Indigenous confraternities in the New Kingdom of Granada, 1600-1650

• In Event: Cofradías in Colonial Latin America

Abstract

In the first half of the seventeenth century, the archdiocese of Santafé in the New Kingdom of Granada —the area roughly corresponding to the central highlands of modern-day Colombia— was the setting of an ambitious experiment. An enthusiastic archbishop keen to reform his diocese along Tridentine lines entrusted the Society of Jesus with a handful of parishes, where they introduced a variety of innovations that reflected some of the most current priorities and ideas of global Catholicism. The strategies resulting from these experiments were later copied and extended elsewhere in the archdiocese by successive archbishops, and the lessons learned by the Jesuits later served them in other missionary theatres.
This paper focuses on one such innovation: the introduction of religious confraternities among the indigenous population. It explores how these institutions altered evangelisation in the archdiocese, and the communities within which they were set. These confraternities were seen by Spanish civil and ecclesiastical authorities as vehicles for religious renewal, the introduction of new religious devotions, and the bolstering of social discipline — all priorities in their project of evangelisation. But at the same time, this paper will examine how confraternities also provided new avenues for the indigenous population to negotiate its place in the nascent colonial society of New Granada in a period not only of religious change, but of dramatic social, political, and cultural upheaval.

Author

• Juan F Cobo Betancourt, University of Cambridge