Procesos y visitas de idolatrías

The French historian Pierre Duviols pioneered the study of “the extirpation of idolatry” with La lutte contre les réligiones autochtones dans le Pérou colonial: “L’extirpation de l’idolatrie,” entre 1532 et 1660 (Lima and Paris, 1971). Subsequently he published some of the sources on which his seminal work was based in Cultura andina y represión (Cuzco, 1986), of which Procesos y visitas de idolatrías is nominally a new edition.Procesos y visitas de idolatrías is much more than a revised, enlarged edition, however; it is almost entirely a new work. Duviols has reworked his previous introduction and added a additional essay on “la Nueva Extirpación,” more than doubling his original remarks. The Peruvian archivists Laura Gutiérrez Arbulú and Luis Andrade Ciudad have revised the transcriptions of the documents against the originals surviving in the Archivo Arzobispal de Lima and added additional sources. The French ethnolinguist César Itier has entirely redone and greatly expanded his analysis of “Textos quechuas de los procesos de Cajatambo.” Andrade Ciudad has prepared a new onomastic index of the documents.Procesos y visitas de idolatrías may be divided into three parts, although I am not not competent to evaluate the third part, Itier’s “Textos quechuas de los procesos de Cajatambo” (pp. 779–822). Part 2, containing “Visitas y procesos de Bernardo de Noboa” and “Documentos anexos sobre idolatrías de Cajatambo,” is the longest of the three and consists of sources on continuities and changes in autochthonous religious beliefs and practices and on the revival of “the extirpation of idolatry” in the Archdiocese of Lima during the mid–seventeenth century. The documents in question range from 1656 through 1664. This part is of inestimable and permanent importance because of the content of these materials, because not all of the originals have survived or continue to be legible, and because the transcriptions of those that have survived and are still decipherable have been reviewed and emended.These revisions will probably not require Sabine MacCormack, Nicholas Griffiths, and Kenneth Mills to revise interpretations based on the transcriptions in Cultura andina y represión presented in their Religion in the Andes (Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), The Cross and the Serpent (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1996), and Idolatry and Its Enemies (Princeton Univ. Press, 1997). The new transcriptions, nonetheless, will probably necesitate correcting some of the details set forth in those and other works.In the first part, “Estudio preliminary,” Duviols evinces little or no concern with MacCormack’s, Griffiths’s, or Mills’s findings (which are not always in agreement with his), of which he is aware. The reworked introduction, on the other hand, does read like a rebuttal to the Spanish historian Antonio Acosta’s several studies of Francisco de Avila, other doctrineros de indios and extirpadores, and Duviol’s earlier work, as well as as an apology for Avila. Avila (1573–1647) was the self-serving mestizo doctrinero who renewed the flames of “the extirpation of idolatry,” or what Duviols aptly characterizes as an extension of the Inquisition to Indians, in the early 1600s. Acosta views Avila less favorably than Duviols does. Drawing upon documentation not originally available to Duviols, Acosta maintains that Avila rekindled the campaign against Andean religious beliefs and practices when he did to offset demonstrable charges of economic exploitation and sexual abuse brought against him by his parishioners.Duviols is given to hyperbole and commits faux pas. For example, he makes much of the difficulties to which the printing of Avila’s Tratado de los Evangelios (Lima, 1648) was subject, but such problems were not uncommon. Duviols rightly extols Avila’s domination of and fluency in Quechua. He is probably wrong, however, in maintaining that Avila wrote in both Cuzco-Collao and Chinchaysuyu Quechua—that is to say, that he wrote his sermons in southern Peruvian Quechua, giving the equivalent in northern and central Peruvian Quechua wherever their vocabularies differed substantively (p. 100). This reviewer finds no indication of Duviols’s claim in Avila’s text. Duviols argues rhetorically that “the subsequent extraordinary rarity” of Avila’s Tratado de los Evangelios and “the relative abundance” of his rival Hernando de Avendaño’s Sermones, also published in 1648, was the result of the printer’s failure to produce or deliberate destruction of the six hundred copies contracted for Avila’s posthumously published Tratado de los Evangelios (p. 101). Guillermo Loh mann Villena, however, has long since shown that 589 exemplars— only 11 short—of the Tratado de los Evangelios were delivered by the binder to Avila’s posthumous editor. Furthermore, extant copies of Avila’s Tratado de los Evangelios (eight known) do not appear to be appreciably less abundant than copies of Avendaño’s Sermones (nine known).However much they may offset, the occasional exaggeration or error does not negate the significance, importance, or magnitude of Duviols’s findings as reset forth in Procesos y visitas de idolatrías on “the extirpation of idolatry” in the Archdiocese of Lima in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or on its reinstigator, Francisco de Avila, a zealot’s zealot

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