The Limits of Devotion and the Weight of Suffering in Colonial Lima, Peru

Although extant examples are relatively sparse and incomplete, eighteenth-century Inquisition records housed in Lima’s Archivo General de la Nación feature a small handful of free women of African descent who stood accused of witchcraft. As part of the proceedings in these cases, begun after inquisition tribunals heard accusations and made arrests, the accused women’s belongings were confiscated and inventoried. An analysis of these inventories reveals the degree to which they are bereft of medicinal products, fetish objects, or other items that would have served as evidence to implicate the women in the use of magical remedies or an engagement in occult practices. Instead, the goods listed therein were of a much more quotidian variety, consisting largely of clothing items and household goods. The presence, ubiquity, and number of these particular species of property invite us to ask how women of African descent used the acquisition of devotional items to lay claim to a particular kind of status, one that not only signaled their profound personal fealty to Christianity but that also allowed them to convey it to others, perhaps through operating their own houses of worship, even in informal capacities. My paper argues that it was precisely the preponderance of Catholic devotional items in their possession that made these African-descent women targets of suspicion of witchcraft. Put another way, it suggests that there was such a thing as excessive Catholic devotion when it came to women of African descent, at least as it pertained to their material acquisitions of devotional items. These acquisitions ran up against the prevailing expectation that among African-descent women, religious devotion was best expressed through penitential suffering.