Early-Modern Iberian Cosmopolitans: Imperial and Global Structures of Knowledge in

Non-elite Colonial Scribal Culture.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
Iin Joan Pau Rubies and Neil Safier, eds. Cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press,
forthcoming 2022, forthcoming)

Between 1784 and 1786, members of the “Maki” nation within the Mina cofradia of
Saint Elesbao and Saint Efigenia in Rio de Janeiro met to grapple with a constitutional crisis
within their black sodality. The Maki brethren remained content as long as Ignacio Gonçalves
do Monte, the captain of free colored militias, ruled the cofradia that celebrated these two
ancient Catholic Ethiopian saints. But when Gonçalves died on December 25 of 1783,
Gonçalves’ widow, with the support of leading members of the Iano, Agolin and Sabaru nations
within the Mina cofradia, declared herself the new ruler. The Maki challenged the widow by
electing their own authorities to the posts of regent, secretary, procurator, and treasurer. The
Maki even decided that it was time to write a constitution for a new devotion, one to the Souls of
Purgatory. Over the course of two years, the Maki devised new devotions as they engaged in a
heated legal dispute through ecclesiastical courts. Their actions forcefully challenged Gonçalves’
widow and the other slaves and freed blacks that had hailed from non-Maki regions of the Blight
of Benin that supported her. This dispute between the Mina and the Maki-Mina came to a head
when the Viceroy of the city of Rio joined the black King of all the African sodalities of Our
Lady of the Rosary in arbitration. The Maki lost. Without further appellate recourse, the Maki
went on to create a separate cofradia in 1787, one dedicated to Our Lady of Remedies, not St
Elesbao and Efigenia. The slaves and manumitted slaves, who had originally come from Maki
regions of the Bight of Benin, finally declared themselves independent from the other Mina
members of the original community. 1 Slowly the Iano, Agolin and Sabaru would do the same.

1
On this dispute, see Mariza de Carvalho Soares, People of the Faith. Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-
Century Rio. Translated by Jerry Metz (Duke, 2011). The history of the dispute is documented in “Regra ou
estatutos por modo de un diálogo onde se dá notícias das caridades, e sufágios, das lamas, que usam os pretos
Minas, com seus nacionais no Estado do Brasil, especialmente no Rio de Janeiro por onde se hão de regerem, e
governam, fora de todo o abuso gentílico, es supersticioso, composto por Francisco Alves de Souza, preto e natural
do Reino de Maki, un dos mais excelente & potentados daquela oriunda Costa da Mina” Fundação Biblioteca
Nacional, Rio de Janeiro. Mss 9,3,11.fols 1-44. Sections of the document in Portuguese with English translations
can be found in Afro-Latino Voices. Narratives form the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812. Kathryn
Joy McKnight and Leo j. Garofolo eds. (Hackett Publishing Company, 2007), 244-267. On black kings elected by

1
 The story of the African Maki cofradia in Rio is the story of how slaves and free blacks
assembled religious “republics” through Atlantic scribal cultures. Different factions in the same
“republic” wrote petitions to both bishops and viceroys. They played politics by writing
constitutions, getting them approved in ecclesiastical courts, and staking out African ethnic
geographies in the streets of Rio. This was a local scribal culture steep deep in Atlantic
geographies. The different factions voted and saw elections as a source of the republic
legitimacy. This form of politics through paperwork and petitioning is well known in the
historiography of indigenous peoples in colonial Spanish America.2 The historiography has
focused mostly on litigation and “justice,” forgetting a much larger subaltern scribal cultures of
petitioning in legislation (gobierno) and grace. The world of petitioning not only brought slave
owners, curas, encomenderos, magistrates to court. It also created new laws, ordenanzas, and
constitutions. Viceregal mandamientos, ecclesiastical constitutions, and royal cedulas were often
no more than verbatim copies of bottom up petitioning by indigenous peoples, freed blacks,
slaves, and women. 3 The world of the Maki reveals this world of paperwork and politics. It also
reveals the creation of knowledge: the constant production of new collective forms of “African”
identity via intra communal conflict settled through paperwork and petitioning.
The historiographical categories of “modernity” have no tools to capture these processes
of politics, sociability, and knowledge. The Enlightenment implies traditions of sociability and
literacy that are at odds with the experience of the Maki. One gets to the “Enlightenment” via the
category of the “Republic of Letters,” whose citizens vicariously engaged one another in salons
and coffee shops via printed text to achieve useful knowledge. The historiography insists that
printed communication sought to be horizontal and critical to reign established hierarchies.
Alternative forms of sociability generated new knowledge to improve material wellbeing.4 The

cofradias, see Marina de Mello e Souza, Reis negros no Brasil escravista: História de coroação de Rei Congo
(Humanitas, Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2002)
2
Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis, eds. Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture
in Mexico and the Andes (Duke University Press, 2014); Jose Carlos de la Puente, Andean Cosmopolitans: Seeking
Justice and Reward at the Spanish Royal Court (Texas University Press, 2018).
3
Adrian Masters, A Thousand Invisible Architects: Vassals, the Petition and Response System, and the Creation of
Spanish Imperial Caste Legislation,” Hispanic American Historical review 98 (2018): 377-406
4
On the early-modern rise of the Republic of Letters and the Public Sphere, see Jurgen Habermas. The Public
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by
Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence; Constance M. Furey, Erasmus, Contarini, and the

2
Maki’s cofradia, however, was a religious republic whose main concern was to manage burials
and the political economy of souls. The Maki brethren were part of much larger scribal culture
whose paperwork moved vertically via petitioning to higher ecclesiastical and lay authorities, not
laterally and horizontally via “print culture.” The Maki did not seek to sway the anonymous
public in salons and café via the vicarious production of printed texts. In the following pages I
explore the culture of paperwork and scribal literacy wielded by slaves, women, and indigenous
peoples. These forms of scribal literacy escape the historiographical categories used to capture
the rise of early Atlantic modernity.

The problem that the category of Enlightenment print culture and public sphere has
capturing the peculiar traditions of Maki scribal modernity is analogous to the problem that the
Enlightenment has with the category of the “cosmopolitan.” The Enlightenment category of the
cosmopolitan might have been instrumental in the creation of forms of politics centered on a
developed notion of human rights. Yet, paradoxically, the Enlightenment cosmopolitan
constructed a foil in “the parochial and the local” that resonate particularly in places like Iberian
America. Kant’s civilizing cosmopolitanism was meant to liberate us from the dangerous
elements (and limitations) of local and national politics, but at the cost of detaching politics from
the local, the contingent, and the contextual. The concept of cosmopolitanism thus becomes a
very blunt instrument to do the history of “local” peoples. In effect, eighteenth-century
cosmopolitanism invented the “local” (the peasant, the nun, and the Latin American illiterate) as
something backward and reactive that had to be integrated into global society and by extension
its own universal values in deeply patronizing and condescending ways.

The paper explores diverse forms of colonial scribal literacy and paperwork that are
deeply at odds with the historiography on print culture and cosmopolitanism. Most of the
individuals in the pages below have long been considered illiterate and parochially provincial,

Religious Republic of Letters (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Peter N. Miller. Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and
Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press, 2000). On the Enlightenment and the Public Sphere-
Republic of Letters, the literature is immense; see among many others, Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A
Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Cornell University Press, 1994); Laurence Brockliss, Calvet's Web:
Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 2002); Brian
Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffee House (Yale University Press, 2005)

3
stifled by their limiting religious world views. It was precisely to denounce these worlds that the
early-modern category of the cosmopolitan emerged. The cure to religious fanaticism and
parochial narrowmindedness was the ability to think outside the narrow and the local. In Europe,
reportedly, early-modern global awareness through philosophical travel accounts deepened
knowledge of the human condition. Cosmopolitanism allegedly offered individuals an escape
from superstitions, credulity, and epistemological biases, errors drawn from parochially narrow
experiences.5

In the traditional categories of European-centered historical and philosophical thought,

the category of the cosmopolitan has been firmly linked to the Enlightenment and the public
sphere. It was in the long-eighteenth century, scholars claim, that intellectuals in Europe and the
Americas began to devise a view of the world in which membership in the Republic of Letters
towered over all other identities. Confessional and local identities came to be seen as stifling and
parochial at best; worse, they were considered to stand in for ignorance and exploitation. There
was no greater enemy of the Enlightenment in their view than superstition, ignorance, localism,
and illiteracy. No greater enemy than the world of piety that the Catholic Church spawned, as it
allegedly sought to sanction violence, ignorance, and exploitation.6 If only light could pierce
such darkness!
This Enlightenment paradigm linking literacy and cosmopolitanism has, to be sure, been
challenged ever since it was developed in the late-eighteenth century. Orally transmitted folklore
and popular culture offered Romantic writers like Herder the primary sources upon which to
invent and sanction national and regional identities. In the wake of the Romantic reaction to the
Enlightenment, the main purpose of print and epistolary culture became the creation of an
imagined community of “equal” brethren, fraternally and vicariously united through the reading
of novels and newspapers written in grammatically standardized vernaculars.7 But what
happened to the literate communities of the enslaved Maki? Did they disappear in the

5
On 18th-century Cosmopolitanism and Enlightenment as the antithesis of empire, see Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment
Against Empire (Princeton, 2003); Pauline Kleingeld, Kant and Cosmpolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World
Citizenship (Cambridge, 2012)

6
On the Enlightenment and the New World, see Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World
(Stanford, 2001)
7
The classic account on the connections between print culture and nationalism remains Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1985)

4
historiographical fog that the Enlightenment Republic of Letters and the Romantic national
public sphere sanctioned? If we read this literate community of enslaved Africans as
cosmopolitans – a group whose identities spanned multiple geographies and who expressed
themselves consciously and coherently as a group, cognizant of their place as members of a
human community in an increasingly globalized world – it is striking, then, that their presence
became so conceptually unintelligible to Enlightenment – and therefore cosmopolitan
– historiography. Their very invisibility in the archive – as polyglot, non-elite peoples building
fissiparous identities upon an array of epistolary, scribal, and printed cultures – seemed to
emerge quite specifically from the structures of empire itself, forcing us to ask important
questions about how extra-European peoples have been excluded from the discourses of empire
that they themselves served to enable.
In the examples below, the cosmopolitan is not the result early modern philosophical
accounts drawn from philosophical travelers and scientific expeditions. Most individuals in this
essay belong to early-modern, imperial traditions of the local and subaltern, yet deeply aware of
global secular and religious geographies. By exploring the relationship between popular literacy
and cosmopolitanism in the early modern Iberian monarchies, this essay probes a series of
illustrative examples that specifically highlight the contributions of communities of Africans,
women, and native inhabitants of the New World as cosmopolitans in their own right.
If one considers the Kantian cosmopolitan to be the result of political and cultural forces
specific to Western European societies, then it is no more than a situated form of local
knowledge. There were other forms of local globalism that were as situated as the Kantian
cosmopolitan. The difference is that the forms of Catholic local globalism that I discuss here
never became normative and universal. Moreover, the forms of local globalism I explore in this
essay never acquired the geopolitical epistemological authority to cast Kant as a parochial
Prussian whose ideas were no more than one version of local globalism. The twist here is that the
Enlightenment notion of the cosmopolitan did acquire the epistemological authority to cast the
Black, nuns, and Indigenous intellectuals I explore in this piece as parochial and local. This
essay offers an alternative to early-modern forms of the local “cosmopolitan”, namely,
individuals who often did travel physically more than Kant, with the exception of a few nuns
who, like our Prussian, imagined the globe as a whole by firmly staying in one place.

5
 The paper is divided into several sections that explore different facets of non-elite scribal
literacy. I first explore a few cases of late 18th century slave and freed black scribal literacies,
including the case of the Maki, to highlight the deeply Atlantic nature of these literacies.
Although tied to local contexts, these literacies were also imperial and global. Later I investigate
early- modern cases of female religious scribal literacy in which paperwork described vast
imperial geographies. Bilocation and prophecy allowed writers to move through vast historical
and geographical landscapes with ease. This community the truth of literacy was also often
grounded in the testimony of the body as text that covered vast religious landscapes. The essay
concludes with a brief study of Amerindian local petitioning and indigenous literacy as an
imperial-cosmopolitan practice.

Petitioning, Cosmopolitanism, and the Black Scribal Culture

The original Mina sodality of Saint Elesabao and Efiginia, from which the Maki splintered, had
begun as a subset of the more demographically dominant community of Angolans. In 1740 the
Mina separated from the Angola, elected their own emperor (and several kings of nations), and
crafted their own constitutions. In 1762 one of the original nations of the Mina, the Dagome, left
to create its own cofradia. In 1787 it was the turn of the Maki. The Maki drew on traditional
Iberian discourse of popular sovereignty and political representation to justify their decision not
to follow Gonçalves’ widow and the Mina anymore. Rulers could not be imposed, they argued.
Legitimacy and sovereignty stemmed from elections and the will of the people. “This
congregation is a devotion made of the will of all…For the widow to be the regent it is necessary
[for] all to say so, not only a handful, because we all know from the stories of the Old Testament
and of general history, even of heathen history, that whoever is king, is king by the will of the
people.”8
Urban Black sodalities, like those of Saint Elesbao and Our Lady of the Rosary in Rio,
were organizations that deployed literacy to advance petitioning. In doing so, they allowed
African “nations” to produce new ethnic identities. One of the most significant functions of these

8
McKnight and Garofolo, 266: “Esta congregação é uma devoção feita por vontade de todos…E para ela ser regenta
é preciso que seja por vontade de todos e não de quatro somente, porque bem vemos nas Estórias Sagradas, e
humanas, e ainda gentílicas que quem faz o re é a vontade do povo.”

6
sodalities was to provide members with the means to enjoy a “good death.” They buried their
members in caskets, within churches, and provided masses to hasten the movement of souls
through purgatory. 9 Places of constitutional and theological thinking that was mediated through
ethnicity, these cofradias were populated by African-descended peoples who inhabited a colonial
city in the Americas, drawing creatively on the diverse strands of political thought that were
available to them. These cofradias can – and as I argue in this essay should – be understood as
enclaves of cosmopolitanism, albeit a very different kind of cosmopolitanism than that narrowly
articulated by Kant or Rousseau.

Literacy was central to colonial Iberian conceptions of piety, lay and ecclesiastical
justice, and community. Cofradias were charged with devising new devotions specifying the
nature and frequency of prayers, and Afro-Atlantic cofradias endlessly splintered to
accommodate notions of ethnicity, usually attached to ports of provenance across the ocean.
Procurators were elected by these sodalities to represent them in ecclesiastical courts and to
approve the new devotions. New devotions and newly minted cofradias, in turn, required new
constitutions (and, thus, new secretaries) to put them into written form. The Maki devised a new
constitution for the Mina in June of 1786 that mandated the sodality to keep four separate books:
one for the list of members; another for “certification of masses;” a third to document members’
fees, loans, debts and general accounts; and one for the laws governing the group.10 And picking
new devotions was far from being a mindless exercise. The election of Elesbao and Ephigenia
over, say, Benito de Palermo as the black saint of devotion was not a random act, nor was the
choice of Our Lady of the Remedies over, for instance, Our Lady of the Rosary. Instead, these
choices were charged with deep theological meanings that concerned narratives of identity and
biblical history. The world of Afro-Atlantic cofradias thus demanded a literate, black public, a
lively lettered culture spawned by Afro-Atlantic sodalities that historians have ignored. 11

9
João José Reis, Death Is a Festival: Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil. By Translated by
H. Sabrina Glidehill. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2003); Elizabeth W. Kiddy. Blacks of the
Rosary: Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2005); Nicole von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans
(Tallahassee, 2006)
10
For a copy of the constitution to the Devotion of the Souls of Purgatory devised by the Maki, see McKnight and
Garofolo, 258-265. Chapter 15 of the constitution mandates the four books (p, 263)
11
See José Ramón Jouve Martín, Esclavos de la ciudad letrada: Esclavitud, escritura y colonialismo en Lima
(1650–1700) (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. 2005)

7
 This world of black scribal petitioning has long challenged, and even puzzled, historians
accustomed to the idea that literacy and cosmopolitanism in the Enlightenment were exclusively
the purview of learned male elites. Take for example the case of Jacinto Ventura de Molina
(1766-1841), an Afro Uruguayan, born free to two black creole Brazilian parents. Molina was a
shoemaker and second in command of the company of free colored (compañía de morenos
libres) who experienced the Age of Revolutions as a royalist, longing for the Spanish Monarchy
to survive. Molina, secretary of a black cofradia in Montevideo, was a jurist autodidact and
theologian who wrote tirelessly, despite the fact that many of his writings were burnt by his wife
during the Wars of Independence to protect him from persecution by his rivals. Three volumes of
his writings did survive, however, and were recently acquired by the National Library of
Uruguay. His writings are heterogeneous: they include a personal memoir; petitions to the Pope
to create a seminar for black priests; and many entries on theology and religious history in Latin.
But a recently edited selection of his writings excluded the bulk of Molina’s theological writing,
on the grounds that they were unintelligible.12 If instead we understand Molina as the child of a
black lettered city that was Atlantic in extent, Catholic in persuasion, and imperial by definition,
his writings – emerging as they did within the world of black religious sodalities – become an
unacknowledged contribution to cosmopolitan literature in the eighteenth century that speaks
precisely to the themes of this volume. His theological writings in the New World were devoted
to excavating the meanings of Ethiopia: from the black bride of the Song of Songs and the
Ethiopian Wise King of the Nativity to the holy saints of Nubia Elisbao and Efigenia and the
writings of the freed African slave Juan Latino, who in the sixteenth-century became a doctor
and professor of the university of Granada, famous for his anti-Islamic epic in Latin on the battle
of Lepanto. Molina, as a new world version of this epic poet with a worldly pedigree, aspired to
become a Juan Latino in La Banda Oriental.13

12
Jacinto Ventura de Molina, Los caminos de la escritura negra en el Río de la Plata. Prólogo de George R.
Andrews. Edición de William G. Acree, Jr y Alex Borucki (Iberoamericana, 2010)
13
On Juan Latino, see Elizabeth R. Wright, “Narrating the Ineffable Lepanto: The Austrias Carmen of Joannes
Latinus (Juan Latino), “ Hispanic Review 77 (2009): 71-91; Elizabeth R. Wright, The Epic of Juan Latino:
Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ; Baltasar Fra-
Molinero, "Juan Latino and His Racial Difference." In Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. T. F. Earle and K. J.
P. Lowe, eds. (Cambridge UP, 2005), 326-44, and Fra-Molinero, La imagen de los negros en el teatro del Siglo de
Oro. (Madrid,1995); Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Maria Wolff. “An Overview of Sources on the Life and Work of
Juan Latino, the 'Ethiopian Humanist'." Research in African Literatures: The African Diaspora and its Origins 29.4
(1998): 14-51

8
 While it could be argued that Molina and the Maki constitutional writers represented rare
cases – the exception that proves the rule – of Atlantic cosmopolitanism, the life of Jose Antonio
Aponte (d. 1812) is too similar to that of Molina for either to be seen as outliers. Aponte was a
carpenter and lathe operator, and the head of a religious sodality – a cabildo de nación – in
Habana. Like Molina, Aponte was also a member of the milicias de pardos and a retired corporal
(cabo primero) who got deeply involved in the conspiracies and struggles triggered by
Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808. Aponte was also affected by the transformations that
Cuba experienced following the slave rebellions in the neighboring island of Haiti. Cuba had
become Haiti’s inverted image: namely, a society that witnessed not emancipation but rather the
deliberate expansion of plantation slavery, itself modeled upon the destroyed regime of Saint
Domingue. Cuba not only received planters, slaves, know-how, and equipment from Haiti; the
Spanish island also received ideologies of Haitian black freedom and empowerment. In the
1790s Spain staged a military campaign to oust the French and regain control over the island of
Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic). Hundreds of Cuban militias, including Aponte’s pardos,
were dispatched to fight alongside rebel armies of Haitians slaves. It is not surprising that
Aponte became deeply familiar with the exploits of black generals like Toussaint L’Ouverture.
Cuban pardos and slaves also became mesmerized with images of black generals like Jean-
Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe, who in 1804 and 1811, respectively, declared
themselves emperors. Aponte sought to model himself after Toussaint, Dessalines, and
particularly Henri Christophe. He organized a slave rebellion in Cuba that both erupted and
fizzled in 1812. 14

When Aponte was captured and interrogated, he declared that he had compiled a
collection of “mapas y banderas” (maps and battle pendants). Upon further scrutiny and two
different raids of Aponte’s house on the outskirts of Habana, the authorities found a treasure
trove of documents. The inventory underscores what can only be called a cosmopolitan culture

14
Matthew D. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery. (University of
North Carolina Press, 2006); Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge,
2015); Stephan Palmié, Wizards and Scientists. Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (Duke
University Press, 2002), and José Pavez Ojeda, “The 'Painting' of Black History: The Afro-Cuban Codex of José
Antonio Aponte (Havana, Cuba, 1812), in Adrien Delmas & Nigel Penn, Written Cultures in a Colonial Context
(University of Cape Town, 2011), 271-303.

9
of visual and bibliographical literacy that undergirded Aponte’s African-inspired Catholic faith.
His small library included books on natural history, grammar manuals, architectural guides of
Rome, manuals on how to write letters, catechisms, a history of Aesop’s life and fables, an
incomplete edition of Don Quixote, and several religious history books that emphasized Catholic
histories of Ethiopia. Most notable among these were the accounts of the lives of Prester John
and of Saint Anthony Abbot—including the latter’s trips to Ethiopia and Egypt. Aponte also kept
in his library copies of three royal cédulas – from 1778 to 1780 – that had ordered the creation of
a battalion of pardos in Havana. Aponte alleged that two silver flag-posts found in his collection
were for a pendant of Our Lady of Remedios, but some witnesses damningly declared that the
posts were actually for displaying Aponte’s coat of arms as would-be Cuban emperor. Amongst
these documents, the authorities also found a book of images (libro de figuras) of Aponte’s own
creation, although he did use a black painter, Juan Trinidad Nunez, for some of his images of
black saints. It is regrettably now lost.15

As a compendium that illustrates the graphic underpinnings of a Catholic Caribbean

cosmopolitanism, the book’s contents can fortunately be painstakingly reconstructed from the
separate notarized interrogations of Aponte and Clemente Chacon, a shoemaker and rebel leader.
The book began with a series of paintings on Genesis, including images for each of the six days
of creation, pre-lapsarian Adam and Eve, and the Fall and the Expulsion from Paradise, all
episodes loosely based on the 1673 French treatise L’histoire du vieux et du nouveau testament,
by Sieur de Sombreval, that Aponte owned. These compositions were followed by a series of
fourteen obscure images of events in Cyprus, Ethiopia, Cairo, Alexandria, and Spain triggered by
the activity of planets, constellations, and various pagan deities. This obscure allegorical series
included the story of the first black apostle in Abyssinia allegedly converted by the Apostle
Philip, a conversion that took place when Philip stumbled into the entourage of the Ethiopian
queen Candace (and loosely based on the Act of the Apostles 8:26-38). The book continued with
battle scenes pitting the pardo militias led by Aponte’s grandfather, Joaquin, against a British

15
Aponte’s “libro de figuras” was carefully described in his trial: “Expediente sobre declarar. José Antonio Aponte
el sentido de las pinturas que se hayan en el L[ibro] que se le aprehendió en su casa. Conspiración de José Antonio
Aponte, 24 de marzo de 1812”, Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Fondo Asuntos Políticos, leg. 12, t. 17. The
“expediente” has been partially published by José Luciano Franco in La conspiración de Aponte (La Habana:
Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1963), 60-101. Jorge Pavez has published it fully in “Expediente sobre Jose Antonio
Aponte y el sentido de las figuras [1812]”, Anales de Desclasificación 1(2006) 2: 717-759.

10
invading force of 600 strong. There were then several images of Havana’s cemetery and tombs
along with detailed maps of Havana’s army posts and fortifications, followed later by maps of
Europe, Africa, and Asia, as well as images of El Escorial. Scenes of black knights from the
Order of Saint Anthony Abbott and embassies from Abyssinia to Spain rounded out the
collection. In total, the book had a grand total of 72 separate compositions, including some of the
world’s architectural marvels and two dozen classical pagan deities.16

Within this miscellaneous collection of images, those depicting Havana’s fortification

and Haitian battles and heroes were the ones that most preoccupied the authorities in Havana.
The book contained scenes of battles pitting armies of “whites” against “blacks.” The images
displayed white heads on pikes. There were also images of naval battles led by black boat
captains. One image contained a group of seven blacks dressed as priests, generals, monarchs,
bishops, and female princesses. Another had Emperor Henri Christophe aboard a ship
surrounded by black clergy, black archbishops, and black Dominicans. The book also included
images of Henri Christophe and Dessalines that had been smuggled from Haiti and that had
circulated among the rebels. There were images of military formations and systems of
communication within Spanish fortifications as well as maps of Havana with the precise location
of every army post and garrison. The book also contained a section of images of global black and
female saints and black church leaders dating back to antiquity. Drawing on Molina’s globally
connected world of Ethiopian saints, patriarchs and emperors, as well as Haitian monarchs,
allows a distinctively global, if religious, framework to come to the fore.

Revisiting the lettered city of Maki-like regents, procuradores, secretaries, and councilors
(who also gave themselves African titles for duke, marquise, count, and general) and the worlds
of Molina and Aponte would require painstaking archival research in ecclesiastical archives in
the urban Black Atlantic: from Luanda to Benguela, from Cape Verde to Sao Tomé, from Bahia
to Pernambuco, from Mexico to Lima, from Montevideo to Rio, and beyond. Yet I seek to call
attention here to forms of cosmopolitanism and literacy that historians working within the
narrower historiographical categories European “Republic of Letters” seem condemned to miss.

16
I have based my analysis in Pavez’s edition of Aponte’s expediente.

11
Women’s Scribal Culture: The Political Economy of Souls, Global Bilocation, and Global
Prophecy.

Francisca de los Angeles lived in Querétaro at the turn of the eighteenth century (1674-
1744). She began her religious life as a typical urban colonial beata. Her piety caused her to
travel to heaven and visit the triumphant church.17 While visiting the celestial court, Francisca
would communicate with members of the nine angelic hierarchies (cherubim, seraphim thrones,
dominions, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels, angels) and the nine hierarchies of saints
(martyrs, patriarchs, prophets, confessors, doctors, virgins, apostles, founders). She would also
have access to Mary and to the Trinity. In her visits to heaven, she would negotiate the fate of
souls. Beatas like Francisca (along with cloistered nuns) were charged with keeping track of the
movement of souls in the after-life, striving to get souls away from purgatory and into heaven.
Nuns and beatas managed the political economy of the afterlife.18 But Francisca would also visit
earthly places while in a praying trance. Since Querétaro housed the headquarters of the
Franciscan missionary colleges charged with securing the conversion of natives in Texas,
California, and Nuevo Leon, and since Francisca was herself a Franciscan tertiary, she would
bilocate to the northern borderlands to help with the budding Franciscan missionary effort.19
Francisca held extraordinary power in colonial society, despite being the legitimate daughter of a
racially mixed couple. As an administrator of the afterlife and messenger from the celestial court,
Francisca was equal, if not superior, to any male administrator of earthly lay or clerical polities.

17
This account of Francisca is based on Ellen Gunnarsdóttir. Mexican Karismata. The Baroque Vocation of
Francisca de los Angeles, 1674-1744 (University of Nebraska Press, 2004)
18
On the category of Purgatory more generally see, Jacques LeGoff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans Arthur
Goldhammer (University of Chicago Press, 1986). On the role of praying and the dead, see Megan McLaughin,
Consorting with Saints: Prayer for the Dead in Early Medieval France (Cornell University Press, 1994) and more
generally the work of Philippe Aires. The Hour of our Death (Oxford University Press, 1991). On Purgatory and
commemoration of the dead in the Spain, see Carlos Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in
Sixteenth Century Spain (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Most works on “living with the dead” in Christendom
have traditionally focused on the mediating role of saints; see, for example, Patrick. J. Geary. Living with the Dead
in the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 1994). As far as I know, there is very little on the specialized role of
praying cloistered woman in the political economy of souls.
19
Francisca was not alone, Sor Maria de Jesus de Agreda, a confessor of both Philip IV and Charles II and a very
important (yet little studied) theologian of Mary, was known for bilocating to Texas to help set up Franciscan
missions.. On Agreda’s bilocations, see Clark A. Colahan. The Visions of Sor Maria Agreda: Writing Knowledge
and Power (University of Arizona Press, 1994).

12
 Such power, however, came with perils and a price. The intense piety of cloistered nuns
and beatas potentially could also channel communication with demonic beings. How to know
whether the visions of Francisca were actually heavenly or demonic? Since the fourteenth
century, the Church had developed institutions and procedures that would vouch for these
visions. The “discernment of spirits” established that all religious women would have written
communication with confessors.20 Male priests would then read the women’s confessions of their
visions and would act as gatekeepers. Confessors had the power to initiate investigations into the
holiness of their charges. In fact, the Inquisition was first established as an institution to police
women’s visions. What is essential to remember is that these institutions encouraged women to
communicate with confessors through letter writing.

The ecclesiastical archives of Querétaro, and those of most cities in Spanish America, are
filled with letters of beatas and nuns addressed to their confessors.21 Francisca was one such avid
letter writer. Over the course of her life, she had several confessors to whom she obediently
wrote, almost daily. These letters detailed her visits to the heavenly court, and to Texas, as well
as her duties in setting souls free from penitential dungeons. But her network of correspondents
was not limited to her confessors. Francisca’s letters evidence her skills as a savvy tactician and
cunning politician. She created a vast network of correspondents within and without Querétaro,
including powerful Franciscans in Mexico and Guatemala. As a result, the Inquisition twice
initiated investigations into Francisca’s visions and actions. And twice Francisca managed to
stamp them out by calling on her influential correspondents who, in turn, vouched for her and
persuaded the Inquisitors to investigate no further.

Over the course of several decades, Francisca also cultivated epistolary networks with
wealthy local women. In part, this was because of the following of beatas that were living under
Francisca’s supervision. Her subordinates needed food and clothing and a stream of sacred

20
On the institutions created by the need to control the spiritual visions of women n the middle ages, see Nancy
Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possessions in the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 2006)
21
On the relationship of confessors and nuns, see Jodi Bilinkoff. Related Lives: Confessors and their Female
Penitents, 1450-1750 (Cornell University Press, 2005). The literature on the writings of spiritual women in colonial
Latin America elicited by their confessors is large and growing. The work of Asuncion Lavrin is foundational. See
Lavrin. Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2008). See also Kathleen
Ann Myers. Neither Saints Nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America (Oxford University Press,
2003); Kathryn Joy MacKnight. The Mystic of Tunja: The Writings of Madre Castillo, 1671-1742 (University of
Massachusetts Press, 1997).

13
objects (altars, lamps, images, vestments) to maintain the viability of the religious community.
Confessors and Inquisitors often looked askance at Francisca’s community and would conspire
to keep patrons from giving the pious women alms. But Francisca outmaneuvered her enemies
every time. Moreover, Francisca managed to transform her beaterio into a cloistered nunnery, in
part thanks to her epistolary friendships with wealthy local women who would in turn leave
endowments for the beaterio in their wills.

The literature on beatas and nuns in the Iberian Atlantic has focused on the patriarchal
system that kept beatas and cloistered nuns under the supervision of powerful confessors.22 But
the story of Francisca shows that religious females were privileged members of the militant
church with access to two polities, which males rarely accessed: namely, the celestial court and
the community of peregrinating souls. Pious females controlled the movement of souls in the
afterlife as well as all communication with the triumphant church. They held a monopoly over
the political economy of such vast polities. They enjoyed privileged access to angels, saints,
Mary, and the Trinity. As a result, religious females saw themselves not as passive, Marian-like,
disenfranchised victims of patriarchal authority, but rather as fully enfranchised participants of
the City of God.23 The constitutions of cloistered nunneries explicitly and consistently identified
nuns as Judith and Jael-like warriors, armed citizens, and privileged members of the Republic of
God.24

22
The works cited in the previous footnote all share this perspective. Feminists have studied the rhetorical strategies
of cloistered women in self confessions and means of resisting patriarchy. See for example, Alison Weber. Teresa of
Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton University Press, 1996)
23
I have not found a single account in the Spanish monarchy of a male who moves souls out of purgatory. Males can
give masses and move souls; but is almost a mechanical process and the agency is with God, who is pleased by the
ceremony on somebody’s behalf and acts (after usually hundreds of masses on behalf of a soul). Which is rather
different from the specialized role of beatas and nuns, whose time is devoted entirely to this task without the
intermediation of mass. I have read many accounts of nuns who move a soul rapidly after an afternoon of prayers or
suddenly with a vision. On the issue of visions and males: I have found many males who have visions and
conversations with angels and members of the trinity but their visions do not carry the prophetic weight of that of
beatas and nuns. The communication that females bring from heaven is much more valuable and is often collected in
writing. The prophetic predictions by males, Savoranola-like, usually come from a Joachimite tradition of learned
engagement with scripture (influenced by the Holy Spirit). Their visions come usually from deeper reading of types
and antitypes. Females, on the other hand, tend to act as messengers of messages for others to interpret. But they
seem the only ones capable of doing it and the traffic of communication with heaven is immense.
24
See for example, Regla de N[uestro] P[adre] S[an] Agustín, águila de los doctores, luz de la iglesia. Manual y
espejo espiritual de sus hijas, por la línea recta de nuestro gran Padre Santo Domingo, y herederas leíitimas del
espíritu de ambos santísimos patriarcas, místicos Abraham y Jacob; Job y Moyses; Rechab y Jonadab (Granada;
Imprenta Real, 1677)

14
 Francisca’s travels between the afterlife and the myriad female communities of colonial
Querétaro offer a form of eighteenth-century local globalism that historians ignore at their peril,
one that might be called celestial cosmopolitanism (if viewed through a Catholic prism) or
simply Atlantic cosmopolitanism (if understood as a series of strategies that emphasized cultural
connections in a global frame). But there are other correctives to the narrative of patriarchal
authority we can draw from Francisca’s story as well. Elite female urban literacy in colonial
Spanish America was not the exception but the rule. Religious females established dense
epistolary networks outside the control of their confessors that guaranteed these women both
political and economic independence. Francisca’s ability to bi-locate and migrate to heaven on
demand reveals a radical form of imperial global awareness that places her wholly outside the
provincial town of Querétaro, and into a much wider social, religious, and geopolitical context.

Seen from the perspective of expansive patronage and correspondence networks,

religious female mysticism was imperial and global (and therefore cosmopolitan) as well. Take
for example the case of Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda, one of the most important theologians of
the Baroque Spanish Monarchy, and the model that Francisca had sought to emulate. Like
Francisca, Ágreda was a gifted tactician with a vast epistolary network of patrons and
correspondents. They included not only grandees but the king himself. Agreda became Philip
IV’s and Charles II’s epistolary spiritual advisor; her influence on seventeenth-century Spanish
high politics is just beginning to be understood. Ágreda, for example, single-handedly swayed
Philip IV and Charles II into ending the unregulated traffic of Filipino and Indian slaves in Asia
and the Americas. The abolitionist campaign did not work due to resistance on the ground, but
both kings tried their best to fulfill Ágreda’s pleas. Ágreda’s multivolume biography of Mary,
Mystica Ciudad de Dios ..y vida de la Madre de Dios (“The Mystic City of God… Life of the
mother of God), became one of the most influential texts of the seventeenth century. It is also
one of the most understudied. The Mystic City of God established the central role of Mary in the
creation of the Apostolic church after Pentecost and elevated Mary to an almost co-equal with
the Trinity. This is not the place to elucidate Ágreda’s significance for the politics and theology
of the Virgin Mary. Suffice it to say that Ágreda’s treatise offered up Mary as a celestial
reflection of the earthly monarch, the topmost ruler of all courtly hierarchies and a benign yet

15
earnest procurator of supreme justice.25 For the purposes of this chapter , Ágreda is important
because she was perceived throughout the century as a powerful earthly traveler, one capable of
establishing the Franciscan missions of Texas through bilocation, as well as a bona fide
geographer, author of Tratado de redondez de la Tierra (“Treatise on the Sphericity of the
Earth”). Her geographical treatise, the result of her youthful mystical trips, was a cosmography
that sought to trace the spread of Marian miraculous images across the world, continent by
continent. Ágreda’s cosmography drew on Isidore of Seville, Johannes of Sacrobosco, and Petrus
Apianus to offer a traditional geocentric model of celestial spheres as well as a more modern
Ptolemaic global earth map of interconnected four continents. As one of the most learned
followers of the late fifteenth-century Franciscan, Amadeo of Portugal, Ágreda believed that the
global geography of Marian miracles was a sure sign of the impeding triumph of the militant
church and the advent of a Joachimite third age of the Holy Spirit.26

The stories of Francisca of Querétaro and Maria de Jesus of Ágreda point to a

fundamental feature of the Iberian monarchies that distinguishes them from their northern
European counterparts: the dependency of the learned on the voices of the humble, “weak,” and
allegedly ignorant. The history of prophecy in early modern Iberia is one characterized by the
extraordinary authority popular prophetesses (and the occasional popular male prophet) held
over lay and ecclesiastical rulers. There was great suspicion among elites that popular prophets
could be lying or, worse, be the instruments of demons. Nevertheless, once the prophetess was
determined to be truly speaking for God, her authority would be unparalleled. Prophetesses were

25
For a recent attempt at elucidating the nature of Marian monarchies in medieval Spain, see Amy G. Remensnyder,
La Conquistadora: The Virgin Mary at War and Peace in the Old and New Worlds (Oxford University Press, 2014)
26 The literature on Agreda is large and growing, see for example: Katie MacLean, “María de Ágreda, Spanish
Mysticism and the Work of Spiritual Conquest” in Colonial Latin American Review 17:1 (2008), 29-48; Marilyn
Fedewa, María de Ágreda: Mystical Lady in Blue (University of New Mexico Press, 2009); T. D. Kendrick, Mary of
Agreda: The Life and Legend of a Spanish Nun (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967); Clark Colahan, “Maria
de Jesus de Agreda: The Sweetheart of the Holy Office” in Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World,
edited by Mary E. Giles (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 155-170; Colahan, “Mary of
Ágreda , the Virgin Mary, and Mystical Knowing”, Studia Mystica 3 (1988): 53-65 ; Colehan, The Visions of Sor
Maria Agreda: Writing. Knowledge, and Power (University of Arizona Press, 1994). On her relationship to the
abolitionist 17th-century campaigns in the Spanish borderlands initiated by Agreda, see Andrés Reséndez, The
Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Slavery in the Americas (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). On her
correspondence with Philip IV, see Cartas de la venerable madre sor María de Agreda y del Señor rey don Felipe
IV, 2 v. (Madrid 1885-1886). Her geography remains unpublished: “Tratado del grado de luz y conocimiento de la
ciencia infusa: trata de toda la redondez de la tierra, de los habitadores de ella y algunos secretos que en sí contiene.”
Mss/5522. Biblioteca Nacional,

16
courted by lay and ecclesiastical authorities for insights. Prophetesses’ visions were carefully
transcribed and interpreted by the learned, and their voices were listened to with awe and
respect.27 The dynamic between learned elite and popular prophetess was driven by a shared
culture of what prophecy should look like. The successful popular prophetess was one whose
voice would resemble the parables and visions of the major and minor prophets of the Old
Testament, including Jeremiah, Isaiah, Daniel, Debora, Amos, and Obadiah. The humble and
allegedly illiterate were schooled in the biblical genres and traditions of the learned and would
deliver their visions by deliberately echoing Old Testament and Revelation tropes. The learned,
in turn, would identify those echoes and would seek to make explicit the parallels through
transcription and interpretation, in an endless self-fulfilling hermeneutical cycle.28

The case of Lucrecia de Leon is illuminating in this regard, as a prophetess with global
imperial connections that emerges from below. Lucrecia grew to become a prophetess of great
repute in Madrid in the 1580s, denouncing the impending end of Philip II’s Habsburg regime and
predicting the Armada’s defeat off the coast of England. When she was imprisoned by the
Inquisition in 1590, Lucrecia was a single, twenty-one-year-old woman who was more
concerned with finding a proper suitor than following spiritual pursuits. Yet this daughter of a
modest paralegal at the service of Genovese bankers in Madrid became a powerful and revered
seer. Her dreams created panic among leading courtiers who, fearful of her predictions of foreign
invasions, had shelters built and food and guns gathered to prepare for the aftermath. Among
Lucrecia’s followers was Hernando de Toledo, head of one of Spain’s most prestigious religious
military orders and member of the Council of State who wore scapulars with a cross design that
had appeared in one of Lucrecia’s dreams.29

The young Lucrecia grew up in an imperial capital teeming with popular prophets:
beatas, like Juana Correa, from whom Lucrecia picked up knowledge of mystical visions;

27
See , for example, the transcribed sermons of Mother Juana de la Cruz (1481-1534), El libro del Conorte (1509),
Ronald E. Surtz, ed. (Barcelona, Puvil LIbros, 1982). For translations, see Jessica A. Boon and Ronald E. Surtz, ed.
Mother Juana de la Cruz, 1481–1534: Visionary Sermons (Iter Press and the Arizona Center for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies, 2016)
28
See for example, the interpretative scheme added by Cardinal Cisneros to the visions of sor Angela de Fulgino in
Libro de la bienaventurada Santa Angela de Fulgino (Toledo, 1510)
29
This paragraph and the next two are based on Richard Kagan, Lucrecia’s Dreams. Politics and Prophecy in
Sixteenth-Century Spain (University of California Press, 1990).

17
soldiers of fortune and veterans of the European wars, like Martin de Piedrola from whom
Lucrecia acquired followers (more on him later);30 the homeless and mentally ill, like Juan de
Dios, reputed “royal prophet’ and second John the Baptist, from whom Lucrecia learned about
the visions of the Toledan prophetess Francisca de los Apostles31; New-World returnees, like
Guillen de Casaos, a family friend and former Governor of Yucatan, from whom Lucrecia
learned Astrology; and willing neighbors, like the drycleaner Martin de Ayala, from whom
Lucrecia absorbed the prophecies of the María de la Visitación (more on her later). Lucrecia was
literate and there is even evidence that she read Latin, as suggested by the correspondence she
exchanged while imprisoned with Diego de Vitores. Vitores was the learned secretary hired in
1587 by the head of the Franciscans in Madrid, Fray Lucas de Allende, to transcribe Lucrecia’s
visions. Soon afterwards he became Lucrecia’s lover and the father of Lucrecia’s out-of-wedlock
child.

That the prominent Allende sought to transcribe Lucrecia’s every utterance is itself
curious. Even more curious is that a member of Toledo’s cathedral chapter Doctor Alonso de
Mendoza was also transfixed with the late adolescent’s dreams; he would peregrinate to Madrid
repeatedly to visit Lucrecia and to serve as her amanuensis. Mendoza belonged to one of Spain’s
most powerful families and was a theologian of distinction. Lucrecia, Vitores, Allende, and
Mendoza established a hermeneutical cycle in which Lucrecia delivered dreams that resembled
the structure of Old Testament and Revelation prophecies. The transcribers would then make
those resemblances explicit through learned theological interpretation, in a self-fulling
hermeneutical cycle that helped to consolidate and enhance her authority. Lucrecia would
implicitly draw on the prophecies of Daniel, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Esdras while Allende and
Mendoza would marvel at the similitudes and would grow ever more confident on the authority
of Lucrecia’s visions.32

The career of Lucrecia resembles that of her contemporary in Madrid, Martin de Piedrola,
a Navarran veteran of the Flemish and Italian wars. Piedrola’s visions cast Philip II as a tyrant.
The aristocratic courtly circle that supported Piedrola also supported Lucrecia. Learned

30
On martin de Piedrola, see
31
On Francisca, see Francisca de los Apostles, The Inquisition of Francisca: A Sixteenth Century Visionary on
Trial, Gillian T. W. Ahlgren. Ed, (University of Chicago Press, 2005)
32
On this cycle, see Kagan, 28-29, 55

18
theologians transcribed and interpreted Piedrola’s prophecies, much like they had done for
Lucrecia. They found the prophecies authoritative and credible, for they resembled those of
Isaiah and Jerome. Piedrola himself would draw attention to his resemblances to Elijah and
Malachi while preaching in the public square. Piedrola’s authority within learned and aristocratic
circles rested on his alleged illiteracy, and yet he had an obvious knowledge of the Bible. It was
assumed he had miraculously memorized every sentence in the Bible. Piedrola’s authority was
such that he became a trusted acolyte (familiar) of the Inquisitor General himself, archbishop of
Toledo and Cardinal Gaspar de Quiroga. The Cortes of Castile established a commission to
evaluate Piedrola’s prophecies and the benefit of appointing Piedrola as “national prophet,” a
new post to be created for him. A reluctant Philip II relented and appointed the General
Inquisitor, the Royal Confessor, and the Royal Almoner to gather the testimony of leading
theological experts so they could pass final judgment. Contradictory evidence collected by the
three prelates forced the Inquisition to take over. Piedrola was arrested. It was the Franciscan
Allende and the canon Mendoza, later interpreters of Lucrecia’s dreams, who spearheaded the
campaign to set Piedrola free. Mendoza would present Piedrola to the Roman curia as modern
Daniel cast by Darius into the lions’ den.33

The Local Trajectories of the Global Body as Text

Another contemporary of Lucrecia and Piedrola reveals yet another surprising aspect of the
hermeneutical cycle that tied the learned to the “illiterate,” namely: the authority of the body as

33
My interpretation of Piedrola is based on Kagan’s, Lucrecias’s Dream, 95-101.

19
prophetic text. 34 Her name was Maria de la Visitación, the nun of Lisbon. If Lucrecia baffled
and tantalized the learned with her dreams, Maria stunned them with her body. Maria’s followers
included not only the Archbishop of Lisbon, Miguel de Noroña, the Franciscan provincial of
Portugal, Fray Antonio de la Cerda, the royal preacher, Fray Gaspar Leiton, and the royal
confessor of the former regent Cardinal Henry, Fray Pedro Samer. The very viceroy of Portugal,
Cardinal Prince Albert of Austria also piously followed her. It was Cardinal Prince Albert
himself who, in 1584, opened a brief before Pope Gregory XIII. His mission was to document
the case of Maria, the prioress of the Dominican Convent of the Annunciation, as the most
extraordinary ever saint of the church. This woman had been loved by Christ so much that her
body and Christ’s had become one. 35 After visiting the nun in the convent, accompanied by the
Inquisitor General, Albert was left overwhelmed by piety. He witnessed a nun who, like St
Francis, shared with Christ the wounds of the cross. Unlike St Francis’s stigmata, however,
Maria’s wounds on her hands and feet sprouted the nails of the cross. She would experience
increasing pain on her wounds beginning on Wednesday (the day Christ’s passion actually
began) until Friday noon, when Christ died at the cross. Every Friday at noon, she would shed 5
drops from the wound below her heart. Small pieces of cloth would be pressed over the bleeding
wound. Perfect red crosses would surface upon the cloth’s face. Dozens of these “engravings”
were treated as relics and circulated in Christendom, from Rome to Venice, from Goa to Japan.36
These relics cured the ill, converted Muslim galley slaves, and saved several ships from

34
All the events identified here are painstakingly described in Luis de Granada’s “Historia de Maria de la
Visitación” (ca. 1586), that was never published. I consulted the edition Luis de Granada. Historia de sor María de
la Visitación y Sermón de las caídas públicas. Bernardo Velado Graña, ed.(Barcelona : J. Flors, 1962). Granada
summarizes all literature available until 1586, including the letters of the Franciscan Provincial de la Cerda to the
Pope and to Franciscan Procurator in Rome, the letter of Cardinal Price Albert to the Pope, and Granada’s own letter
to the archbishop and viceroy of Valencia and patriarch of Antioch Juan de Ribera. These letters were published in
Etienne de Lusignan. ed. Les grands miracles et les tressainctes playes advenuz à la R. Mere prieure aujourd'huy
1586. du monastere de l'Annonciade, en la ville de Lisbone, au royaume de Portugal, de l'ordre des Freres
prescheurs (París: Jean Bessaut, 1586). Cipriano de Valera offered in 1599 also a critical, satirical synthesis of these
letters and of E. Lusingnan’s treatise in Enxambre de Los Falsos Milagros Y Ilusiones Del Demonio, Con Que
Maria de la Visitacion Engaño a Muy Muchos, Y de Como Fue Descubierta Y Condenada (1588), which was
publshed in his Dos Tratados el Primero es el del Papa y su autoridad. El segundo es el de la missa (Londres;
Ricardo del Campo, 1599), pp. 554-594.
35
Granada, Historia, libro 1, capitulo 1 (preámbulo para relación que se sigue), capitulo 2 (de los milagros que se
coligen); libro 3, capítulo 1. par. 1 and capítulo 2 (los clavos); libro 4, capitulo 1 (como preámbulo).
36
Granada, Historia, libro 3, capitulo 4 (las cinco gotas)

20
shipwrecks particularly off the Barbary Coast.37 Maria de la Visitación’s bodily transformation
took years to unfold. It begun in 1575 with the miraculous appearance of the scars of Christ’s
crown of thorns around Maria’s head. In 1578 Christ miraculously transferred a copy of his lance
wound onto her chest. In 1584 she turned 33, the age of Christ, and Christ appeared to carve out
stigmata into her hands and feet, nails included. In 1585, she had a vision of Christ pouring a pint
of his blood over her body. The blood miraculously became a crimson tunic identical to the one
Pontius Pilot gave the condemned Christ. Maria wore the tunic ever since but it was invisible to
everyone except those who would join her into rapture. The archbishop of Lisbon Noroña, the
Franciscan Provincial Cerda, and her confessor, Fray Pedro Romero, testified to the Inquisition
about their shared vision of her invisible robe when the three joined her in prayer.38 A steady
stream of theologians would trek from all over Castile and Andalucía to see her in Lisbon.39 The
correspondence between Lisbon and Rome thickened. Publications of these letters began to
appear in Latin, Italian, and French.

The Dominican Luis de Granada was the learned man who closely followed the changes
and visions of Maria de la Visitación. Maria had her own confessor, Fray Pedro Romero, with
whom she corresponded. Romero, however, considered he did not have the knowledge to make
sense of the unfolding dramatic bodily transformations. Since the great theologian Granada had
moved to Lisbon in 1555, Romero asked Granada to help. In his unpublished “Historia of Maria
de la Visitation,” Granada explained how the communication between the three of them
happened. Maria would originally put her visions in writing, but because holding a pen in her
lacerated hand was so painful, Romero was forced to act as her amanuensis. Granada would
interpret the case through Maria’s own writing, Romero’s transcriptions, and direct
conversations with the nun.40 Yet Granada was not really interested in the content of her visions.
Granada sought to make explicit the mystery of salvation through Maria’s prophetic body as a
text, not her writings.

37
Granda, Historia, libro 4, passim. On miracles preventing shipwrecks, see, for example, capitulo 2 (de una
milagro notable en brava tormenta);
38
Granada, Histoira, libro 3, capitulo 3 (vestidura colorada)
39
Granada, Historia, libro 3, capitulo 2, preamble (luz del cielo).
40
Granada, historia, Prólogo (en el que se declara el argumento)

21
 Maria’s stage was global, the whole of ancient Christendom. As Granada struggled to
make sense of what transpired in the Dominican nunnery of the Anunciación, it became clear
that Maria’s visions consisted of long conversations not only with Christ himself, but also with
the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist, St Thomas Aquinas, St Augustine, St Thomas, Mary
Magdalene, and hundreds of other saints. Sometimes Maria would spend entire days in catatonic
rapture, engaged in long dialogues with diverse members of the heavenly court. Granada did not
have much curiosity for the content of these exchanges. He focused his attention on the visions
that allowed Maria’s body to gradually become one with Christ’s: the moments in which Maria
would receive from Christ the crown of thorns, the stigmata, and the robe. Key to the
transformation was Maria’s almost daily consumption of the Eucharist. In the rare occasions in
which the Corpus Christi was denied to her, the host would still miraculously move in the air
from sealed monstrances and tabernacles directly into her mouth. Granada would carefully
describe the loving relations between an all-powerful deity, Christ, and his lowly creature, Maria,
to elucidate the nature of imperial mercy as well as the role of the human body in sin and
salvation. Christ modeled what a great monarch needed to do by making time to hear the cries of
the weak, and dispensing his mercy and grace, even if the weak in question were quasi-
adolescent females. To gain access to Christ, on the other hand, Maria had to overcome all her
bodily desires as well as the innate sinfulness of her soul. As she cleansed herself through
rigorous fasting and bodily punishments, both her soul and body would change. By tracing the
gradual transformation of Maria’s body, Granada illuminated the mysteries of both the Fall and
of Salvation. According to Granada, Christ had come not only to save the soul of the living and
the dead from the original sin and the imprisonment in hell but also the body of humans from
eternal death. Resurrection was a promise of future bodily life. Maria’s process of cleansing was
a reminder that not only her soul but also her body had crossed a threshold. Her sanctified body
was now capable of curing the degenerated and corrupted bodies of commoners. Granada would
describe the many miracles of her body: her laying of hands would cure the ill, her bleeding
patches would convert the Muslim, even the waste waters of her washings would circulate as
relics to prevent shipwrecks during storms.

22
 Maria’s body was a text that spoke to the trajectory of global history from the Old to the
New Testament. Granada believed that Maria’s body was a prophetic text that spoke to
momentous events. It was God’s voice of support in the Church’s struggle against the ‘reformed’
heretics. According to Granada, God sent prophets in times of great crisis. Maria was the modern
equivalent of David, Micah and Josiah. For Granada the import of Maria lay in her body more
than in her visions. The miracle of her transformation was the equivalent of the miracles God
performed as he communicated through Moses, Josue, Isaiah, Elijah, Eliseo, Daniel, and Tobias
(as well as the Apostles, San Francisco, St Dominick, Vincent Ferrer, and Catharina of Sienna in
the Age of Grace).41 The Portuguese Provincial of the Franciscans, De la Cerda, would insist in
his correspondence with the Roman Curia that God spoke to Maria in the same way that He once
did to Jeremiah and Moses.42 According to Granada, God had used Maria de la Visitación as a
text to intervene publicly in the momentous confessional dispute. First, God treated Maria as his
canvass by imprinting the stigmata on her body. God then deployed Maria’s cloth relics,
themselves engraved canvasses, to spread knowledge of Christ’s sacrifice and the mysteries of
redemption and salvation. Finally, God prompted the exchange of letters between Prince Albert
and the Pope, as well as the public investigations of the Inquisition, to spread His word even
further. According to Granada, God knew the power of print and of the public sphere in
transforming a private revelation into a significant event in Christendom.43

And yet Maria’s politics were global but they were also local. She refused to follow
God’s script as scribed by Granada, as she considered she had more than her body to offer to
Portugal. Sometime after all the attention brought on her by the visits of Cardinal Prince Albert,
Maria began to have prophetic visions unrelated to the transformation of her sanctified body.
Maria began to denounce Philip II’s tyranny. She joined others in Portugal in support of the
cause of Philip’s rival, Dom Antonio, Prior of Crato, who, despite having lost battles in Lisbon
and Tenerife, and despite his exile to Paris and London, remained a threat to Hapsburg rule in
Portugal.44 Philip II ordered the awestruck cardinal Prince Albert to immediately initiate an

41
Granada, Historia, libro 1. Ch.1
42
Antonio de la Cerda to Hernando de Castro, in Cipriano de Valera, Enxambre de falsos Milagros, 559-60.
(Jeremiah 33: 3: Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest
no)
43
Granada, Historia, libro 3, capitulo 4 (de la causa de la publicación de las llagas de esta virgen).
44
On the Prior of Crato and other possible replacements for King Sebastian after his disappearance in the ill-fated
crusading campaign to Morocco in 1578, see Ruth MacKay, The Baker Who Pretended to be King of Portugal

23
investigation. A junta of great theologians and inquisitors went to the nunnery to give Maria a
closer look. With the help of the other nuns, who until then had only sung her praises, the
commission found that Maria’s stigmata could be washed out through robust scrubbing. She was
found a fraud and her prophetic visions on Philip II a trickery. The guilty Maria was demoted
and sent to another nearby convent to be cloistered and ritually humiliated at every communal
meal for the rest of her life.45

Studying the relationship between the learned, Granada, and the popular prophet, Maria
de la Visitacion, is important because it exposes alternative early-modern discourses on literacy
and print culture. The story of Maria de la Visitacion sheds light on a peculiar early modern
understanding of the public sphere. God was deemed a publicist who through printed
hagiographies and the body of saints as texts reached out to the larger communities of the pious.
The life of another popular prophet in Mexico, Gregorio Lopez, a contemporary of Lucrecia,
Piedrola, and Maria de la Visitacion, exposes yet another case of alternative early-modern
Catholic conceptions of literacy and the local trajectories of the global.

Lopez lived for some 33 years as a hermit in the Mexican wilderness with very limited
access to books and no schooling or knowledge of Latin. He nevertheless managed to produce an
extraordinary book of commentaries on the Apocalypse, a text of materia medica, and a lost
treatise on chronology and universal history, along with a mappamundi and a globe.

(University of Chicago Press, 2012). On the negotiated arrangement to the succession between Philip II and the
Portuguese nobility, see Fernando Bouza, Felipe II y el Portugal “dos povos”. Imagenes de esperanza y revuelta
(Universidad de Valladolid, 2001); Pedro Cardim, Portugal unido y separado : Felipe II, la unión de territorios y el
debate sobre condición política del reino de Portugal (Universidad de Valladolid 2014).
45
The trial was uncharacteristically brief; see “Autos del proceso y sentencia contra la monja María de la Visitación,
priora del Convento de la Anunciada de Lisboa, 1588,” MS 8012. Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid.

24
1727 portrait of Lopez that includes a globe along with his medical treatise and the commentary
of the Apocalypse among the works he produced. Previous images focus on his materia medica,
interpretation of Revelation, and his Chronology, to the exclusion of his cosmographic and
astrological work. Vida de siervo de Dios Gregorio Lopez escrita por el padre Francisco Losa, a
la que se añaden los Escritos del Apocalipsis y el Tesoro de la Medicina, Juan de Artizia, ed.
(Madrid, 1727).

This strange hermit developed a huge following among the leading theologians of New Spain.
The most learned Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits of the land would peregrinate to Lopez’s
hermitages to contemplate his frail body and parsimonious speech while peppering Lopez with
questions on biblical commentary, theology, Church history, astrology, mathematics, and
chronology.46 This “idiot,” given Lopez’s lack of learning and Latin, became a living saint

46
I have relied mostly on Francisco de Losa, La Vida que hizo el siervo de Dios Gregorio Lopez en algunos lugares
de Nueva España y principalmente en la villa e Santa Fe (Mexico, 1613). The edition of the life of Lopez published
in Puebla 1642 under the auspices of Archbishop Palafox by the cleric Luis Muñoz is heavily edited and includes
information drawn from briefs of witnesses gathered in 1621 and 1622 by the archbishop of Mexico Juan Perez de la
Serna. When the information complements and adds to that of Losa in 1613, I use the 1642 edition. The Vida y
muertes misteriosas del gran siervo de Dios Gregorio Lopez, natural de Madrid by the general chronicler of the
Mercederians Alonso Remon came out in Madrid in 1630 and is for all practical purposes a copy of Losa’s 1613
hagiography. Remon, however, includes towards the end an account by the Franciscan Manuel Reynoso, one of the
witnesses debriefed by Serna. On the books and maps Lopez produced, see Vida (Mexico, 1613) chs. 16-17 (64v-
71v)

25
whose every utterance was parsed out for meaning.47 After his fame in the northern Chichimec
frontier grew, the archbishop of Mexico Pedro Moya de Contreras assigned Father Francisco
Losa, member of the cathedral chapter, to be Lopez’s caregiver and secretary. Losa would follow
Lopez around for the next twenty years. Losa quit his job in the capital to live in the nearby town
of Santa Fe with Lopez the last seven years of the hermit’s life, ushering learned visitors into
Lopez’s quarters and recording Lopez’ acts. When the hermit died in 1596 Lopez’s few
possessions were dispersed as relics. In 1616 the Archbishop of Mexico, Juan Perez de la Serna,
had Lopez’s corpse removed from Santa Fe to the Discalced Carmelite convent Serna had just
created. As Lopez’s body was placed in a box in the convent’s altar, Serna would give two of
Lopez’s bones as gifts to the Viceroy Marques de Salinas.48 The hermit’s body, however, kept on
moving. In 1636, Archbishop Francisco Manso y Zuñiga relocated the mutilated bones into
Mexico’s cathedral, not before first taking Lopez’s skull. The saint’s head was to travel as relic
with Manso y Zuñiga to the cathedral of Burgos, the latter’s new see.49

As the hermit acquired the prestige of saint among the pious, his life as an “idiot” became an
intense focus of meditation for the learned. In 1613 Losa published in Mexico a hagiography of
the supernatural learning abilities of the hermit that was reprinted several times over the course
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and translated into Portuguese and French.50 The
hagiography moved Philip III in 1620 to order the archbishop of Mexico Serna to initiate a
dossier on Lopez to lobby for the hermit’s canonization in Rome. Philip III also ordered Serna to
find all of Lopez’s writings. By 1622 Serna had debriefed dozens of witnesses, including the
current bishops of Tlaxcala, Yucatan, Michoacán, and Cebu (Philippines) who had at some point
met the hermit.51 The dossier established the ways copies of Lopez’s commentaries on the

47
Jose Arce Diaz refers to Lopez as “idiot” in his 1648 treatise on biblical hermeneutics, Opus Studioso Sacrum
Bibliorum, originally published in Mexico 1648. I have used the 1750 Rome reprint of Arce Diaz’s Opus edited by
the Dominican Bernardino Membrive, consultor for the Sacred Congregation of Rites and leading advocate for the
canonization of Lopez in Rome. See Opus, “Quaestio XII, An illiterati et idiotae possint utiliter et fructuose studio
Bibliorum applicari? Et an Gregorius noster possit idiota nominari?” pp. 46-53.
48
See Vida (Puebla, 1642) 112 v-r.
49
Vida (Puebla, 1642), 113r.
50
A Spanish reprint of Losa’s 1613 work came out in Lisbon in 1615 under the auspices of the archbishop of Lisbon
Dom Miguel de Castro. La Vie de Gregorio Lopez dans la Nouvelle Espagne, translated by a Jesuit into French
came out in Paris in 1644
51
For the accounts of the four bishops, see Vida (Puebla, 1642),101 r-107r.

26
Apocalypse had since the 1580s moved all over the empire, from Philippines to Madrid.52
Lopez’s practical treatise on how to cure some 200 different illnesses ranging from hemorrhoids
to engorged breasts using herbs, plants, oils, waters, minerals, and soils, Tesoros de Medicina,
had ultimately wound up in the Royal Convent of the Incarnation in Madrid as the Viceroy
Salinas’s present to Queen Margaret of Austria, who left the manuscript to the convent when she
had the convent built.53 In 1636, Margaret’s son, King Philip IV, would personally write to pope
Urban VIII, the Spanish ambassador in Rome, Marquis de Castelrodrigo, and the powerful
cardinal Barberini, nephew of Urban, soliciting Lopez’s canonization and presenting the dossier
the archbishop Serna had gathered the previous decade.54 Nothing was to come of this initiative,
but the cause of the saint was not abandoned. In 1642 a new hagiography appeared in Puebla that
included several accounts by the learned bishops who had befriended the saint. The updated
hagiography also announced that the powerful, learned Archbishop and Viceroy of Mexico, Juan
de Palafox y Mendoza, had thrown his weight behind the canonization cause.55 As part of the
lobbying effort in Rome the top Mexican theologian at the University of Mexico Joseph Arce
Diaz published in 1648 a treatise on biblical hermeneutics, Opus Studioso Sacrum Bibliorum,
addressed to pope Innocent X. Arce Diaz used the life and writings of Lopez to articulate an
epistemology on the proper role of females and non-elite males (including children) in Biblical
interpretation. Arce Diaz offered a sustained theological argument for the role of popular
prophets like Lopez in deepening the understanding of scripture.56 Arce Diaz’s argument on the
reliability and quality of female scriptural learning was to be used by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz a
few years later to justify her own dabbling in theology.57

52
On the circulation of copies of Lopez’s Apocalypse in the Americas, Spain, and the Philippines, see Vida (Puebla,
1642), 114v-116r.
53
Vida (Puebla, 1642), 116r. Tesoro de Medicinas para diversas enfermedades dispuesto por Gregorio Lopez was
first printed in Mexico in 1672 under the auspices of the President of the Real Audiencia and Governor of Santo
Domingo, Francisco de Montemaior de Cuenca, one of the larger donors in the ongoing canonization cause. The
1672 and 1674 editions of Tesoro appeared with the combined notes of two different Mexican medical practitioners,
Mathias de Salzedo Mariaca and Joseph Diaz Brizuela. Both doctors confirmed the extraordinary medical
knowledge accrued by the hermit in his many years as an intern in the hospital of Oaxtepec of the Order de la
Caridad. Both the hospital and the order was founded by Bernardino Alvarez who by the mid-sixteenth-century
secured from pope Gregorio XIII a brief sanctioning the formal recognition of the new Mexican religious order.
54
For copies of these letters, see Vida (Puebla, 1642), 116v-118r.
55
See footnote 41.
56
See footnote 42.
57
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, “Respuesta de la poetisa a la muy ilustre Sor Philotea de la Cruz,” in Fama y Obras
Postumas Tomo Terecero (Lisboa, 1701), 41-52 , in which Sor Juana deploys Arce Diaz to make identical
arguments on the feasibility and need of theological learning among women. Strikingly, there is no study available

27
The case of Lopez sheds light on an early-modern path to sanctity that confounds our
stereotypes. Lopez was the antithesis of the Counter Reformation saint. He rarely went to mass.
He spent long periods of his life restoring his health in hospitals where he kept to himself,
without consoling or attending the poor and the sick.58 Lopez explicitly and vocally denied ever
having exercised active punishment on his body. He also insisted he had never had visions or
mystical raptures. He did not access the divine via a Neoplatonic regimented ascent of the soul
through heavenly cosmic steps of ever greater cleansing and sporadic ecstasies. Lopez was in the
company of the divine when he engaged in mundane tasks, such as the manual labor he carried
out to secure an income, given that Lopez did not accept alms. God was with him when Lopez
observed and studied nature. Even when he socialized in conversation with others, God was at
his side.59 All his hagiographers, Francisco Losa (Mexico 1613), the Mercedarian Alonso
Remon (Madrid 1630), the cleric Luis Muñoz (Puebla 1643) and the theologian Joseph Arce
Diaz (Mexico 1648) dwelled on Lopez’s unusual path to sanctity as a form of permanent
communication with God. The Augustinian theologian Francisco de Salazar, Bishop of Yucatan,
who had often visited Lopez while the hermit lived in Satan Fe, maintained in his deposition to
Serna that Lopez was a prophet not unlike both Elijah and Eliseo, constantly in conversation with
the divine.60 Lopez’s great learning on biblical scholarship and natural science was supernatural,
“infused science,” that came to the hermit via the constant presence of the Holy Spirt.
Hagiographers liked to recount witnesses who once saw the saint digging ditches in his orchard
while being helped by angels, like Elijah.61

in Spanish or English on Arce Diaz’s Opus and the impact it might have had in biblical hermeneutics in
Christendom. Sor Juana is studied in isolation as if she would have defied a misogynist culture. In fact she was
lionized and exalted as the dozens of pages by leading Spanish and Mexican theologians introducing the 1701
volume of her collected works attest.
58
See footnote 48.
59
Losa structured Lopez saintly life deliberately as an alternative to that of Teresa de Jesus and other mystics who
sought communication with the divine in visions through the disciplining of the body in a systematic ascent through
stages of cleansing and rapture. See Vida (Mexico, 1613), chs 26-29 (113r-131v); see also 13 r (in which Lopez
engages in manual labor and does not receive alms).
60
Vida (Puebla, 1642), 103 r.
61
Vida (Mexico, 1613), 8r.

28
Witnesses’ account of the communication of Lopez with angels at the hermit’s orchard in the
Chichimec frontier. In 1750 Roman edition of Diaz Arce’s Opus de Studioso Sacrum Bibliorum
(Mexico 1648) by Bernardino Membrive, member consultor for the Sacred Congregation of
Rites and leading advocate for the canonization of Lopez in Rome.

The hagiographer Luis Muñoz succinctly captured the nature of Lopez’s communication with the
divine as a permanent imprint on the heart. Muñoz chose Lopez as a model for his patron the
archbishop Palafox to imitate: the image of a heart with a crucified Christ carved in it, the
permanence of the divine inside the saint.

29
Frontispiece, Francisco Losa, Vida que el siervo de Dios Gregorio Lopez hizo en algunos
lugares de Nueva España, principalmente en el pueblo de Santa Fe, Luis Muñoz ed. (Mexico,
1642)
The life and works of Gregorio Lopez confound all the paradigms scholars use to interpret
literacy, print culture, cosmopolitanism, and the public sphere. Lopez was a layman with no
access to libraries, Latin, or any institution of learning. He had spent most of his adult life in the
backwaters of the imperial frontier. He nevertheless became one of the most accomplished
biblical scholars, cosmographers, and physicians of colonial Mexico. Lopez never traveled
mystically over the surface of the earth, like Sor Maria Agreda once did. Yet he was known for
his command of global cosmographies and was capable of producing a mappa mundi and a
globe, via the supernatural force of the Holy Spirit acting through angels. God spoke through this
living “idiot” saint not by means of visions, revelation, and prophecy but through the plain
languages of mathematics, astrology, medicine, and ecclesiastical scholarship. And it all made
sense in the eyes of his contemporaries all over Christendom, from Mexico to Madrid to Rome.
The history of the making of saints like Maria de la Concepcion and Gregorio Lopez challenge
historians to rethink what the learned in the early modern period understood literacy and print
culture to be, and to re-consider the paths through which information circulated to create
communities throughout the world.

30
Andean “Cosmopilitans”62

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala has come to stand in for indigenous resistance against Spanish
colonialism.63 In the first two decades of the 17th century Guaman Poma wrote some twelve
hundred folio pages to Philip III, describing the plight of the indigenous peoples of Peru and
demanding justice from the king. Guaman Poma also included hundreds of images in his
“memorial,” titled Nueva coronica y buen gobierno (new chronicle and good government).
Nueva coronica is indeed extraordinary and it has allowed ethno-historians to reconstruct the
many worlds of Andean colonial peoples. But Guaman Poma is by no means an exceptional
figure. He was a typical upwardly mobile urban native whose literacy afforded him access to the
labyrinthine judicial system of the Spanish Monarchy. His training in all aspects of the judicial
system (from visitas, to land surveys, to litigation) and his privileged role as a clerk and
translator bolstered his social aspirations: he came to imagine himself as a native lord.64 In a
judicial dispute over lands between two indigenous communities, Guaman Poma represented one
of the two litigious communities and he took the opportunity to impersonate as their native lord.
He was caught, punished, and exiled and he moved on to a different city where he continued to
use his considerable judicial skills on behalf of new native plaintiffs. His unbounded desire to
gain noble status, however, did not go away. In his Nueva coronica, Guaman Poma managed to
present his father as one of the local lords that had helped Spaniards negotiate with the Inca.

We now know that there were hundreds of Guaman Pomas in the Spanish Atlantic:
upwardly mobile urban natives whose literacy and mastery of the legalese and bureaucratic
procedures of appellate courts and high courts transformed them into powerful yet ubiquitous
brokers in the indigenous world. Rural indigenous communities located far away from appellate

62
This subtitle is based on the recent book by Jose Carlos de la Puente, Andean Cosmopolitans: Seeking Justice and
Reward at the Spanish Royal Court (Texas University Press, 2018).
63
The foundational work is Rolena Adorno. Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru (second
edition University Of Texas Press, 2000)
64
My interpretation of Guaman Poma as a self-made urban legal go-between, is based on the impressive archival
work of Jose Carlos de la Puente, “Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, administrador de bienes de comunidad” Revista
Andina 47 (2008 [2009]): 9-51; “Cuando el ‘punto de vista nativo’ no es el punto de vista de los nativos: Felipe
Guaman Poma y el problema de la apropiación de tierra en el Peru colonial.” Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Études
Andines / 2008, 37 (1): 123-149; De la Puente with Victor Soller, “La huella del intérprete: Felipe Guaman Poma de
Ayala y la primera composición general de tierras en el virreinato del Perú.” Histórica 30 (2006) 2: 7-39

31
and high courts came to rely on these lowly clerks as proxy legal counsel.65 But these brokers
existed only because the legal system in the Spanish Monarchy worked as a substitute for
politics.66

As natives came to be defined legally as miserables, with the same status as orphans and
widows, indigenous communities gained entitlement to speedy access to justice as well as direct,
unmediated communication to the king for redress.67 It should surprise no one that the natives
quickly took full advantage of this status, transforming every aspect of power struggles and
politics into meandering litigation through local, appellate, and high courts, all the way to the
king. Communities invested inordinate amounts of resources into the judicial process, litigating
cases in dusty townships, provincial capitals, vice regal capitals, and even Madrid. Since politics
was litigation, communities desperately sought to maintain legal representation in cities. There
were many ways of securing legal representation in distant locales: lords traveled periodically to
urban centers; communities housed permanent delegates in cities; and communities used lowly,
local urban clerks like Guaman Poma as proxy council.

This complex system of houses, lobbyists (procuradores), and clerks led to the
development of one of the least-visible dimensions of the Spanish imperial world: vast pan-
regional, continental, and transatlantic indigenous networks sustained by epistolary networks.68
Historians and anthropologists have overwhelmingly treated us to accounts of stubbornly
resistant corporate indigenous communities. We associate natives in colonial Spanish America
with resilient communal ethnogenesis: natives survived by recreating collective identity around
the cult of saints and religious images, always looking inward as they wove tightly knit
communities and pueblos. This kind of inward-looking parochial gaze, as described by ethno-
historians, created a narrative that rendered unintelligible any effort by pueblos to reach out to

65
On these brokers, see Alcira Dueñas. Indians and Mestizos in the Lettered City Reshaping Justice, Social
Hierarchy, and Political Cuture in Colonial Peru (University of Colorado Press, 2010); Yanna Yannakakis. The Art
of Being In-between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca. (Duke University
Press, 2008)
66
On the culture of litigation as politics, see Brain Owensby. Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico
(Stanford University Press, 2008). See also Steve Stern. Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish
Conquest: Huamanga to 1640 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1982)
67
Charles R. Cutter, The Protector de Indios in Colonial New Mexico, 1659-1821 (University of New Mexico Press.
1986)
68
On indigenous procuradores and transatlantic networks, see Jose Carlos de la Puente, “Into the Heart of the
Empire. Indian Journeys to the Habsburg Royal Court (PhD dissertation, Texas Christian University, 2010)

32
other pueblos to create pan-regional forms of resistance and identity. We need to revise this
narrative.

Literacy spread in the Andes like wildfire. It was already a fixture of Andean systems of
labor based on redistribution and reciprocity. For centuries, if not millennia, communities of
Andean agro-pastoralists accessed Andean glaziers to build canals and irrigate the land.
Collective labor was the key to survival to maintain this hydraulic infrastructure, and it was
organized around the mobilization of patrilineal corporate groups, the ayllu. To this day each
ayllu keeps painstaking records of who shows up for service. To count as evidence, individual
acts need to be recorded and inscribed. Communal balance is too precious to be left to the
vagaries of gossip or oral recollection. Khipus were the original means through which these
records of labor were kept. With the arrival of alphabetical writings, communities immediately
turned to the new script and began to keep voluminous paper records which have remained
invisible to the state as well as ethnographers and historians. As alphabetical writing spread with
the arrival of the Spaniards, so too did litigation. Archival evidence suggests that, precisely in
order maintain the corporate integrity of pueblos, natives developed extraordinarily intricate
networks linking distant pueblos to cities with appellate courts though lobbyists and traveling
caciques.69

Cities were spaces where caciques and procuradores of myriad communities met, often
living under the same roof. Literate lowly indigenous clerks like Guaman Poma helped weave
together these complex networks. We know that by the early eighteenth century, Lima housed
not only caciques from distant pueblos as far north as Cajamarca and as far south as Arequipa,
but also procuradores from Tlaxcala, Mexico.70 In the mid eighteenth century, secular Tlaxcalan
priests incorporated images of the seventeenth-century saintly Trujillo Indian, Nicolas Aillon, as
well as images of the pious Mohawk, Catherina Tekawita, into baptisteries, naves, and sacristies
of various parishes of their Holy Republic.71

69 In the Andes, this tradition seemed to have survived into the national period; see for example Laura Gotkowitz.
A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia, 1880–1952 (Duke University
Press, 2008).
70
See for exemple, Vicente Mora Chimbo, Capac, Cazique Principal de varios pueblos en la jurisdicción de la
ciudad de Trujiilo, Procurador General de sus Naturales, y nuevamente Diputado General por los Caziques mas
principales de sus Provincias. Al Rey (Madrid 1727)
71 Jaime Cuadriello. Las glorias de la república de Tlaxcala: o la conciencia como imagen sublime (UNAM, 2004)

33
 These networks were possible because litigation did not know parochial or regional
boundaries. Hundreds of indigenous caciques and procuradores traveled to Madrid to talk
directly with the king. In fact, the king had the responsibility of paying for the upkeep and travel
expenses of these visitors. Native caciques had the right to address the king personally and hand
him memorials, that is, Guaman-Poma-like letters seeking justice and redress. Indigenous
lobbyists would often spend years if not decades at the court in Madrid, where they had the
opportunity to meet other indigenous procuradores. Indigenous literacy helped create, one could
argue, a virtual trans-oceanic, Pan-American indigenous republic.72

Conclusion

Historians have had a difficult time correlating the black, female, popular, and indigenous
lettered cities of the early-modern Iberian monarchies (as well as the variety of forms of
cosmopolitanism these republics spawned) as forms of local globalism that could be compared to
a Parisian salon or a Prussian university. The lettered cities and cosmopolitanisms I have
explored in this essay are precisely the foils against which the Enlightenment articulated the
categories of cosmopolitanism and the Republic of Letters. The individuals paraded in these
pages (Molina, Aponte, Piedrola, Francisca de los Angeles, Maria de Agreda, Lucrecia, Maria de
la Visitacion, Gregorio Lopez, and Guaman Poma) inhabited mental worlds that were very
different from those inhabited by, say, Voltaire, Kant, and Jefferson. The Enlightenment
rendered the Franciscans and Marias and the Molinas and Apontes, of the Iberian Monarchies
invisible precisely because the Enlightenment created very narrow definitions for both
cosmopolitanism and the public sphere. Most of the individuals studied here have long been
considered illiterate and parochially provincial, stifled by their limiting religious world views. It
was precisely to denounce these worlds that the category of the cosmopolitan emerged in the late

72
On the tradition of indigenous literacies in the public sphere, see Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins eds.,
Beyond The Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes (Duke University Press, 2012); Frank Salomon
and Mercedes Niño-Murcia, The Lettered Mountain: A Peruvian Village’s Way with Writing (Duke University
Press, 2011)

34
eighteenth century. I have sought to explore ways of understanding early modern alternative
epistemologies of writing and credibility, including writing through images and bodies, vary
alien to the secular paradigms of the Enlightenment. We still live in a world that wrestles daily
with its epistemological legacies, legacies that still neatly divide world between illiteracy and
literacy, local and global, popular and elite, rational and superstitious, light and darkness. It is my
hope that after having introduced the views of black, female, casta and Amerindian intellectuals
in the early-modern Iberian monarchies, those legacies of a lettered, enlightened
cosmopolitanism begin to be challenged by alternative genealogies that take as their starting
point the fundamental observation that all cosmopolitanisms – wherever they may be found in
the world – are forms of local globalism.

35