ABSTRACT
In the early modern period, women spent a great deal of time in each other’s company: whether fashioning lace gloves, witnessing a moment of rapture in a friend’s home or kneading dough in convents. Clustered in private and public settings they laboured, they bickered, they imparted their innermost thoughts. Recently, scholars have begun to consider how these collective assemblages and ‘alliances’ formed and where women gathered to work and converse.1 This chapter follows in the footsteps of this previous work, but also shifts the focus by considering how and where the transmission and exchange of knowledge about spiritual matters in early seventeenthcentury Lima occurred among women who established networks. I shall argue that as a result of the social circuits that developed, women formed ‘epistemological communities’ around a body of spiritual knowledge that was interconnected and interdependent (Hankinson Nelson, 1993, p. 141). Epistemologies, or, in this case, broad understandings of the world of the beyond, were located, as feminist scholar Teresa de Lauretis has argued, ‘in the personal, the subjective, the body, the symptomatic, the quotidian, as the very site of material inscription of the ideological; that is to say, the ground where socio-political determinations take hold and are realized’ (Lauretis, 1986, pp. 11-12).
