Nuns Reporting the City: Convents, Urban Change, and Women’s Spatial Experiences in Santiago de Chile (1700-1812)
With the Spanish occupation of South America during the 16th century, Catholic organizations arrived from Spain to run a parallel “spiritual colonization.” As early as 1571, female religious groups established in Chile alongside male priests to propagate Catholicism. Nuns—women who took religious vo...
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| Veröffentlicht in: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/abe, |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprache: | Anglais |
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ABE Journal
2026
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| Online Zugang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Zusammenfassung: | With the Spanish occupation of South America during the 16th century, Catholic organizations arrived from Spain to run a parallel “spiritual colonization.” As early as 1571, female religious groups established in Chile alongside male priests to propagate Catholicism. Nuns—women who took religious vows—fulfilled a spiritual and educational purpose in South America similar to the one they held in Europe, but within colonial cities, they also had an added social role. Convents—fort-like structures with accommodation, services, and gardens designed for nuns and those who lived with them—were part of the Spanish colonial project and its Christian mission. The convent served a dual purpose: it provided a space to instruct women in the Catholic way of life, and an enclosure for those who deviated from societal expectations. These buildings and other religious spaces played a central role in colonial society as a shelter or repository for girls, orphans, widows, single women, impoverished women, captives, and detainees of all ethnic backgrounds. In this context, nuns became the first female writers and urban chroniclers of the southern corner of the Spanish empire. This article examines the writings of nuns in Santiago during the 18th and early 19th centuries, combining three publications with religious archival records to explore women’s participation in the architectural culture of colonial cities at a time when most women could not—or were not allowed to—read or write. While these accounts mainly narrate the perspectives of white Spanish or Creole convent inhabitants, they also offer fleeting insights into the racially-mixed social and spatial world of these convents, including references to the poorer and marginalized Indigenous, Mestiza (mixed-race), and African women who were rarely included in the historical record. |
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