Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru Paperback – Illustrated, March 29, 1999

An absolutely fantastic history of the financial history of Cusco. Cusco had eccentrically created its own weapon of financial destruction much like the CDS of 2007.

Extraordinary book.

Very well written!

One of my favorite books in Latin American history. Burns takes us inside Cusco's colonial convents but also shows how they shaped the Andean colonial via credit. The biographies are splendid and the overall argument important and convincing.

Colonial Habits analyzes the roles that convents played in Cuzco, Peru--and by extension, in Latin America in general--from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century. Cuzco got its first convent, Santa Clara, in 1558, within a generation of Spanish conquest, and two more convents, Santa Catalina and Santa Teresa, in the seventeenth century. Burns argues that the convents, though walled off from the hustle and bustle of the city, played important roles in Cuzco's community life: first as environments in which the mestiza daughters of the conquerors could be educated, converted, and assimilated to Spanish colonial society; then as powerful landlords and lenders in mature colonial society; and always as power brokers in Cuzco's "spiritual economy," dispensing both prayers and social capital to the families that patronized them. After independence, Cuzco's convents declined in size and importance as new secular schools and charities took on some of their earlier roles.One of the charming features of this book is that Burns discusses her research process as well as her conclusions: the types of documents she found, the nuns' interpretations of and responses to her research agenda, and the experience of returning daily to the locutario, the grille through which cloistered nuns communicated with the outside world. Burns's descriptions of the locutario, in particular, are wonderfully evocative. Highly recommended.