the Peruvian Viceroyalty

Abstract

Obscenity and modesty: at first glance, we recognise these terms a priori, as clear in their morality and limits. However, both concepts are ambiguous, porous, and paradoxical. Obscenity and modesty are complementary categories, and their definitions are circumstantial; that is, they depend on an interpretive framework as much as historical and textual context for substantiation. Using this brief reflection as a point of departure, the purpose of this work is to study the dynamics of the modest/obscene – framed by conceptualisations of saintliness and heresy – in the context of the Spanish colonies in America and using textualities associated with feminine spiritual devotion in the Peruvian Viceroyalty of the seventeenth century. To this end, two particularly resonant cases will be analysed: those of Saint Rose of Lima (1586–1617) and Ángela Carranza (1643–1694). This work’s hypothesis is that spiritual behaviours considered modest or obscene reveal themselves as paradoxical in the given context and that, despite initiatives by colonial powers to sustain the differences between the categories, many acts of feminine spiritual devotion become dislocated from their original modest context and intersect with elements of the obscene.

Keywords:

• obscenity
• modesty
• saintliness
• heresy
• baroque

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 There is an extensive bibliography on this topic. Some of the fundamental works exploring conventual life and mystic feminine writing in Latin America are: Kathleen Myers, Neither Saints nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America (2003a); Nora Jaffary, False Mystics: Deviant Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico (2004); María Piedad Quevedo, Un cuerpo para el espíritu: Mística en la Nueva Granada, el cuerpo, el gusto y el asco (1680-1750) (2007); Kathryn Burns, Hábitos coloniales: Los conventos y la economía espiritual del Cuzco (2008); Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (2010); Asunción Lavrín, Las esposas de Cristo: La vida conventual en la Nueva España (2016); Nancy E. Van Deusen, Embodying the Sacred: Women Mystics in Seventeenth-Century Lima (2018).

2 In the case of the Peruvian viceroyalty, one of the first historiographic works on the theme of the Inquisition is the Historia del Tribunal de la Inquisición de Lima (1569-1820) by the nineteenth-century historian José Toribio Medina. There is also the work of Ricardo Palma Anales de la Inquisición de Lima (1863). Some examples of contemporary work around the archives and inquisitorial censorship are María Emma Mannarelli, Hechiceras, beatas y expósitas: Mujeres y poder inquisitorial en Lima (1999); Pedro Guibovich Pérez, Censura, libros e inquisición en el Perú Colonial 1570-1754 (2003), and the extensive work of Teodoro Hampe Martínez, Fernando Iwasaki and René Millar Carvacho, among others.

3 The beatas, beguinas, or terciarias were lay women who maintained some relationship with an ecclesiastical order, who could take vows of chastity and poverty, as well as wear an order’s habit, without being nuns. This is a tradition from the European Middle Ages (thirteenth–fourteenth centuries), and which also extended to the overseas territories of the Spanish empire. These women’s lives, testimonies and, on some occasions, their own writings are truly rich objects of study, as they question the common idea that colonial women could only either marry or join a convent. Their form of para-institutional spirituality (Walker Bynum 1987) did not, however, fail to raise suspicions among the authorities, and many of these holy women were considered heretics. As regards the mysticism, it is difficult to give a deep and complex definition of this sort of discourse and manifestations in such a short space, but, for this case, the mystical can be understood as the intimate, direct, and loving experience of God. In this sense, the practices of mysticism, which at the time were referred to using various names such as quietism, illuminism, alumbrado/a, hypocrite, iluso/a, aturdido/a, etcetera, supposed, to some extent, a direct affront to the orthodoxy of the counter-reformist church. The latter sought to establish that the experience of God was only possible through the intervention of the Church, the mediation of the clerics, and the sacraments promoted by Catholicism. For a history and theological reflection on mysticism in the Early Modern context, see Certeau (2010), La fábula mística: Siglos XVI-XVII.

4 Except in quotes that refer to her as Saint Rosa of Lima, she will hereinafter be referred to as Rosa.

5 This term comes from Jaffary (2004), who studies cases of women accused of being alumbradas in the Hispanic New World. Further, the term is placed in quotation marks, as it is not intended to question whether Ángela Carranza is a true mystic, as this would suppose valorising her spirituality in the same terms as the Inquisition.

6 For this to be possible, Baroque power must be represented on the public scene in a particularly visible and repetitive form; it must make a spectacle of itself. “Power generates images of itself; power is expressed in events; power, powers are exercised in a ‘theatrical’ way in a space completely submitted to control (…). Going a bit further, we could even affirm that power has neither existence nor effectiveness outside of its exhibitionist representation” (Rodríguez de la Flor 2002, 162–163).

7 Rodríguez de la Flor refers here to the work of Antonio Maravall, La cultura del barroco (1975).

8 “A theatre of religiosity, a ‘scene’, is founded on it (spiritual praxis). At the end of its circuit, the word, as tense as it may have been portrayed, is without violence reintegrated to the higher order constituted by the hegemonic discourse (…). But this scene and this theatre of representations both have their mysteries, their paradoxes, since upon attempting to escape from the material limitations that determine them, they open themselves to unexpected effects” (De la Flor 2002, 30).

9 This proposition arose after a long period of reflection. This hypothesis, much further elaborated, would not have been possible without the recommendations and contributions offered by Zeb Tortorici and Javier Fernández Galeano, and so I thank them for this.

10 Within the practices that have been referred to as mysticism and which form a fundamental part of Baroque spirituality, a large part of what defines the movement is oxymoronic. As María Piedad Quevedo explains it in the context of conventual Neogranadine mysticism (2007): “The contradiction founds the baroque spiritual experience and finds its expression in the oxymoron, a rhetorical figure used by the nuns studied here, which names the paradoxical union of opposites, according to which they refer to the mystical encounter as a cruel pleasure, the gentlest flame, the liveliest death” (47).

11 Mujica Pinilla makes evident Rosa’s polyphony by mentioning that there is not one Rosa, but rather one thousand: “There’s the mystical Rosa, the reformist Catholic, the assiduous lay beata reader of the Dominican Luis de Granada (1504–1588) (…). There’s the counter-reformist Rosa, enemy of the Dutch pirates, defender of the Eucharist and of the campaigns to extirpate indigenous idolatry (…). There is the Andean Rosa, prophet, more mythical than historical, that foreshadowed the restoration of Tahuantinsuyo under a Catholic Inca that would ultimately preside over the American emancipatory process” (2005, 74–75).

12 The text will hereinafter be referred to as the Primer proceso.

13 It is not entirely clear why Rosa leaves her parents’ house and goes to live with Gonzalo de la Maza. If we think of the timeframe for the events, this change in domicile happens a few years before her interrogation by the Inquisition (1614), leading one to presume that such a change was a way of protecting Rosa and better observing her practices, as these generated suspicions not only among her family, but also in the city. Firbas (2021) adds that in 1611, the servant Mariana marries and leaves the home of Flores Oliva, such that this might also “serve to remind us to reconsider the motives for which the saint also left her family home and went to live in the house of the accountant Gonzalo de la Maza and his wife María de Uzátegui”.

14 AHN, Portal de Archivos Españoles PARES, Relaciones de causas y autos de fe del Tribunal de la Inquisición de Lima, Inquisición, L.1032. The title of the file is “Relación que hace el Tribunal de la Inquisición de Lima al Consejo Supremo de su Majestad de la Santa y General Ínquisición De la Causa de Doña Ángela Carranza alias Madre de Dios Beata de San Agustín que salió en Auto de Fee celebrado en 20 de Diciembre de 1694” (271). The passages seek to preserve the writing just as it appears in the original. TN: the translation strove to reproduce the language in English as it appears in Spanish, less some orthographic errata.

15 Aside from Rosa, there were several figures considered to be of major importance to the construction of Catholic spirituality in America, such as Toribio de Mogrovejo, Francisco Solano, Juan Macías, and Martín de Porres (Millar Carvacho 1998, 279).

16 “The weight attributed to canonisation is a strictly Peruvian phenomenon, New Spain invested and risked much less in the recognition of saintliness (…). On the other hand, in Lima, the archbishop Liñan y Cisneros maintained, in the cathedral, a chapel transformed into a permanent office where four notaries simultaneously worked on processes” (Estenssoro Fuchs 2003, 356).

17 It is also worth mentioning that, due to the relationship that Ángela Carranza maintained with the known Indigenous servant Nicolás de Ayllón (1632–1677), this man’s path to canonisation was truncated. If he had followed the process, Nicolás would have been the first Indigenous saint in America. To this day, one can still find complaints by his followers demanding that his canonisation process begin again. For more on this, see Estenssoro Fuchs (2003) and Espitia (2018).

18 Mujica Pinilla (2005) says that the tracing of the different relationships of festivals surrounding the beatification and canonisation of Rosa in Italy, Spain, Peru, and Mexico constitutes an important source for understanding the figure of Rosa as a standard-bearer for criollismo and the Counter-Reformation (60).

19 Citations of the Primer proceso come from Hernán Jiménez Salas O.P., Primer proceso ordinario para la canonización de Santa Rosa de Lima (Lima: Monasterio de Santa Rosa de Santa María de Lima, ed. 2002).

20 The work of Millones (1992), “Los indios de Santa Rosa: la población aborigen a través de los ojos de los bienaventurados”, has been essential to understanding the importance of Mariana in Rosa’s life. More recently, Firbas (2021), in “Mariana de Oliva, criada india de Santa Rosa de Lima: Vida y textos”, uses several sources to reconstruct Mariana’s life and her prominent role as spiritual “secretary” to Rosa, as the servant continued tracking her miracles after the saint had died.

21 Although this Baroque visual regime might also appear an obvious penetration by power in which one obtains a transparent and panoptical vision of even the most intimate parts of being, the visual capacity of power can also be problematised and be seen as twisted, as Fernando de la Flor explores in another of his works, Imago: La cultura visual y figurativa del Barroco (2009).

22 “E.M. Cioran called this ‘voluptuous suffering’. Cioran, a Romanian writer living in Paris, made of the sensual pleasure of crying the central point of his revision of religious emotions in Lágrimas y santos, a book first published in 1937. He decided that it was not only piety, nor feats, nor the value of saints that makes them so interesting to us later observers, but rather the voluptuousness of their suffering” (Lutz 1999, 36).

23 Noting this relationship was possible thanks to a suggestion by Zeb Tortorici.

24 Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN) and Portal de Archivos Españoles PARES (1699). “Relación que hace el Tribunal de la Inquisición de Lima al Consejo Supremo de su Magestad de la Santa General Inquisición de la causa que hace de Doña Ángela Carranza alias la Madre de Dios, Beata de San Agustin que salio en Auto de Fee celebrado en 20 de diciembre de 1694.” In Relaciones de causas y autos de fe del Tribunal de la Inquisición de Lima, Inquisición, L. 1032, pp. 277–278. Henceforth referred to with the abbreviated title of “Relación…”.

25 Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN) and Portal de Archivos Españoles PARES (1699). “Relación…”, p. 280.

26 Ibid., pp. 302.

27 Ibid., pp. 330–331.

28 Ibid., p. 276.

29 Ibid., p. 272.

30 Ibid., p. 312.

31 Ibid., p. 321.

32 Ibid., pp. 322–323.

33 “In general, the Spanish games of Shrovetide tended toward the usage of costumes or masks; jokes, tricks, and shouting; to lash and beat others with sticks and sacks; make special noises with special objects – bramaderas and zumbaderas – shatter stew pots and such; tossing about stuffed toys or ‘peleles’ of dogs and cats; chasing chickens; throwing bran and flour at each other, or water on stew pots or syringes; tossing eggs or oranges, and other pleasures” (González Pérez 2017).

34 Archivo Histórico Nacional (AHN) and Portal de Archivos Españoles PARES (1699). “Relación…”, pp. 336–337.

35 Ibid., p. 310.

36 Figueroa Sánchez (2008), following the work of Severo Sarduy, indicates the cosmological metaphor implied by changing from a classical world model to a baroque one: Galileo’s and Copernicus’s model of the universe is circular, while the Baroque, Keplerian model is an ellipsis with multiple centres (55) and wherein everything, even language, seems to escape from stable sense: “everything acquires a relative value and existence; each thing is contradictory, multiple, and contrasting” (33).

37 One cannot ignore the work of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986), or the sociological projection achieved by Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (2002), which succeed in involving different historical moments through a multidisciplinary lens. Also, one might say that the work by Mikhail Bakhtin, La cultura popular en la Edad Media y el Renacimiento: El contexto de François Rabelais (2003), is vital to considerations of the obscene within the medieval world and the Early Modern period.

38 Think of the work of Georges Vigarello: Lo sano y lo malsano: historias de las prácticas de la salud desde la Edad Media hasta nuestros días (2006) or Historia de la obesidad: metamorfosis de la gordura (2011), which might be key to thinking of these categories, but in the specific context of colonial Latin America.

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Pilar Espitia

Pilar Espitia received her BA in Literary Studies (2009) from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from Stony Brook University in New York. Her focus has been medieval literature, literature of the so-called Early Modernities, and colonial literature. She has also published several articles in which she articulates feminist and queer theory with the interpretation of literary texts. Her dissertation, “Queering the Andean Saints” (2018), forms part of a broader work-in-progress that offers a genealogy of models of saintliness in colonial Latin America. Currently, she is an assistant professor at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia, and teaches courses on Medieval Literature at the undergraduate level in the Department of Literature. She has directed a study group around mystic themes since 2020 and is currently a collaborator and translator for the digital journal Open Americas.