Standing on Shaky Ground: Claiming Ecclesiastical Immunity in Seventeenth-Century Lima: 1600-1699

• In Event: Blackness and Identity in the Early Modern Andean-Atlantic

Abstract

This paper examines cases of ecclesiastical immunity in which secular officials forcibly removed enslaved prisoners from Lima’s vast network of religious institutions for criminal prosecution. The cases give us a fine-grained picture of the medieval ecclesiastical practice of granting sanctuary to fugitives fleeing secular punishment in a colonial (New World) context. The investigative records give us a rare glimpse into the lives and criminal networks of the urban poor, the enslaved underclass, and the links forged by newly transplanted African slaves with other kinsmen—invaluable for the social historian of the Atlantic World.

Many of the fugitives were young men recently brought to Lima from the Iberian peninsula, Central and West Africa, and other colonial sites. As historians of Central West Africa remind us, many of the enslaved peoples imported to the Americas in the seventeenth century came from polities that had long been integrated into the religious, dietary, and cultural practices of Iberian Catholicism. Slavery scholars are increasingly turning to global, transatlantic, and diasporic frameworks to analyze cultural and political aspects of the slave experience in Latin America, arguing convincingly that creolization began in Africa. As such, this inquiry moves the ancient and medieval tradition of ecclesiastical immunity for fugitives into a more capacious diasporic frame. It falls within the effort to expand our scholarly gaze and connect European, African, and New World practices around slavery, without losing sight of the internal political and juridical context and the local nuances of slaveholding societies.

Author

• Michelle A McKinley, University of Oregon