The Enlightenment & Awakening Era · c. 1600-1810 · New Spain, Peru
Colonial Latin American Devotional Catholicism
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About This Movement
Once the first missionary generation had passed, Catholicism in Spanish America settled into being the ordinary religion of whole societies, and its real institutions were local: the cofradías, lay confraternities that maintained an altar or an image, buried their members and paid for their funerals, organized by trade, by parish and often by race — with indigenous confraternities and Black brotherhoods running their own devotional life. Its saints were homegrown: Rose of Lima, canonized in 1671 as the first saint of the Americas, and Martín de Porres, the mixed-race Dominican lay brother of the same city. Its convents produced writers of the first rank, among them Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Mexico, who defended a woman's right to study, and Úrsula de Jesús in Lima, an enslaved woman later freed, whose spiritual diary survives in her own dictated words. Above all it produced Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose shrine at Tepeyac became the devotional centre of Mexico and eventually a symbol of Mexican identity itself.
Sources
- The cofradia books: confraternity records across New Spain and Peru, incl. indigenous confraternities' books and Black brotherhoods' records (Afro-Peruvian and Afro-Brazilian rosary confraternities) (primary) — A lay-run devotional economy that was the ordinary institutional life of the piety; the records themselves were kept under clerical oversight.
- Convent writings, women's: Sor Juana, Respuesta a Sor Filotea (1691; trans. Arenal & Powell); Madre Maria de San Jose's autobiography (ed. Myers & Powell); Ursula de Jesus, The Souls of Purgatory (ed./trans. van Deusen, UNM, 2004) (primary) — An enslaved-then-freed convent servant's dictated spiritual diary, begun in 1650 - an enslaved woman's own religious voice, though filtered through the confessor who took her dictation. The convent's racial hierarchy is visible within it.
- The canonization processes: Rose of Lima (canonized 1671), Martin de Porres (process testimony from the 1660s, ordinary witnesses incl. Afro-Peruvians), Mariana de Quito (primary) — Canonization-process testimony is structured and led by the questioners, but it remains the era's densest record of ordinary devotees speaking for themselves.
- The devotional-practice layer: the Guadalupan corpus (Nican Mopohua, published 1649 in Huei tlamahuicoltica; its dating and authorship are still debated), shrine and pilgrimage records, novena imprints; Inquisition and extirpation records that policed popular devotion (primary) — The records that policed popular devotion come from a hostile administrative source.
- William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred (Stanford, 1996), with Asuncion Lavrin, Brides of Christ (Stanford, 2008) (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 7, ch. 19 'Christianity in Iberian America' (Riley) (reference) — A direct fit for this movement, with the chapter number confirmed.