The Edification of Prayer: The Convents of Santa Clara and Santa Catalina in Cusco, Peru (17th c.)

Abstract

This multidisciplinary dissertation analyzes the interrelationship between architecture, sacred art objects, and rituals in the two convents of Santa Clara and Santa Catalina, in Cusco, Peru to examine how each community constructed cloisters to fully partake in the Catholic spiritual economy. Natural disasters, such as the March 31st, 1650 earthquake which completely destroyed both convents, signaled an inherent imbalance in the spiritual economy that had resulted from God’s anger at humans’ immorality and impiety. The antidote to this destruction was prayer. Since black veiled nuns in Cusco dedicated their lives to prayer, their prayers held the capacity to counteract impious conduct and mitigate natural disasters. Thus, this examination of the processes through which the Cusqueñan nuns produced, adorned, and ritually used their cloisters for prayer, will demonstrate how they fully engaged in the Catholic spiritual economy. The two large convents of Santa Clara and Santa Catalina have often been assumed to have survived perfectly intact from their seventeenth-century foundations into the present, with their thick stone walls denoting the timelessness of monastic life therewithin. The Franciscan Convent of Santa Clara in Cusco was founded in 1558, but through successive moves across the city, which served to project its corporate identity as a community of pious nuns of calidad, would not arrive at its final location until 1622. The Dominican convent of Santa Catalina was established by the Padilla family in 1599 in Arequipa and only relocated to Cusco in 1605, due to effects of a volcanic eruption and earthquake. Once each community had grown to become a large-convent in Cusco by mid-century, earthquakes, such as that of 1650, threatened the structure and design of their cloisters. Both convents completely reconstructed their cloisters and church in the aftermath of this earthquake, demonstrating that major changes to monastic space occurred throughout the course of this century. More frequently, in ritual practice, both communities introduced subtle, ephemeral modifications to adapt their cloisters to their specific needs of prayer, which would not have left any physical mark on the architecture, but would have greatly affected a nun’s perception of her cloisters and her relationship to her community and God. All these continual changes highlight the difficulty of formal analysis to capture the complexity of the nuns’ relationship to their cloisters. Therefore, this dissertation, instead, turns to an analysis of archival, written documents and sacred art objects to demonstrate the various processes by which these transformations occurred throughout the seventeenth century. Each of the seven chapters of this dissertation discusses a different type of modification that transpired in the cloisters during the seventeenth century to demonstrate how Santa Clara and Santa Catalina constantly and actively transformed their cloisters to better connect through prayer to God, their fellow sisters, and the local and global Catholic communities.