Memoria del nombre y salvación eterna

State-financed team research is a relatively new development in Latin America, but in Chile it is already bearing fruit. Despite some unevenness in the quality of the essays and minor redundancies in the presentation of its theoretical and methodological foundations, this book is an example of the benefits of setting a group of junior and senior researchers to examine different aspects of a shared historical problem. Here, five researchers from Santiago, under the direction of María Eugenia Horvitz, analyze four hundred years of capellanías de sangre, chantries founded by elites to endow an eternal series of masses offered to the benefit of their own souls and those of past generations of family members. These spiritual investments involved the placement of mortgages, or censos, on real property or other assets, and they fulfilled many purposes. In addition to assuring the ritualized and perpetual memory of a notable lineage, the chantries reinforced alliances with ecclesiastic institutions and protected family wealth: 84 percent of the founders stipulated that a succession of family members serve as the chantry’s chaplains. In addition, members of the family, including laywomen, were named as the patrons of these pious works.The authors of this book rely on a rich assortment of wills, church records, and government documents to show how capellanías were particularly apt and enduring vehicles by which local elites in colonial and republican Chile linked land, lineage, and a “spiritualized memory.” They argue that Chile represents a unique case among Spanish American states in which the capellanías survived the modernization and nation-building processes of the nineteenth century to endure until at least 1935. In her contributions to the volume, María Eugenia Horvitz contends that the extraordinary resilience of the capellanías in Chile is due to the fact that aristocratic families shared the overwhelming need to assure the memory of their lineages based on land, and that this impulse outweighed the economic incentives for the modernization of agriculture and production in the nineteenth century. Thus, as discussed by Bernardo González Mella, the Civil Code of 1855 granted the cash-strapped state the power to redeem capellanías from willing landowners, with the commitment that it assumed the associated obligations in perpetuity. Successive governments avoided suppressing these foundations, and it was only during the Agrarian Reform movement of the mid-twentieth century that rural properties subject to censos were disentailed by the state.Margarita Iglesias writes of the growing role of women as the founders of chantries over the colonial and republican periods and attributes this tendency to the gendered responsibility to preserve social prestige, lineages, and memories. She traces the actions of various generations of elite families to show how women fulfilled the charge to “preserve the networks of concrete and symbolic power through the social representations of the colonial world” (p. 279). In a related note, Ximena Cortez González shows how nuns often established chantries when they professed their vows; the proceeds of these pious works were applied in part to covering their own expenses in the convent. These funds also enabled the female religious houses to extend loans, especially to their members’ relatives, thus acting as mediators between the spiritual and material worlds while also solidifying elite family fortunes.Juan Carlos Luengo Peila analyzes the language contained in the chaplaincy documents to reach the rather vacuous argument that the formulas employed demonstrate how memories were maintained through discursive ritual means. Marcial Sánchez Gaete provides a case study of the uses of the chantry by the Toro Mazote family to consolidate and preserve the social and economic fortunes of successive generations.This work is particularly useful for those interested in the cultural history of religion in the colonial world, and to a lesser extent to those examining family networks and credit systems. The evidence provided in this book demonstrates clearly that, as compared to conditions in Peru and Mexico as analyzed by researchers in these colonial centers of lay wealth and clerical power, in Chile women were unusually frequent founders of chantries, and the Chilean state was uniquely reluctant to abolish these endowments despite its often liberal and modernizing tendencies. The explanations for these trends are less well established, however, and they undoubtedly call for broader comparative studies between Chile and other outlying areas of colonial Spanish America

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