ABSTRACT
In colonial Lima, known as the City of Kings, church and state worked together – in tandem and at times in tension – to ensure the economic, political, religious, and social functioning of the viceroyalty. Through its bureaucratic vigilance of daily life, the Inquisition functioned as one important mechanism for eliminating the peril that ecclesiastical officials perceived, that they were losing control of religious practice. As part of this concern, clerics throughout the early modern Spanish empire, most particularly in Lima, paid a great deal of attention to the proliferation of beatas, those lay holy women considered saintly by the denizens of the urban spaces of all classes, ordinary people and influential citizens.1
When, for instance, the Jesuit priest Juan Muñoz denounced Luisa Melgarejo de Soto, one of the most famous of the early seventeenth-century Lima beatas, to inquisitors in July 1622, he identified her as one of many false (female) visionaries in the city: ‘haviendo tanto numero de mugeres que muy desordenadas se suelen arrobar y aun alguna bolar en esta ciudad de Lima’ [there is such a large number of women who, creating a tumult, are accustomed to going into trances and some even fly in this city of Lima].2 In sum, nowhere was the preoccupation with eradicating holy laywomen’s ‘dangerous’ influence more prevalent than in this viceregal city, the political, economic, and cultural capital of Peru.
