Colonial Latin American Review

ISSN: 1060-9164 (Print) 1466-1802 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccla20

Shapes of love in the miracle testimonies of the

Virgin of Chiquinquirá, New Kingdom of Granada,
1587 to 1694

Karen Shears Cousins

To cite this article: Karen Shears Cousins (2019) Shapes of love in the miracle testimonies of the
Virgin of Chiquinquirá, New Kingdom of Granada, 1587 to 1694, Colonial Latin American Review,
28:3, 396-423, DOI: 10.1080/10609164.2019.1655890

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2019.1655890

Published online: 10 Oct 2019.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 92

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ccla20
COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW
2019, VOL. 28, NO. 3, 396–423
https://doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2019.1655890

Shapes of love in the miracle testimonies of the Virgin of

Chiquinquirá, New Kingdom of Granada, 1587 to 1694
Karen Shears Cousins
Department of History, University of North Florida

On 21 May 1654, after he had been placed under oath and sworn to tell the truth, Juan Ray-
mundo de Vargas recounted a story of love—his own, both for the Virgin Mary and for a
woman ‘of good blood, whose identity he kept to himself.’1 Vargas, a thirty-two-year-old
municipal official born in Santafé de Bogotá, had traveled to a rural shrine in the New
Kingdom of Granada for the second time to pray novenas before the thaumaturgic
painted image of Our Lady of the Rosary of Chiquinquirá. There, he confided to Fray
Juan de Pereyra, the notary-priest who was collecting miracle testimonies in the pilgrimage
church, that eight years earlier, he had become ‘blind with love’ for a woman to whom he was
closely related and not married. Vargas said his passion was such that he cared neither about
the damage to her reputation nor the risk to his own life when he entered her house and com-
municated with her at all hours. Their illicit relationship continued for two years, until
Vargas learned that she had given birth to his daughter. Despite this fact, and his own under-
standing that the situation was bad for both ‘body and soul,’ Vargas told Pereyra that the
‘devil blinded him more and more’ until he came on pilgrimage with his aunts to the holy
house in Chiquinquirá, walking barefoot in penance for part of the journey. Pereyra recorded
Vargas’s words: ‘The said declarant begged the Mother of God for her favor, to remove such
love from his heart and erase the memory of it.’ Vargas testified that soon after that first pil-
grimage, his feelings for his paramour grew tepid; and, despite her efforts to communicate
with him, from that time until the present date he had returned to her no more. There
was no further mention of the child conceived of the union.
The recipient of the Virgin’s favor in this story, Juan Raymundo de Vargas, belonged to
a particular ‘emotional community’: a social group ‘in which people adhere to the same
norms of emotional expression and value—or devalue the same or related emotions’
and ‘have a common stake, interests, values and goals’ (Rosenwein 2006, 2, 24; 2010,
11). In Vargas’s case, the community coalesced around the spiritual lives of its
members, and they understood Vargas’s efforts to purge his feelings of love for the
unnamed woman. During the medieval and early modern periods, Catholic Christians
were part of general, ‘overarching’ emotional communities based upon shared love for
God and the Virgin Mary.2 But lived emotional communities (what historian Barbara
Rosenwein calls ‘subordinate’ emotional communities) were more likely local, as in
Vargas’s case: its members focused on a particular Marian image perceived to be super-
naturally activated and imbued with ‘sacred immanence’ (Larkin 2010, 29). Whether
kneeling in prayer and supplication or crying out to the Mother of God in a desperate

CONTACT Karen Shears Cousins karen.s.cousins@comcast.net

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group on behalf of CLAR
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 397

moment, devotees made themselves vulnerable by trusting and confiding in Mary, confes-
sing their hopes and fears to her, and opening themselves to divine favor or judgment. As a
result, and as historian Miri Rubin has suggested, lived emotional communities of Mary
were spaces of deep feeling and intimate communication (2009, 79).3
The Virgin of Chiquinquirá was (and is) an activated painted image of Mary with a
devotional following which emerged in 1586 and continues to the present. Within the
milieu of an everchanging yet enduring emotional community in Chiquinquirá, dozens
of testimonies recounting individual experiences, appeals to Mary, and her supernatural
intercessions were recorded under oath by notary-scribes during the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries. These accounts of the Virgin’s miracles are filled with anecdotal refer-
ences to local society and culture. More importantly for present purposes, the
testimonies abound with descriptions of human needs and supplications for divine
favor fueled by such feelings as love, fear, anger, shame, and jealousy. A panoply of
human emotion is embedded in the supplication, ‘Help me, Mary!’
Asking the Virgin of Chiquinquirá for her intercession was an intimate act in which
supplicants confessing their needs also articulated feelings about themselves and others.
Since some devotees later shared their lived intercessory experiences in sworn testimony,
and because those testimonies have survived in published and unpublished texts, as we
shall see, scholars have ways to approach the feelings and thought worlds of historical
actors in a particular emotional community. I focus in this essay on selected miracle
accounts inflected by the emotion category of love.4 In discerning shapes of that
emotion between and among people in the New Kingdom of Granada and Mary of Chi-
quinquirá, I show that, offered in the intimate space of an emotional community, miracle
testimonies which purport to focus on love for the Virgin actually reveal a great deal about
human love. And human love, again as we shall see, was often complicated by other feel-
ings and was even, at times, self-interested and dishonoring.

Historicizing emotion and thinking about love

Scholars of history have become increasingly interested in studying human emotion and
‘affect’ (simple embodied sensations of pleasantness or unpleasantness and calmness or
agitation, Barrett 2017b, 71–72). Historians seek to understand, for example, how to
define, interpret, and historicize emotion; how historical actors have expressed their feel-
ings over time; and how such feelings are related to behavior.5 Emotion, affect, and cogni-
tion may intersect and manifest socially as complicated feelings (Davidson 2002; Panksepp
1998; 2011) such as jealousy, a complex emotion which philosopher Jerome Neu argues
‘operates in the space of fear, anger, and love’ (Neu 2002, 161). Love itself is a complex
emotion—especially the ways in which it is offered, perceived, and performed, and the
expectations it engenders—which occurs within a social context.
Recently, scholars have begun to explore historical notions of love in colonial Spanish
America, including within the New Kingdom.6 The bulk of this work, however, focuses on
romantic love (and offended romantic love) in the eighteenth century or later, drawing
from sources such as lawsuits, inquisition documents, and letters. In contrast, this essay
considers expressions of love in a variety of forms recorded more than a century
earlier, between 1587 and 1694, and drawn from an uncommon genre of sources:
miracle testimonies, like the one given under oath by Juan Raymundo de Vargas.
398 K. S. COUSINS

Within the emotion category of love, Vargas’s testimony evinces two general forms:
divine and human. Sabine MacCormack used the phrase ‘divine love’ ambiguously, first
in a theoretical sense, to denote allegorical ways in which Christian thinkers read the
Song of Songs as fleshless spirituality or reimagined the good news of the Bible and the
‘cosmic battle between evil and good’ in Andean contexts (2010, e.g., 65–71). But she
also used it in a more practical sense, especially to signal the love the Virgin of Copacabana
demonstrated for indigenous peoples through the granting of miracles, and they for the
Mother of God through supplications, offerings, and pilgrimage (2010, e.g., 58, 71–73).
It is MacCormack’s second sense I seek here to evoke.
I define divine love as a spiritual and reciprocal ‘holy affection’ between human and
divine beings. Many writers have referred to divine love using the Greek word agápē,
an obscure term found frequently in the Christian New Testament (Oord 2005, 930–
35). For seventeenth-century England, historian Hannah Newton characterized holy
affection as ‘the most exquisite of all human feelings [which] saturated the body and
soul’ (2017, 67). In the sources from which I draw, divine love is manifested as sublime
devotion offered to the Virgin of Chiquinquirá by supplicants, and the loving commitment
she was perceived to initiate or return through the granting of intercessory favors. In con-
trast, by human love I mean various temporal passions and attachments between people:
fleshly love which might well be between mother and child as between lovers or husband
and wife. While both divine and human love may be tactile and sensual, human love is a
complex emotion in myriad permutations shared, perceived, or experienced between
human beings.7
These two general forms of love are often interconnected, expressed within the
emotional community of Mary of Chiquinquirá by devotees who prayed for her interven-
tions in matters of troubled human love: for the supernatural healing of a sick child or
spouse, for example, or for holy intercession in romantic relationships gone awry. This
essay explores these forms of love, embedded in texts meant to undergird and advance
the local Marian advocation. The testators (and devotees like them whose experiences
were never recorded by priestly notaries) comprised the community and cult of the
Virgin of Chiquinquirá, fundamentally shaping it through word and deed during a long
seventeenth century. The cult was shaped with conditions, however, for although the
emotional community in Chiquinquirá embraced people who loved the Virgin, it also
required public performances of contrition and penance from those who dishonored com-
munity norms, as we shall see. At the same time, the miracle testators from the community
in Chiquinquirá shared an emotion lexicon with similar emotional communities of the
Virgin Mary in other locales, and they were also part of different emotional communities
centered around ethnicity or place of origin, gender, profession, or social standing (Rosen-
wein 2010, 12). In these connected ways, the lived and thought worlds of the testators
transcended Chiquinquirá’s devotional sphere.

The activated image and its earliest historical texts

Juan Raymundo de Vargas’s story is found in two of three sequential texts from which the
testimonies referenced in this essay are drawn. The triune corpus of sources recounts the
origin and early history of Our Lady of Chiquinquirá, a faded mid-sixteenth-century
painting of the Virgin of the Rosary flanked by Anthony of Padua and the Apostle
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 399

Andrew. Its cult of devotion was sparked by the founding miracle: the supernatural relo-
cation and miraculous self-renewal of the painting, vouched by eyewitnesses to have
occurred on 26 December 1586 (Figure 1). A local semblance of the Virgin Mary, the
Virgin of Chiquinquirá is a colonial contemporary of the well-known Virgin of Guadalupe
of Tepeyac, Mexico, and the Virgin of Copacabana of Lake Titicaca, bordering Peru and
Bolivia. Yet, just as the scholarship for New Spain and Peru exceeds that for the New
Kingdom of Granada, so the cults of Guadalupe and Copacabana have been studied far
more than Mary of Chiquinquirá—curiously, even though the earliest years of her devo-
tion are more robustly documented.8
According to the requirements of a decree regulating the veneration of ‘unusual’ images
promulgated in 1563 during the Twenty-fifth Session of the Council of Trent (Schroeder
1978, 220), an ecclesiastical investigation of proliferating miracles in Chiquinquirá was
opened just fifteen days after the founding miracle was reported. Known as an información
jurídica, such a canonical investigation under the auspices of a bishop was intended to
determine the authenticity of miracles through the sworn testimony of witnesses
(Taylor 2016, 17). The información jurídica for Chiquinquirá was ordered by the

Figure 1. Alonso de Narváez, ‘Nuestra Señora del Rosario de Chiquinquirá, original.’ Basílica de Nuestra
Señora del Rosario de Chiquinquirá, Chiquinquirá, Colombia. Image reproduced by permission of the
Orden de Predicadores, Provincia de San Luis Bertrán de Colombia.
400 K. S. COUSINS

archbishop of Santafé de Bogotá, Luis Zapata de Cárdenas, and conducted by commis-

sioners and notaries between January 1587 and February 1589. But extant original
reports of canonical investigation for colonial Spanish America are unusual. William
B. Taylor has found, for example, that ecclesiastical authorities in New Spain either
rarely undertook such official inquiries or their documentation has been lost (2016,
312–13). Any report of investigation for either the Virgin of Guadalupe or Copacabana
contemporaneous with their founding miracles is currently unknown, for example. Yet
the full and timely información jurídica for Chiquinquirá has survived and is housed
today in the private Dominican archive in Bogotá (the Archivo de Provincia San Luis
Bertrán de Colombia, Orden de Predicadores). It is the first of the trilogy of sources refer-
enced in this essay.9
The second source—the one in which Vargas’s sworn testimony first appears—is an
unpublished, simply bound manuscript entitled Memoria de los sucesos raros que ha
obrado Nuestro Señor por intercesión de Nuestra Señora de Chiquinquirá. The ‘Memoria’
comprises 234 sworn, signed, notarized, and witnessed testimonies of miracles attributed
to the Virgin of Chiquinquirá by 142 testators collected between 1651 and 1654 by Domin-
ican notary-priest and shrine-keeper Juan de Pereyra. Except for people of African heritage,
who do not appear as deponents, the testators in this manuscript represent the scope of
New Kingdom colonial society.10 An unredacted, original collection of juridical miracle tes-
timonies such as the ‘Memoria’ is ‘highly unusual, if not unique, for colonial Spanish
America.’11 Lost for nearly eighty years to avocational historians who knew of its existence
from references made in the writings of early-twentieth-century Dominicans (Ariza 1992,
757), I searched for and found the unindexed and unlabeled manuscript in 2013, tucked
into a box of old books stored in the Dominican archive. Pereyra’s ‘Memoria’ has never
been systematically studied until now (Cousins 2018).
The last of the three sources from which I have drawn for this essay, Dominican friar
Pedro de Tobar y Buendía’s Verdadera histórica relación is the first published sacred
history of the Virgin of Chiquinquirá.12 Born in Santafé de Bogotá, Tobar was prior in
Chiquinquirá for three-year terms in 1681 and again in 1685, when he presided over
the centennial anniversary celebrations of the founding miracle of renewal (Cousins
2018, 400). Before he served a third term as prior in 1711, Tobar traveled to Madrid
where, in 1694, he published his ‘true historical account’ of the New Granadan Mary—
an account in which he extolled her beauty and enumerated her generous intercessory
miracles. Reminiscent of Augustinian friar Alonso Ramos Gavilán’s Historia del célebre
santuario de Nuestra Señora de Copacabana y sus milagros published in Lima in 1621,
Tobar’s Verdadera histórica relación is the source with which scholars of Chiquinquirá
are most familiar. In composing the sacred history for publication, Tobar drew without
attribution upon both the información jurídica and the ‘Memoria,’ editing, correcting, ela-
borating, and distilling testimonies, and adding his own knowledge and experiences as
prior of the shrine. For example, among other accounts Tobar heavily redacted Vargas’s
story from the original testimony in the ‘Memoria,’ featuring it as one of repentance
and the divine erasure of what Tobar summarized as ‘disordered love’ (1986 [1694], 169).
Collectively, these three sources were intended by their colonial Catholic makers to auth-
enticate and legitimize early miracles, record the memory of marvelous events, elicit
financial support for and, ultimately, shape and promote the cult of the Virgin of Chiquin-
quirá. The priestly commissioners and notaries of the first two manuscripts sought to
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 401

perform their tasks in juridical fashion, necessarily filtering the spoken words of the sworn
witnesses through the mind and hand of the notary-scribe.13 These exceptional texts, and
the 1694 sacred history based upon them, illuminate various shapes of love enacted by
people in the colonial New Kingdom of Granada, including parental, familial, affectionate,
sexual, romantic, platonic, and self-interested love. This essay is thus a significant addition
to the nascent history of emotions in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world.

Divine love in the emotional community of Chiquinquirá

Contemporary ideas of divine love as understood by Catholic Christians, particularly in
New Spain, have been considered by other scholars, most recently William B. Taylor
(2016).14 In his study of colonial devotion in Mexico, Taylor explored ways in which
people perceived the local immanence of saintly intercessors; he observed how the faithful
performed acts of supplication and gratitude in a sacred dance of reciprocity between God
and humans. Taylor’s empathic studies (2005, 2010, 2011, 2016) undergird this essay. The
testators in the información jurídica and ‘Memoria’ expressed loving devotion to Mary of
Chiquinquirá, to whom they had brought some pressing need and a vow, and from whom
they had received a miraculous intervention. In return, grateful recipients made pil-
grimages to her holy house, prayed novenas, or proffered candlewax, alms, or votive
items. Faithful reciprocity was understood by the members of Marian emotional commu-
nities in the New Kingdom of Granada, as in New Spain and elsewhere, to be a key com-
ponent of sustained divine love.
Occasionally, however, a supplicant made a vow that was eventually forgotten, and reci-
procity took on a darker hue. Diego Sánchez de Robles, for example, told Pereyra that his
parents offered his younger brother, Lucas, to the Virgin when he was ill.15 Upon his
recovery, his parents became distracted by other issues and failed to make their promised
pilgrimage to Chiquinquirá. Sánchez explained that for ten years the boy was ‘plagued by
visions, and diseased by an evil heart,’ cured only upon his completion of the parents’ orig-
inal pledge. In this case, the child suffered the judgment meted out by a vengeful, neglected
Virgin.16 At other times, divine and human love seemed to exist in conflict, as manifested
in the now-familiar testimony of Raymundo de Vargas. There, in the shrine church of Chi-
quinquirá, Vargas was still speaking about the illicit passions which had consumed him
eight years earlier, and the human love he had sacrificed in the name of divine love.
Mindful of moral lessons and the spiritual edification of their future readers, both
Pereyra and Tobar framed Vargas’s sworn deposition as a battle between God and the
devil for the testator’s very soul—an illumination of the interconnectivity between
divine and human love.
In contrast to the tormented Vargas, two other historical actors seem to have willingly
left behind the ordinary diversions of colonial life in the New Kingdom and any sense of
struggle or inner conflict like those others experienced. María Ramos and Catalina García
de Reyna committed themselves wholeheartedly to the Virgin and were redeemed through
her in return, exemplifying the triumph of divine love in its highest form. Ramos witnessed
the original miracle in 1586 and was the first person deposed in the información jurídica.17
She emigrated from Castile to the New Kingdom of Granada in 1584 to join her husband,
Pedro de Santana. For reasons that are not clear, Ramos soon left Santana, joining a
widowed sister-in-law on her small cattle farm in Chiquinquirá. Ramos testified that
402 K. S. COUSINS

she knelt in prayer every day before the only religious image available to her there: a tat-
tered and nearly indiscernible painting of the Virgin of the Rosary which hung in a straw
mission chapel so rudimentary that dogs and pigs wandered in and out.18 Tobar later
added detail to Ramos’s testimony, claiming that her prayers had been pleas for the
Virgin to ‘manifest and reveal’ herself in the obscure image (1986 [1694], 23). Ramos
herself did not disclose the words she prayed, but she and others testified that after she
turned to leave the chapel on the day of Saint Stephen, the painting miraculously
moved from the wall over the altar into her usual place of prayer on the floor, and all
that day the face and figure of the Virgin glowed radiant, luminous, and clear.
Following her mystical experience during the founding miracle of the Virgin of Chi-
quinquirá, María Ramos assumed the role of beata or informal holy woman, making
herself protector and custodian of the activated image and the new, more commodious
shrine-chapel quickly built to house it. Ramos features in several miracle testimonies in
the información jurídica and the ‘Memoria,’ named as the woman who lit the candles
and lamps in the shrine and dispensed holy relics of sacralized water, earth, and oil to
needful pilgrims. After her death, Pereyra, Tobar, and other chroniclers essentially colla-
borated in Ramos’s rehabilitation, reconstructing her from the marginal exile she was—a
poor woman who rejected or was rejected by her husband—into the revered high priestess
and favored confidant of the Mary of Chiquinquirá.19
Some decades later, according to the sworn testimonies of two witnesses, one of whom
was a relative, Juan de Pereyra recorded the story of Catalina García de Reyna.20 These
witnesses told a story of redemptive divine love. García was known as the ‘Angel of
Gualí’ because she was strikingly beautiful and often passed the time gamboling along
the banks of the Gualí River in the town of Mariquita. Doña Inés Bermúdez de Solórzano,
who knew García personally and considered her a friend, testified that she was ‘shameless’;
she had banished her husband and gave the appearance of engaging in ‘dishonest work.’
Doña Inés said some of the local women had ‘reprimanded the Angel several times,
drawing back from their friendship until she should live a better life.’21
But at some point, the witness testified, the Angel became deathly ill and turned to the
Virgin of Chiquinquirá, humbly asking that she be granted health of body and soul. When
she was cured, she was also changed. According to Doña Inés, the Angel distributed her
jewels to the Marian images in every convent in Mariquita; she sold her dresses and finery
and gave the proceeds to the poor; and she clothed herself in a woolen blanket, wearing her
hair disheveled, ‘like the other Magdalena, whom she imitated in her penance.’ In remorse,
the Angel went out into the public street where she had previously lived her scandalous
life, and there everyone was affected by her tears. Then she left on pilgrimage to see
and serve the Virgin of Chiquinquirá, taking a little sack to collect the alms that were
given to her along the way.
Doña Inés told Pereyra that once she had been reformed, the Angel lived in Chiquin-
quirá for fifteen years, sleeping at night on a rack of reeds with a block of wood under her
head. She wore a milled sack and hair shirt, and washed clothes and cleaned the church
and sacristy.22 Sometimes, when she was alone, she took out a stringed musical instrument
called a vihuela, which she had used to pass the time when she ‘lived a profane life, and
which she had kept in order to sing motets and spiritual songs of devotion to God and
his Holy Mother.’ Pereyra recorded that the Angel ‘died with a good reputation’ and
was buried in the holy house in Chiquinquirá. Tobar redacted García de Reyna’s story
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 403

from the ‘Memoria,’ deemphasizing her individuality and removing identifying details. He
depicted the circumstances of the anonymous Angel in his Verdadera histórica relación as
a universal redemption tale compelling enough to be given preeminent status among
miracles attributed to the Virgin of Chiquinquirá (1986 [1694], 168–69).
García de Reyna and Ramos, each in their different ways, were transformed from their
former lives, idealized as venerable holy women known to be living in committed reciprocal
relationships of service and spirituality. Unlike Ramos, however, the Angel, García de
Reyna, had recklessly breached the boundaries of female honor out of self-interest and
what historian Ute Frevert characterizes as ‘self-love’ (2011, 52, 70–73). Such breaches of
honor women could not easily repair (Frevert 2011, 67–68). García de Reyna’s integration
into the emotional community of Chiquinquirá therefore required not only divine inter-
vention but the Angel’s ceaseless public performance of contrition and penance. The
stories of María Ramos and Catalina García de Reyna, interpreted and recorded by the
notary-priest, reiterate and exemplify the perceived power of divine love to remake the
sinner into beloved penitent, the degraded mourner into celebrant. But unlike these two
women, most of the miracle testimonies treated in this essay were given by people who
had, in enactments of divine love, turned to Mary of Chiquinquirá for her help in
urgent matters of human love, shaped especially as parental and romantic love.

Human love expressed as parental love

In the past, some scholars suggested that medieval and early modern European parents
were largely indifferent to their children and did not especially mourn the deaths of
their youngest (Mause 1974). That idea has been challenged by other scholars, including
Christian Krötzl and Ronald C. Finucane, who explored medieval miracle stories. They
found that parents did, in fact, love their young children, although not always in ways
as immediately demonstrative and thus intelligible to modern interpreters (Finucane
1997 and Krötzl 1989; see also Kroll 1977 and Wiesner-Hanks 2008, 56–57).
Literature on the history of childhood in colonial Spanish America specifically is still
limited, and focuses primarily on illegitimacy and circulation of children, not love or
attachment (González and Premo 2007; Hecht 2002; Mandell 2010; Premo 2008;
Twinam 1999). Studies are especially scarce with respect to the colonial New Kingdom,
where the work thus far has largely been on issues of abandonment (Ramírez 2006;
Restrepo Zea 2007; Rodríguez Jiménez 2007). But many of the testimonies in the informa-
ción jurídica and ‘Memoria’ which recount miraculous interventions by the Virgin of Chi-
quinquirá were offered by the parents of sick or dying infants and children, or of children
threatened by environmental dangers such as fires, raging rivers, and poisonous snakes.
Similar to the findings from medieval miracle stories demonstrated in the work of
Krötzl and Finucane, the miracle testimonies by deponents in Chiquinquirá indicate
that it was not uncommon for parents to exhibit love for their children, even from
shortly after birth.
Pedro Sánchez de Haro, for example, attested to one of the earliest healing miracles
attributed to Mary of Chiquinquirá, inscribed in the información jurídica on 16 September
1587.23 His account is also witness to the love of parents for their children in the late-six-
teenth-century New Kingdom. Sánchez explained to commissioners that he and his wife
carried their fifteen-month-old son from another village to the holy house in Chiquinquirá
404 K. S. COUSINS

because the child had, from birth, ‘a very bad ear’ which, despite many purgative treat-
ments, had failed to improve. The boy was healed after they offered him to the Virgin.
Months later, when the child suffered severe swelling of his eyes, they appealed again to
Mary of Chiquinquirá, promising in return for his healing the monies they received
from the sale of a handmade religious image. Sánchez and his wife were only two of
numerous contemporary parents among the miracle testators who demonstrated sacrifi-
cial love for a young child.
Captain Bartolomé Rioja told Juan de Pereyra under oath that in 1635, his wife, Doña
Francisca, became distraught when their nine-month-old daughter, Ana María, contracted
smallpox and appeared to be dying.24 It happened that the Virgin of Chiquinquirá was
then in ceremonial procession from the capital city of Santafé de Bogotá (where the acti-
vated painting had been taken two years earlier for intercession in an epidemic) back to its
holy house. On that particular afternoon, the holy image had arrived in the nearby pueblo
of Cogua. At midnight, Doña Francisca left their house and carried the baby in her arms
through desolate high moors to lay her at the feet of the Virgin. Ana María was miracu-
lously healed. In a similar story, Bartolomé de Aragón testified that he watched the
widowed Doña Catalina de Aillon place her dead six-year-old daughter before an auxiliary
image of Our Lady of Chiquinquirá located in the pueblo de indios of Brotaré.25 Aragón
said that the child was ‘resurrected’ after her mother, who had carried her four leagues
(approximately twelve miles) to lay her lifeless body on the altar, tearfully promised the
Virgin she would donate candlewax in the weight of the child.
Declarant María Rodríguez described how she had despaired for the life of her seven-
year-old son, Andrés, who had manifested sudden and severe neurological symptoms, so
that she and her husband ‘called upon the Sovereign Lady of Chiquinquirá with the ten-
derness that comes from having lost hope.’26 Yet another deponent, Augustina de la Pina,
testified before Pereyra about her daughter, Juana, then aged fifteen, who had been chroni-
cally ill from infancy.27 When Juana also developed smallpox, her desperate mother
sought divine intervention. The notary-priest recorded that the anguished mother cried,
‘Blessed Virgin, Mother of God of Chiquinquirá, is it possible that you [ … ] are going
to deny my entreaties as I kneel here? Look at this girl with eyes of pity and look at
me. I am her mother, and I offer her up to you. I promise that I will take her to your
holy house if you will give her life.’28 Although Juana was so ill that her father had
‘already contracted for the wax to be burned at her burial,’ de la Pina told Pereyra that
in the days after she had cried out to the Virgin, her daughter was healed of smallpox
‘and all her other illnesses as well.’
The trilogy of historical texts—particularly the ‘Memoria’—are lush with enactments of
human love described under oath by testators as they recounted miraculous interventions
sought and received in reciprocal divine love. In addition to expressions of parental love
such as those highlighted above, a number of testimonies illuminate romantic or sexual
love experienced between men and women, including instances of love complicated by
feelings of jealousy, rage, and offense to honor.

Human love expressed as sexual or romantic love

Notions of romantic love are ancient and widespread, found within classical Greek and
Roman societies, and among pre-modern peoples of Japan, India, China, and the Middle
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 405

East (Lindholm 2006, 8, 11–13). Anthropologist Charles Lindholm suggests that if the idea of
romantic love is indeed a universal, it is because such love is part of the ‘compelling imaginary
of the sacred’ through which people seek to transcend ‘existential limits of the self’ and of
ordinary life, which is frequently lonely, dangerous, or dispiriting (2006, 16–18). In
certain times and places, Lindholm notes, romantic love was an ideal envisioned apart
from and in opposition to sexual desire, an idea fruitfully elaborated by William Reddy
(2012). Notions of romantic love in Western cultures, Reddy suggests, were rooted in reac-
tion to eleventh-century Gregorian Reforms and reflected in medieval poetry and songs
depicting courtly love—the more refined and noble ‘counterdoctrine of true love’ held up
against the appetites of physical ardor decried by a then-renewing Church (2012, 2–4).
Historically then, at least in the Christian or Christianizing worlds, the ideal of roman-
tic love was often decoupled from marriage, the social vehicle through which political and
economic alliances were made and lineages preserved or improved. But this was not
always the case. Love certainly could be present from the beginning of any marriage,
and it could grow over time even in arranged or political marriages, perhaps as a ‘mora-
lized response’ to the spouse’s particular qualities and characteristics (Abramson and Leite
2011, 696; Epstein et al. 2013). It follows, of course, that love and sexual desire have also
never been confined to marriage. Therefore, even if love and marriage were decoupled,
they were all too frequently enmeshed.
Linda A. Curcio-Nagy contends that men and women in colonial Mexico formed their
ideas of romantic love and sexual desire (and acted upon those ideas) influenced by
emotional communities including social groups, popular entertainment, and the
Church (2014, 44–45). Teachings about love from the Catholic Church in the early
modern Spanish world were drawn with a fine theological line. On one hand, as
Curcio-Nagy and Alejandro Cañeque show, romantic love was linked to desire and lust,
and these emotions were ‘passions,’ fraught with ‘spiritual danger’ (Curcio-Nagy 2014,
45; Cañeque 2014, 92–100). On the other hand, the Church advocated marriage, at
least for those who were not married to the Church itself. Marriage was a sacrament.
And after the General Council of Trent (1545–1563), the Church championed spousal
freedom of choice in marriage over political or familial considerations.29 The ‘ideal mar-
riage,’ according to the Tridentine Church, involved loving, caring, and protective spouses
who chose each other and engaged in conjugal sex only for the purpose of procreation
(Curcio-Nagy 2014, 50–53). The spousal love defended by the Church was a philosophi-
cally different form of emotion: it was not burning ardor but was rather love as an
‘affection of the soul’ (Cañeque 2014, 92). During the colonial period, the Church did
not countenance the passions of lusty love, even in marriage.
As Rebecca Earle and others have observed, there is no consensus among historians
regarding when ‘affectionate’ marriage became socially normative in colonial Spanish
America versus political marriage, other than it was sometime between the mid-sixteenth
and the nineteenth centuries (Earle 2005, 19–24). According to Nicole von Germeten, men
and women in colonial Cartagena ‘sought passionate love in different contexts than the
romantic ideal of loving spouses that we cherish today.’ She suggests more broadly that
‘historians of Latin America have not found traces of the idea of affectionate love
within marriage until the nineteenth century’ (2013, 86).30 But miracle testimonies in
the ‘Memoria’ complicate von Germeten’s suggestion: during the seventeenth century in
the New Kingdom, some people did indeed love their spouses with affection and passion.
406 K. S. COUSINS

Depictions of love between men and women embedded in the miracle testimonies of
the ‘Memoria’ vary widely. I have alluded to what appears to have been indifference or
an absence of love between María Ramos and her husband, Pedro de Santana, for instance.
In another example, when Catalina de los Reyes experienced what was clearly an abnormal
(molar) pregnancy and decided after ten months to go to Chiquinquirá to entrust herself
to the Virgin, her husband was too busy to go with her despite the threat to her life.31 The
testator, her uncle, explained to Pereyra that he himself had felt ‘bound by blood to accom-
pany her.’ This case suggests, through implication of the testator—or perhaps the notary-
priest’s pen—that the husband’s level of concern for his wife’s condition was minimal, and
familial love, however obligatory, outperformed marital attachment.
When Doña Juana de Colmenares developed a grave, mysterious illness, however, her
husband, Alonso de Cabrera, had a different response.32 He told Pereyra that he was ‘so
heartbroken’ at the thought of his wife’s death that he went to the convent of Santo
Domingo in Mariquita to pray at the altar of the Virgin of the Rosary. There, Pereyra
wrote, ‘as he was praying on his knees with tears in his eyes asking for her help, the
memory of the Sovereign Virgin of Chiquinquirá and her many miracles occurred to
him, so he cried out for his wife’s protection with those same tears.’ Cabrera had promised
to take his wife to the holy house in Chiquinquirá if she lived, and then resigned himself to
arranging her funeral. But by the time he returned to his wife’s side, he told Pereyra, she
had begun to recover.
Yet another deponent, Doña Ana María de Aldana, testified that she had become ill
because she had washed her hair one afternoon and, rather than drying it, she had tied
it up wet at her dressing table and then sat down next to a candle.33 Just as she did so,
an illness fell upon her with such power that she was out of her senses for three days
and could neither hear nor speak. ‘Seeing that her life was in danger and having love
for her,’ Pereyra recorded, ‘her grieving husband went to the parish priest and asked
him to pray a mass to the Sovereign Virgin, Our Lady of Chiquinquirá, on behalf of his
wife.’ When the priest touched the host at the altar, Pereyra continued, Doña Ana
María returned to consciousness. I suggest that the recording notary-priest read approv-
ingly, as we can do analytically, the distress of these two husbands, their tearful concern,
and their acts of devotion as love for their wives.
The testimony of Don Cristóbal des Debar y Aldana, in which he details his healing
from a horrifying medical condition, elucidates love both for the Virgin Mary and for
his wife.34 Don Cristóbal told Pereyra that he contracted the peste while he was employed
at the feria de armada in Cartagena (the public sale of goods and commodities carried on
vessels and galleons which had convoyed from Spain in armed fleets as protection against
pirates). He explained that although he sought treatment from the best physicians and sur-
geons, the disease had decayed the tissues in his mouth and corroded his jawbone. Pereyra
recorded, ‘Given up as lost, the declarant, still afflicted with the abovementioned illness,
left Cartagena, hoping it was possible for him to arrive in the city of Santafé while still
alive, so that his wife could lay her eyes upon him.’ Don Cristóbal said that when he
reached the town of Mompox, a surgeon removed five of his teeth, and ‘seeing his
rotted jawbone, the doctor determined to remove it with iron tools and cauterization.’
Though he was deeply afraid, the declarant said he ‘was resolved to endure it.’ He spent
the night praying to the Virgin of Chiquinquirá, promising to make a pilgrimage to her
holy house if he lived through the extraction. The next morning, however, the declarant
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 407

painlessly removed his own jawbone. He told the surgeon, who arrived at the appointed
hour, ‘I do not need you, your grace, as I already have a female surgeon who has healed
me.’ Within this story of miraculous healing, Don Cristóbal’s testimony records the yearn-
ing of a man who, despite his suffering, was compelled to make an arduous journey to
rejoin his wife before he died.
Passionate spousal love is evinced in the testimony of Juan Fernández de Posadas as he
recounted the miraculous healing of his wife, María de los Ángeles.35 He told Pereyra that
in 1645, his wife had developed an unidentified illness symptomized by terrible pain in her
stomach. She would not eat and became emaciated and weak. The notary-priest recorded:
‘And as the aforementioned declarant had a very intense love for his wife, when he saw
that there was no hope of improvement or cure for her, he became deeply upset.’ Fernán-
dez de Posadas said he went to the Calle Real in Santafé and bought wax for a candle,
which he then took to the convent of Santo Domingo. The testator lit the candle at the
altar of the Virgin of the Rosary and asked for his wife’s health. Suddenly, he said, Our
Lady came into his mind. Following that impulse, on his knees he prayed, ‘Holy Virgin
of Chiquinquirá, if it pleases you to give health to my wife, I promise we will come to
your holy house to visit and serve you for nine days.’ Fernández de Posadas said he
returned home to find his wife beginning to recover. Even before she was completely
well, he procured two mules and the couple began their pilgrimage to Chiquinquirá.
The deponent described the journey to Pereyra, which included relaxing and picnicking
with his wife on the banks of a stream. Six years later, on yet another pilgrimage to Chi-
quinquirá, Fernández de Posadas was still speaking of the passionate love (‘intensísimo
amor’) he had for his wife, María. This miracle story, like that of Don Cristóbal des
Debar y Aldana just above, illustrate ways in which representations of divine and
human love were braided together.
Supplicants kneeling before the Virgin of Chiquinquirá in enactments of divine love
often asked for her intercession in matters of human love, as these examples have shown.
Within the intimacy of the shrine church and the Virgin’s emotional community, these
devotees later reiterated their inner feelings in the course of testifying under oath to super-
natural interventions. The willingness to speak openly of such needful, personal experiences
suggests not only that the testators knew that the Virgin Mary understood those feelings, but
that the shapes of love they described were comprehended, familiar, and valued among
other members of the emotional community, including the notary-priest.
But what of the several testimonies in the ‘Memoria’ that evince human love complicated
by negative emotions such as jealousy and rage? These accounts suggest that it was not
unknown for offended parties in the seventeenth-century New Kingdom to act out the
desire for revenge through illegal violence—and in the sources for the Virgin of Chiquin-
quirá, the offended parties were all men. Two testimonies in the pages ahead represent
jealous-love experienced from the victims’ points of view. These sobering accounts illumi-
nate the potential lethality of such an enacted emotion complex. Two more testimonies were
given by violent enactors themselves. It was dangerous for these men to offer their testimo-
nies, for in so doing they made themselves openly vulnerable to the judgments of colonial
officials and public opinion. To have received the forgiveness and protective intervention of
the Virgin of Chiquinquirá appears not to have been enough for these testators. I suggest
that the violent enactors were compelled to risk their legal standing in local society
because each had erroneously attempted to defend his personal honor through audacious
408 K. S. COUSINS

acts of self-interest and self-love, effectively dishonoring accepted norms of the emotional
community. Penitential acts of public confession and contrition by the violent enactors
were thus necessary to establish or restore their individual places within that community.

Human love expressed as offended sexual or romantic love

Love between married couples existed in the colonial New Kingdom, as we have seen, but
there were also other, more negative feelings between men and women: lust, possessive-
ness, jealousy, and violent anger. Cañeque has argued that during the colonial period,
such ‘passions were seen as being conditioned by distinctions of class, culture, [and]
social status’; he elaborated, they ‘were not perceived as interior states of feeling but as
responses to social interactions that entailed consequences for one’s own or others’ repu-
tation’ (Cañeque 2014, 92–93). According to Scott Taylor, emotions of lust, possessiveness,
jealousy, and anger were key components of the ‘rhetoric of honor’: a repertoire or
‘complex’ of public attitudes and behaviors associated with, but not limited to, the king-
doms of Spain and Spanish America, especially during the early modern period (Taylor
2008, 1–16; Twinam 1999, 25–34). Taylor described the rhetoric of honor as ‘the conscious
use of phrases, gestures, and actions—including elements of the duel—to convey infor-
mation about the issues in contention while simultaneously advancing a violent confron-
tation’ (2008, 21). Notions of honor varied from place to place and differed among castes
and social groups; and, as Ann Twinam has observed, the ‘presence or absence [of honor]
was constantly subject to negotiation’ (1999, 33).
Nevertheless, there were some constants. While legitimate elites who had been able to
demonstrate their pure blood, or limpieza de sangre, laid claim to honor in the form of
inherited status (Villamarín and Villamarín 1982), everyone—including plebeians
of every ilk—was concerned to protect their public reputation and virtue, another form
of honor.36 In order for women to protect their public reputations, they not only had
to be seen as virginal maidens until marriage (or at least betrothal) and discreet, sexually
faithful wives, they also had to defend their husbands and families (Taylor 2008, 9;
Twinam 1999, 36–41). A man’s honor, however—that is, his public reputation—was
defined by wholly different social parameters. Simply put, a man’s honorable public repu-
tation ‘was exemplified by assertiveness, courage, authority, and domination of women’
(Spurling 1998, 45; Garrido 1998). Taylor’s more expansive definition of male honor
added competence in profession or office; financial integrity; and ‘performance in the
aggressive, competitive play that composed much of male sociability’ (2008, 9). What a
man could not do, and retain his honor, was overlook any threat to his control over the
sexual purity of the women in his life or allow an insult to go unanswered. Although
the practice was illegal, it was not uncommon for an insult to be answered with confronta-
tion, and the violent thrust of a sword (Burkholder 1998, 34).37
The rhetoric of honor was understood if not wholly endorsed within the spectrum of
emotional communities in the seventeenth-century New Kingdom. In fact, this rhetoric
was part of the more pervasive ‘emotional regimes’ of the medieval and early modern
worlds (Reddy 1997; 2001). As Frevert suggests, honor (an ‘emotional disposition’ now
lost to modern emotion lexicons) ‘served as the “glue” that bound a social group together’
(2011, 37, 42–43). Honor ‘functioned as a perfect hybrid: although it was integral to a
social group and its particular rules of conduct, it was appropriated by individuals as a
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 409

“purely personal” thing’ (Frevert 2011, 43). The miracle testimonies which pivot on issues
of jealous-love and insulted male honor are among the most substantial and richly detailed
in the ‘Memoria.’ Four of these accounts involve the attempted or intended murder of a
woman by her lover or husband. Here, I will explore the first three briefly, lingering
over the fourth testimony to show the intricacy of the testator’s act of public confession
—required to maintain membership in the emotional community whose behavioral
norms he had offended and effectively dishonored.
In 1653, an elite Spanish creole woman testified to a healing miracle alluding to
aggrieved male honor.38 She said that two years earlier, Lucía, an indigenous girl of
sixteen or eighteen years of age, servant to her sister, Doña Augustina de Vega y Lugo,
suffered a crushing head injury at the hands of an indigenous man.39 Pereyra recorded
that ‘because of jealousy, an indio tried to kill the girl with a stick or truncheon, clubbing
her many times in the head.’ Initially, doctors poured soothing tonics on her exposed
brain. Further treatment was delayed until physicians could deduce whether her brain
had ruptured, although Doña Augustina urged them to open her skull in the form of a
cross to see. The girl was miraculously cured after her mistress treated her for three
days, bathing her head with a mixture of regular water and earth from the shrine in Chi-
quinquirá, and promised to bring or send the girl to pray novenas to Our Lady if she sur-
vived. There is no further mention of the perpetrator of the violence. On the interesting
periphery of this miracle story is Lucía’s mistress, Doña Augustina. Were her ministrations
and prayers for the terribly injured young indigenous woman gestures of human com-
passion or even affectionate love? Was Doña Augustina fascinated by her injuries, or
perhaps acting in self-interest, working to save the life of the woman who served her?
Doña Augustina’s motives are unclear to us, but it seems likely that both her motives
and her emotions were mixed.
In the second story, three sisters appeared before Pereyra to state that in 1649, they had
been out in the countryside together.40 Suddenly, the (unnamed) husband of one of the
sisters, María de Lara, appeared with a butcher knife in his hand, declaring his depraved
intention to kill her based upon slanderous and ill-founded suspicions of dishonor. The
witnesses stated that de Lara’s husband rushed to stab her in the chest, but since she
lifted her hands to deflect the blow, he cut her face from cheekbone to jaw, also slicing
through the veins and nerves of her left hand. He then tried to behead her with a
second strike, but instead slashed her forehead (the notary-priest vouched for having
seen the scars). In an act of what may have been familial love, one sister grabbed her
brother-in-law by the cape, but María de Lara cried out to the Blessed Virgin of Chiquin-
quirá, and then instructed her sisters not to intervene: she was prepared to die at the hands
of her husband. Hearing her voice and her submission to death, the sisters said de Lara’s
husband dropped the knife and withdrew. For her part, de Lara retreated to a convent in
Tunja, attributing her survival to the favor of the Virgin. Neither this violent assault nor
the preceding attack on the young indigenous girl appear to have been reported to auth-
orities by any of the witnesses. They are examples of the ‘dark figure’ of uncounted crime
which scholars like Victor Uribe-Uran admit effectively skew attempts to proffer statistics
on honor and spousal violence (2016, 14–16).
In the third testimony, the deponent was Antonio Pérez, a married Spaniard from
Galicia. He told Pereyra that in 1645, ‘he had been obsessed as a man and mixed up with
a woman,’ and he became jealous of the woman’s young male friend.41 Pérez decided to
410 K. S. COUSINS

challenge him, especially because he seemed to be the sort of person who would walk away
from a fight when faced with the deponent’s boldness. Pérez went looking for the young man
and found him near the house of the governor’s lieutenant, who was also the chief justice of
Tunja. Brandishing a stick as an instrument of reprimand, Pérez said he threatened the
young man, driving him up against the front door of the lieutenant’s house. The resulting
hullabaloo roused the ladies inside, who complained to the lieutenant about Pérez’s auda-
city, which was, as Pereyra recorded, the ‘usual complaint of elite ladies.’ Pérez testified that,
sometime later, he was in the shop owned by Diego de Guevara, the provincial of the
municipal peacekeeping force, when the lieutenant seized Pérez and put him in prison.
After six months of good behavior, Pérez negotiated with the magistrate of the prison
for an overnight home visit, promising to return at dawn. But instead of going home to his
wife, he went in search of the woman who was the subject of his obsession. He found her in
the company of the same young man. Pérez told Pereyra that the companion slipped away
when Pérez attacked them but he grabbed the woman and ‘gave her nine wounds in pun-
ishment for her fickleness, leaving her for dead.’ As there were no witnesses, the declarant
continued, he concealed the crime and returned to prison. Somehow, the lieutenant
learned of Pérez’s actions and, after an investigation, Pérez was sentenced to six years
of forced exile in a closed presidio, where he was to serve the king without pay. Although
he appealed his sentence, it was for naught. Pereyra recorded that Pérez’s crime was so
serious that news of it was received with great sadness in the community since ‘he was
a good man, married, with obligations.’ People were touched to see that both Pérez and
his wife wept when she visited him.
While he was in prison before his exile, Pérez testified, he learned about the Virgin of
Chiquinquirá and he prayed humbly for her intervention in the severity of his sentence.
He promised to free himself of his obsessions and have virtuous love only for his wife
(who had forgiven him), serving her as she deserved. Miraculously then, the royal court
in Santafé reduced his sentence to two years of voluntary exile in a place of his choosing.
Pérez told Pereyra that he considered this to have been a great mercy from Our Lady of
Chiquinquirá, and that from that day forward, he had been completely devoted to her.
The level of detail in Pérez’s story is impressive, but questions remain. Did he kill the
woman with whom he was obsessed? The fact that her young male companion ‘slipped
away’ rather than help her, and the significant reduction of Perez’s sentence for brutally
attacking her (regardless of the reduction’s divine attribution), illuminate the societal
value of a non-elite woman’s life in the seventeenth-century New Kingdom. Pereyra’s
lack of attention to the specifics of the criminal charges is also sobering to modern
readers. That Pérez would act on his jealousies may have saddened his contemporaries
as Pereyra recorded, but his actions, although illegal, seem not to have surprised them.
Unlike the unnamed attackers from the two testimonies previously described, Pérez
suffered some time and spiritual penance in prison, but that penalty was not sufficient.
Seeking admission to the emotional community of the Virgin of Chiquinquirá, he also per-
formed acts of contrition by making a pilgrimage to the shrine church where he prayed
novenas and offered a public confession before witnesses and the notary-priest.
The last miracle testimony is complex: a tale of unrealized deadly intentions. It illumi-
nates many facets of domestic life in the seventeenth-century New Kingdom and tempts
the historical interpreter toward psychohistory to speculate on the protagonist’s mental
health. Yet this temptation I resist, focusing instead on his expressed emotions and
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 411

enactments of offended honor. The testimony was given under oath to Juan de Pereyra and
three witnesses by Bartolomé Bermúdez, a well-known person in the province of Tunja.42
The testator, witnesses, and notary each signed the deposition. Bermúdez’s public testimony
was essentially a verbal votive offering, a well-posited social act, and part of the required reci-
procity of divine love understood by supplicants before images. It may also have worked
toward the assuaging of his conscience in ways private prayer did not.
On 3 April 1652, Bartolomé Bermúdez, a fifty-year-old surgeon born in Santafé,
declared that fifteen months earlier, as he was treating an injured local man, he realized
that his own heart was pounding and, inexplicably, he felt both bitter and melancholy.
He tried to cheer himself up, but the mood did not pass, so he left his patient and
walked home. He explained to Pereyra that as he approached his house, he noticed a
woman hastily leaving the house next door. Agitated, Bermúdez went to his outdoor
kitchen and looked inside, where he saw his wife and two daughters. The surgeon said
he felt defensive and disturbed, suspecting that one of them had discredited his honor.
Those suspicions spurred him to immediate action and, although he was armed with
only a dagger, he rushed to the house next door.
As Bermúdez burst into his neighbor’s house, Pereyra recorded, he was praying to the
Virgin of Chiquinquirá, invoking her name to allay the fear in his imagination that his
honor had been aggrieved. Suddenly, from behind the fence surrounding the house, a
man leapt out with sword drawn. The swordsman rushed toward the house and attacked
Bermúdez, lunging at him with a mortal thrust. His attack inflamed the surgeon. Envision-
ing his opponent ‘cut from stem to stern,’ Bermúdez said he charged forward and stabbed
the man in the chest. His opponent dropped his sword and collapsed, begging the surgeon
to desist so that he could be allowed to confess. The surgeon extracted his knife from the
wounded man’s chest and stood there for a moment, imagining that the dying man was
the cause of a grave insult.
Bermúdez realized that he wanted to take revenge upon those within his own household
he presumed had dishonored him. So he left the wounded man in the neighbor’s house
and went home to search for his wife and daughters. He told Pereyra his intention was
‘to injure and kill them.’ But when he entered his house he found it empty, and he
stood in the courtyard for a long time, contemplating what he should do. Eventually, Ber-
múdez told Pereyra, he left his house and went to make his confession. Afterwards, Ber-
múdez asked the priest to accompany him while he went out to treat an anonymous man
who had been dealt a mortal wound. The priest agreed to go, and he and the surgeon
walked to the house where the wounded swordsman still lay.
Bermúdez testified that when he entered that house, the grievously injured man declared
that the surgeon owed no honor to him or his house, and that he deserved death for having
attacked the surgeon with the intention of killing him. The wounded swordsman confided
that the fault was his own and not the surgeon’s—and that if he should come before a judge
who asked who had wounded him, he would not condemn Bermúdez in his statement,
which he said he would make without prejudice before the governor’s lieutenant. Bermúdez
told the notary-priest that the wounded man had begged him, ‘for the love of God,’ to treat
his injury with care, even though the surgeon owed him nothing. But although Bermúdez
heard the swordsman’s words, they neither calmed his imagination nor assuaged his
offended honor. Nevertheless, the surgeon moderated his actions, deciding to ‘await his
revenge’ until he had more opportune circumstances.
412 K. S. COUSINS

After he treated the wounded man, Bermúdez returned home, where his wife and
daughters were waiting. He did not frighten them, but instead sent them outside
without telling them about the fight he had had with the man in the next house, who
now lay at death’s door. But, Pereyra recorded, the demon in the surgeon’s imagination
had not been dispelled. Judging it more likely that his wife had wronged him than his
daughters, the surgeon resolved that, as a woman ensconced in an evil life, he would
kill her. Planning a way to escape after he had committed the deed, Bermúdez took a
good mule to a nearby meadow and left it tied up there. He then went back to his
house and talked for a while with his wife. He told Pereyra that he spoke lovingly to
her, and he caressed her that night to reassure her. Yet his words were lies, for he had
hidden a sword and a dagger in the headboard of the bed.
That night, the surgeon slept only briefly, dreaming of his wife. In his heart, he called
upon the name of the Blessed Virgin of Chiquinquirá, asking her to help him act truly and
justly in the name of honor. After a time, sensing that his wife was asleep, he reached
stealthily for the dagger, but it was not where he had secreted it. As he searched more vig-
orously for the hidden weapons, he woke his wife. Bermúdez soothed her and, when she
went back to sleep, he got up to look for the weapons. But they were gone. Bermúdez was
confused; he wrestled with his thoughts and debated with himself in his imagination. ‘All
through the night,’ the notary-priest inscribed, ‘the surgeon cried out to the Virgin, plead-
ing with her to help him do the right thing.’
The next morning, Bermúdez found the sword and dagger hanging in the eaves of the
house, which added to his sense of confusion. His disorientation increased when he went
to the meadow and found the mule dead. In trying to roll, it had impaled itself on the stake
to which it was tied. The death of the mule was such a blow to his escape plan that he was
only able to calm his paranoia by remembering the reassuring statement of the wounded
swordsman.
Two days later, the surgeon’s wife startled him by asking him to go with her to a remote
river valley. Although her unexpected request unnerved Bermúdez, he was also pleased
that the solitude of the site would enable him to act upon his suspicions. When they
arrived in that lonely place, his wife confronted him calmly and courageously. She
wanted to persuade her husband that he was laboring under a misapprehension. She
had witnessed his quarrel with the swordsman next door and knew that Bermúdez sus-
pected her of bad conduct. She had perceived that he was ‘walking about consumed by
evil suspicions, and that he was being eaten alive by his imagination.’ She knew also
that the sweet words and flattery of recent days had been false, spoken only to reassure
her before he did her some harm. She had come with him alone in order either to demon-
strate her innocence or relinquish her life. She had already confessed and committed
herself to the Virgin of Chiquinquirá. She said she had ‘come ready to die.’
Then his wife explained the circumstances which had appeared so suspicious to the
surgeon. She said she had lent a pair of scissors from Bermúdez’s surgery kit to the
man next door, and then prepared to light a fire in the oven to bake some bread. When
she saw her husband in the distance returning home, she hastily sent one of her daughters
to retrieve the scissors before they became damaged. But the owner of the house was no
longer there. Instead, another man who knew nothing of the scissors was present in the
house, and neither he nor the daughter could locate them. The daughter hurried out of
the house just as her father, the surgeon, was approaching. When Bermúdez’s wife saw
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 413

that her husband was already upset upon his arrival, she was afraid to tell him that their
daughter had gone inside the neighbor’s house, or why. Fearing her husband’s anger and
recklessness as he stormed next door with an unsheathed dagger, she sent their daughters
back into the kitchen. The wife stayed inside their house, ‘cowering under a cushion in
their bedroom, praying to the Blessed Virgin.’
Bermúdez told Pereyra that as he listened to his wife, his mind began to clear. He
admired her for coming with him unaccompanied. He realized that the innocence of
his house had been confirmed by the Virgin Mary’s favor and interventions, manifested
by the divine relocation of his sword and dagger and the death of his mule. Bermúdez
vowed to go on pilgrimage to Chiquinquirá to give thanks to the Virgin in person.
With peace in his heart, he and his wife returned home. The surgeon then went to visit
and treat the wounded swordsman. The surgeon told Pereyra he admitted to the swords-
man that he had himself entertained corrupt intentions, and that he had entered the
other’s house with the sole intention of killing the man in defense of his own honor.
After the swordsman had healed, Bermúdez traveled to the shrine in Chiquinquirá, as
he had promised. He arrived in the afternoon without speaking to anyone and entered the
church alone. The surgeon knelt on the first step of the high altar, tearfully pouring out his
gratitude, where he experienced a vision of the Virgin which ‘filled him with joy and rever-
ential fear.’ Bermúdez considered the vision to be another miracle, added to those the
Virgin of Chiquinquirá had performed when she interceded to prevent him from killing
his innocent wife.
Despite the distinct contexts, the work of Natalie Zemon Davis is helpful in thinking
about Bermúdez’s miracle story. His account is similar in certain formulaic, narratively
crafted respects to the pardon tales or petitions for remission of sentence in sixteenth-
century France that Davis has studied, even if also different from them. For example,
Davis noted that when seeking pardon for a crime, ‘it helped [for a witness] to say that
the victim had had time for final sacraments or had been heard to pardon the killer or
take on the blame or urge his or her kin not to prosecute’ (1987, 17). In Bermúdez’s tes-
timony, both he and the man he stabbed meet such readerly expectations, asking for and
evidently receiving the sacrament of confession. And the inclusion of the wounded man’s
detailed admission that he, not Bermúdez, was at fault, even to the point of volunteering to
explain his own guilt to the lieutenant, is telling. These sections of the story are remarkably
explicit; such second-hand testimony could only have worked to Bermúdez’s advantage
should municipal officials have intervened.
There is another echo of Davis’s reading of the pardon tales in Bermúdez’s testimony.
Like the remission petitions which emphasized sudden anger or passion on the part of the
perpetrator, Bermúdez’s story paid close attention to his state of mind. As the reader will
recall, Bermúdez felt himself to be ‘bitter’ and ‘melancholy’ with a ‘pounding heart’ when
he began to suspect his wife of dishonoring him; he was ‘defensive and disturbed,’ driven
by his ‘fears’ and ‘imagination.’ These are mental states that could explain what otherwise
would be duplicity and premeditation on the part of the testator, who had deceived his
wife with caresses and planted a sword and dagger in the headboard in order to kill her.
But in testifying under oath to Pereyra, Bermúdez confessed events that had occurred
fifteen months earlier, and authorities had not yet interceded. Why tell such a detailed and
incriminating story which could have remained untold? Bermúdez’s testimony in memory
of the Virgin’s miracles was acknowledgement of divine favors received, and public
414 K. S. COUSINS

confession of private guilt—his unseemly, even criminal conduct. Bermúdez’s risky com-
munal admission, like Antonio Pérez’s, was the price each had to pay for indulging in
illegal ‘single combat,’ ‘scrapping,’ and ‘surprise attacks’ sparked by imagined insult and
framed as defense of personal honor (Frevert 1995, 10–13). Such unrestrained acts of
self-interest and self-love dishonored God, offended their wives, and violated the accepted
norms of the Marian emotional community in Chiquinquirá. Public contrition and con-
fession were required to confirm an ongoing place within that community and others con-
nected to it. Still, the communal acts of confession by Pérez and Bermúdez were
circumscribed, quite different from those enacted by the Angel of Gualí. She addressed
the expectations of the offended emotional community through acts of contrition for
the rest of her life: cutting her hair, giving away her luxurious clothing, wearing rags
and coarse clothing, sleeping on a harsh bed, and devoting herself to God after the
Virgin of Chiquinquirá healed her and rescued her from a dishonorable life. One
wonders if the Angel herself chose such relentless penance as Pereyra and Tobar would
have us believe, or if the requirements of the emotional community were so gendered.
For their part, Pérez and Bermúdez offered their risky public testimonies as articulated
and inscribed votive offerings, seeking confirmation of ongoing membership in the
emotional community of the Virgin of Chiquinquirá. I do not know if municipal auth-
orities ever acted against Bartolomé Bermúdez; I have not found record of any judicial
proceedings against him in Colombian colonial archives. But that both men were reinte-
grated into the emotional community is first suggested by the inclusion of their testimo-
nies in Pereyra’s ‘Memoria’ and then confirmed fifty years later by Pedro de Tobar y
Buendía. In his true history of the Virgin of Chiquinquirá, Tobar identified Pérez and Ber-
múdez by name even as he stripped their complicated stories of personal detail, flattening
and shaping them into tales of moral and spiritual redemption (1986 [1694], 308–11).

Conclusion
I have suggested in this essay that extant juridical miracle testimonies from the colonial
Spanish world are an unusual and unusually rich genre of historical source material. I
have demonstrated that three early texts recounting supernatural interventions attributed
to the Virgin of the Rosary of Chiquinquirá, particularly Fray Juan de Pereyra’s
‘Memoria,’ offer multiple points of entry on to life and lived worlds in the seventeenth-
century New Kingdom of Granada. One point of entry approaches the emotion worlds of
the miracle testators. The testimonies reveal that people in the New Kingdom experienced
a constellation of emotions, among them love for God and the Virgin Mary; parental, famil-
ial, affectionate, sexual, and romantic love; joy, jealousy, guilt, shame, and rage. How these
emotions were expressed was necessarily constrained by local emotional communities and
cultural conventions, all of which were unfixed and malleable. Thus, the glimpses we see
through the source texts are in one sense merely revealing snapshots of a place in time.
Even so, the testimonies and accounts preserve more than individual experiences. They
also suggest social commonalities, shared lexicons, and collective mentalities, including
notions about love which have both evolved and continued over time. The miracle
accounts show that divine love was believed reciprocal and linked to human love. Repeat-
edly, all kinds of people turned to the Virgin for interventions in their own lives and the
lives of people they loved, especially their children and spouses. People understood that
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 415

love for the divine required performance in the forms of active devotion and vows fulfilled,
and that the Virgin might chastise or punish them, as she did in the cases of the mentally ill
child, Lucas, and the sexually obsessed Raymundo de Vargas. People seemed also to
understand that although their love for Mary did not ‘imply safety’ (Orsi 2016, 67) or
the granting of their intercessory petitions, they still might expect to receive supernatural
comfort even in the face of loss. In this sense, then, divine love reified human love.
The miracle testimonies pivoting on offended love reveal that spousal violence in the
seventeenth-century New Kingdom, as elsewhere in the early modern Spanish world,
was underreported, confirming and elaborating on the suggestions of Uribe-Uran
(2001, 2013, 2016). How common was it to plot and attempt to perpetrate violent
revenge, as well-known surgeon Bartolomé Bermúdez and others did, without attracting
the attention of local authorities? How prevalent within the colonial New Kingdom was
underlying social acceptance of—and complicity, not least through silence, in—such out-
raged attitudes among and reactive physical violence by men? This place, the New
Kingdom, was developing in the seventeenth century the cultures from which would
emerge the people of the nineteenth, when ‘women [were] regularly subjected to physical,
psychological and sexual abuse by their intimate partners’ (Uribe-Uran 2013, 6). The colo-
nial New Kingdom was incubating the complex cultures of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, Colombian societies composed of people who would—at poles of a spectrum—
both inspire or execute the brutal assassinations and displacements of La Violencia,43 and
author the poetics of affection, passion, and (dis)honor of El amor en los tiempos del cólera
(Love in the time of cholera).44 From the seventeenth century until today, people in this
place have continued to kneel at the feet of the Mother of God in her advocation as the
Virgin of Chiquinquirá. What are the historical connections within the emotion category
of love: among divine and human love, love and offended love, passion and affection? This
essay offers detail and insights from uncommon sources, adding to and enriching the lit-
erature of colonial Spanish America, the New Kingdom of Granada, and the history of
emotions in the seventeenth century; nevertheless, questions abound.
Before historical interpreters attempt to discern ways of feeling and thinking in the past,
we do well to acknowledge the caveat posed by cultural historian Peter Burke: ‘ … to
understand the behavior of people in other cultures it is not sufficient to imagine
oneself in their shoes, in their situation; it is also necessary to imagine their definition
of the situation, to see it through their eyes’ (1986, 442). In seeking a way into the
emotion worlds of the testators in Chiquinquirá, I have endeavored to imagine empathe-
tically, even as the voices embedded in the neglected trilogy of historical sources them-
selves clamor to be heard. Some of the miracle testimonies as Pereyra recorded them
may seem to us patterned and formulaic. But these patterns and forms, crafted across
different genres and honed over centuries of Christian narrative tradition, were familiar
and recognizable to believers within the overarching and local emotional communities
of believers, as perhaps they are still.

Epilogue
In September 2017, tens of thousands of people watched, from the crowded sanctuary or
the plaza outside the cathedral in Bogotá and on televisions or computer screens, as the
national patroness of Colombia, the numinous icon of the Virgin of the Rosary of
416 K. S. COUSINS

Chiquinquirá, was venerated by Pope Francis.45 Francis was the second bishop of Rome to
pray before her: John Paul II did so in 1986. But while popes come occasionally, pilgrims
arrive at the modern shrine complex in Chiquinquirá every day to gaze at the Virgin and
pray for her intercessions in their human lives. They light candles and pray novenas, place
wax effigies on a special altar in the basilica, or crawl on bared knees up the aisle to the holy
image—all vulnerable enactments of divine love which reveal human emotion. More than
four hundred years after the original miracle of renewal, a local emotional community of
the Virgin and the cult of devotion originally shaped by the miracle testators of the infor-
mación jurídica, the ‘Memoria,’ and the Verdadera histórica relación (and countless
unnamed people), remain vibrant in Chiquinquirá.

Notes
1. ‘Memoria de los sucesos raros que ha obrado Nuestro Señor por intercesión de Nuestra
Señora de Chiquinquirá’ [1651-1654] (hereafter ‘Memoria’), f. 149r/v. This is an uncatalo-
gued manuscript from the Archivo de la Provincia de San Luis Bertrán de Colombia, Orden
de Predicadores, Bogotá, Colombia (hereafter APBC). The testimonies referenced in this
essay were originally recorded in Spanish by hand on paper during the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries. For typed transcriptions of the paleography and translations of the testimo-
nies into English, see Cousins 2018.
2. I use the expression ‘Catholic Christians’ in this essay to distinguish Catholics from Protes-
tant Christians, generally all of whom in the early modern period considered themselves to
have embraced the ‘true faith’ and many of whom referred to themselves simply as
Christians.
3. Miri Rubin posited that after the eleventh century, the Virgin Mary herself, ‘the lady of inter-
cession, became increasingly an enabling site for reflection on the expression of emotion’
(2009, 79). Barbara Rosenwein has suggested that scholars look at emotional communities
‘seek[ing] above all to uncover systems of feeling, to establish what these communities
(and the individuals within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them (for it
is about such things that people express emotions)’ (2010, 11). I have found these insights
and suggestions to be fruitful when applied to the devotional community of Mary in seven-
teenth-century Chiquinquirá. Before Rosenwein published her theoretical work on
‘emotional communities’ in 2006, William Reddy proposed the concepts of ‘emotives’ (basi-
cally ‘emotion talk and emotional gestures’) and ‘emotional regimes,’ which he saw as
broader political or societal structures (e.g., the emotional regime of the eighteenth-
century French court) (1997; 2001). Both frameworks are useful in thinking about the
human emotions embedded in the miracle testimonies of the Virgin of Chiquinquirá.
4. Research psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, who has published exten-
sively on aspects of her ‘theory of constructed emotion,’ posits that ‘an emotion category
refers to a population of highly variable, situated instances’ (2017a, 22); put more simply,
‘an emotion is not a thing but a category of instances, and any emotion category has tremen-
dous variety’ (2017b, 16).
5. Recent general work by historians and social scientists on emotions and affect includes
Boddice 2018, Broomhall 2017, Figlerowicz 2012, Frevert 2011, Gross 2006, Leys 2011,
Matt and Stearns 2014, Plamper 2015, Reddy 2001, Rosenwein 2002 and 2016, and Wetherell
2015. On theories of emotion in historical study, especially through the lenses of cognitive
psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience, see Reddy 2014.
6. For studies on and around notions of love in colonial Spanish America, see French 2015,
Johnson and Lipsett-Rivera 1998, Seed 1988, Uribe-Uran 2016, and Villa-Flores and
Lipsett-Rivera 2014. Recent such studies focused on the New Kingdom of Granada
include Dueñas-Vargas 2015 and von Germeten 2013.
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 417

7. In this essay, I limit my thinking and scope to heteronormative expressions of human love.
Non-heterosexual forms of love and desire may have abounded in the New Kingdom but are
not presented in Pereyra’s ‘Memoria’ or my other sources, nor have I encountered hints of or
references to same sex or other forms of sexual relationships in pertinent archival documents.
For more on this subject in colonial Spanish America and on such silences, see Lewis 2007;
Sigal 2003, 2007, and 2009; and Tortorici 2018.
8. The historiography on the Virgin of Guadalupe is robust (e.g. Brading 2001, Poole 1995, and
Taylor 1987, 1999, and 2003); that of the Virgin of Copacabana slightly less so (MacCormack
1984, 2010, and Salles-Reese 1997). The literature on the Virgin of Chiquinquirá is less devel-
oped yet, authored primarily by vocational religious scholars of the sacred (Ariza 1950) and
most recently by art historians (Acosta Luna 2011, 214–26, 313–17, 400–4; Cummins 1999;
and Vences Vidal 2008).
9. The first three testators in the información jurídica, all eyewitnesses, were women: two Spa-
niards and one indigenous. Thereafter, the testators were of European descent. Both men and
women are represented. The full title of the información jurídica, an uncatalogued manu-
script held by the APBC, is ‘Proceso eclesiástico sobre el milagro de la renovación de la
imagen de Nuestra Señora de Chiquinquirá, 1586-1588 [sic], original’ (hereafter ‘Proceso’
or información jurídica); it has been transcribed in Ariza 1950, 15-83. I am grateful for
digital images of this manuscript provided by the prior provincial, Fray Orlando Rueda
Acevedo, O.P., and archivist Martha Hincapié.
10. The 142 testators of the ‘Memoria’ comprise 82 men and 60 women; Spanish, creole (an
identifier in the ‘Memoria’ which includes mestizos), and indigenous; and elite (council-
men, clergymen, and caciques) to pilgrim peasant and poorer urban dwellers. Juan de
Pereyra did not explain in the ‘Memoria’ how he selected deponents, the specific procedure
he used to first hear and then record miracle testimonies, the purpose of or intended audi-
ence for his collection of miracle testimonies, or under whose direct authority he compiled
these testimonies between 1651 and 1654. However, because Pedro de Tobar y Buendía
wrote in his sacred history that the original información juridica had been misplaced
sometime after 1589 until 1681 when he recovered it from the cathedral in Santafé de
Bogotá, it seems likely that Pereyra sought to authenticate the ongoing miracles of the
Virgin of Chiquinquirá, thus undergirding the legitimacy of the devotion (Cousins 2018,
especially Chapter 10).
11. William B. Taylor, personal communication, 19 March 2018.
12. The full name of Tobar’s work, published in Madrid in 1694, is Verdadera histórica
relación del origen, manifestación y prodigiosa renovación por sí misma y milagros de la
imagen de la sacratísima Virgen María Madre de Dios Nuestra Señora del Rosario de
Chiquinquirá.
13. In this essay and in the dissertation from which it grew, I rarely attempt to qualify witnesses
or their stories through cautionary phrases such as ‘alleged witness’ or ‘claimed to have wit-
nessed.’ I stipulate that the stories the witnesses related in their sworn testimonies have been
‘filtered’ and/or ‘constructed’ to varying degrees. Further, I am not concerned with the vera-
city of the stories; that is, whether a miracle or marvel actually occurred or not. I care only
that the teller and the recording notary believed a supernatural event or intervention had
occurred. On the compelling need for ‘a historicism that can make sense of each non-
modern lifeworld on its own ontological terms, as a distinct real world in its own right,’
see Anderson 2015, 789.
14. In addition to Taylor 2016, see Fallena Montaño 2013, Granados Salinas 2012, Graziano
2016, and Hughes 2010.
15. APBC, ‘Memoria,’ ff. 90v–91r.
16. Regarding ‘miracles of vengeance,’ in which a saint punishes the supplicant for not fulfilling
the terms of a personal vow, see Christian 1981, 39, and Klaniczay 2010, 238, 241–43. On the
idea that Mary might ‘protect humans from divine judgment’ even while she also ‘threatens
them with it,’ or ‘chastise’ them for various errors or failures, see Orsi 2016, 66–67.
17. APBC, ‘Proceso,’ f. 1r.
418 K. S. COUSINS

18. APBC, ‘Proceso,’ ff. 1r, 3v.

19. On the ‘recollecting,’ ‘remodeling,’ and ‘construction’ of saints and, by inference, of beatas
and holy men and women, see Delooz 1983, 194–99.
20. APBC, ‘Memoria,’ ff. 142r–44r.
21. The reported reaction of local women in Mariquita—i.e., reprimanding and distancing them-
selves from the scandalous Angel—contrasts with Nicole von Germeten’s suggestion that
‘elite women [of the colonial period] were not all that concerned about associating with a
reputedly “fallen woman,” even a confirmed prostitute’ (2013, 180).
22. In Pereyra’s telling, the Angel herself chose to suffer as payment for her former sins. See Sil-
verman 2001, esp. 111–30 on ‘Lay Piety and the Valorization of Pain.’
23. APBC, ‘Proceso,’ f. 8r.
24. APBC, ‘Memoria,’ ff. 14v–15r.
25. APBC, ‘Memoria,’ ff. 80v–81v.
26. APBC, ‘Memoria,’ f. 54r/v.
27. APBC, ‘Memoria,’ ff. 51v–52r.
28. APBC, ‘Memoria, f. 52r.
29. For a recent essay on implementation in Peru of Tridentine recommendations regarding
marriage freedom, see Latassa 2016.
30. Patricia Seed argues that in early colonial documents from Mexico, the word ‘love’ is not
used in connection with marriage; notions of romantic love are found instead in the literature
of the Golden Age (1988, 47–53). For a recent study on changing ideas of love and social behav-
ior in the New Kingdom during and after the Independence era, see Dueñas-Vargas 2015.
31. APBC, ‘Memoria,’ f. 32r/v.
32. APBC, ‘Memoria,’ ff. 108r–9r.
33. APBC, ‘Memoria,’ f. 98r/v.
34. APBC, ‘Memoria,’ ff. 132v–33r.
35. APBC, ‘Memoria,’ f. 38r/v.
36. Ann Twinam observes wryly that while contemporary elites recognized honor as tangible and
heritable, according to historic guidelines and popular practice, modern academics ‘chop the
honor complex into pieces—virtue, status, honor, shame’ (1998, 73).
37. Kimberly Gauderman argues for ‘decentralized gender authority,’ however, questioning
whether ‘a sexual double standard for women and men was universally accepted by colonial
Spanish American society and that men’s physical aggression against female family members
was considered acceptable behavior’ (2005, 71–72).
38. APBC, ‘Memoria,’ f. 121r/v.
39. In a study of seventeenth-century homicide trial records for two regions in New Spain,
William Taylor found that ‘[a]mong Indians in both regions, an important proportion of
the victims were wives, sex partners, and sex rivals’ (1979, 85).
40. APBC, ‘Memoria,’ ff. 50r–51r.
41. APBC, ‘Memoria,’ ff. 75r–76r.
42. APBC, ‘Memoria,’ ff. 70r–72v.
43. The Violence, or La Violencia, was a period between the 1940s and the 1960s of
unremittent rural and urban violence in Colombia. Although tensions between the Conser-
vative and Liberal parties were implicated in La Violencia, scholars suggest the causes were
more complex, and included the need for land reform, socioeconomic issues, banditry, and
deeply embedded systems of patronage. The historiography is extensive. For a sampling, see
Díaz Uribe 1985; Guzmàn Campos et al. 1988; and Roldán 2002.
44. For example, ‘The lesson was not interrupted, but the girl raised her eyes to see who was
passing by the window, and that casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love
that still had not ended half a century later;’ and ‘Lorenzo Daza played for high stakes,
because his sweetheart was the darling of a typical family of the region: an intricate tribe
of wild women and softhearted men who were obsessed to the point of dementia with
their sense of honor’ (García Márquez 2003, 55, 86).
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 419

45. Because Pope Francis’s schedule did not permit him to travel to Chiquinquirá, the Virgin of Chi-
quinquirá was transported via helicopter and motorcade to the Metropolitan Cathedral Basilica
of the Immaculate Conception in Bogotá, where the pope prayed before her in silence for seven
minutes. See, for example, ‘El papa Francisco se inclinó ante la Virgen de Chiquinquirá,’ El
Tiempo, 7 September 2017, http://www.eltiempo.com/vida/religion/papa-francisco-visita-a-la-
virgen-de-chiquinquira-en-bogota-128236 [last accessed 13 January 2018]; and ‘En la catedral
el Papa venera a la Virgen de Chiquinquirá,’ Zenit, 7 September 2017, https://es.zenit.org/
articles/en-la-catedral-el-pontifice-venera-a-la-virgen-de-chiquinquira/ [last accessed 13
January 2018].

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Kenneth Mills and Natalie Zemon Davis for thinking and working with me on
the dissertation project in which this essay is rooted. I am sincerely grateful to Dana Leibsohn and
the anonymous reviewers for their deep readings of the original and revised versions of the manu-
script, for their encouragement, and for critical recommendations. I also appreciate the insightful
suggestions offered by Jason Dyck, Rosario Granados, and David Sheffler.

Biographical note
Karen Shears Cousins received her PhD. from the University of Toronto in 2018 and is an affiliated
Assistant Professor in History and Director of Undergraduate Research at the University of North
Florida. She is interested in the history of emotions, materiality, and the senses, and in ways people
have conceived of and interacted with the sacred. Her dissertation, ‘Miracles and Memory: The
Virgin of Chiquinquirá and her People in the Seventeenth-Century New Kingdom of Granada,’
is an anthropological history of society and culture centered around that Marian advocation, and
the first comprehensive study of an unpublished juridical miracle collection compiled between 1651
and 1654 by Fray Juan de Pereyra.

Works cited
Abramson, Kate, and Adam Leite. 2011. Love as a reactive emotion. The Philosophical Quarterly 61
(245): 673–99.
Acosta Luna, Olga Isabel. 2011. Milagrosas imágenes marianas en el Nuevo Reino de Granada.
Madrid: Iberoamericana.
Anderson, Greg. 2015. Retrieving the lost worlds of the past: The case for an ontological turn.
American Historical Review 120 (3): 787–810.
Ariza S., O.P., Fr. Alberto E. 1950. Hagiografía de la milagrosa imagen de Nuestra Señora del Rosario
de Chiquinquirá. Bogotá: Editorial Iqueima.
———. 1992. Los dominicos en Colombia. Vols. 1 and 2. Santafé de Bogotá: Provincia de San Luis
Bertrán de Colombia.
Barrett, Lisa Feldman. 2017a. Categories and their role in the science of emotion. Psychological
Inquiry 28 (1): 20–26.
———. 2017b. How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Boston: Mariner Books.
Boddice, Rob. 2018. The history of emotions. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Brading, David A. 2001. Mexican phoenix. Our Lady of Guadalupe: image and tradition across five
centuries. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Broomhall, Susan, ed. 2017. Early modern emotions: An introduction. New York: Routledge.
Burke, Peter. 1986. Strengths and weaknesses of the history of mentalities. History of European
Ideas 7 (5): 439–51.
Burkholder, Mark. 1998. Honor and honors in colonial Spanish America. In The faces of honor: sex,
shame and violence in colonial Latin America, edited by Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-
Rivera, 18–44. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
420 K. S. COUSINS

Cañeque, Alejandro. 2014. The emotions of power: love, anger, and fear, or how to rule the Spanish
empire. In Emotions and daily life in colonial Mexico, edited by Javier Villa-Flores and Sonya
Lipsett-Rivera, 89–121. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Christian Jr., William A. 1981. Local religion in sixteenth-century Spain. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Cousins, Karen Shears. 2018. Miracles and memory: the Virgin of Chiquinquirá and her people in
the seventeenth-century New Kingdom of Granada. PhD. diss., University of Toronto.
Cummins, Tom. 1999. On the colonial formation of comparison: the Virgin of Chiquinquirá, the
Virgin of Guadalupe, and cloth. Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 74–75: 51–77.
Curcio-Nagy, Linda A. 2014. The language of desire in colonial Mexico. In Emotions and daily life
in colonial Mexico, edited by Javier Villa-Flores and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, 44–65. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press.
Davidson, Richard J. 2002. Seven sins in the study of emotion: correctives from affective neuro-
science. Brain and Cognition 52: 129–32.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. 1987. Fiction in the archives: pardon tales and their tellers in sixteenth-
century France. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Delooz, Pierre. 1983. Towards a sociological study of canonized sainthood in the Catholic Church.
In Saints and their cults: studies in religious sociology, folklore and history, edited by Stephen
Wilson, 189–216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Díaz Uribe, Alberto, ed. 1985. Once ensayos sobre la violencia. Bogotá: Centro Gaitán y Fondo
Editorial CEREC.
Dueñas-Vargas, Guiomar. 2015. Of love and other passions: elites, politics, and family in Bogotá,
Colombia, 1778–1870. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Earle, Rebecca. 2005. Letters and love in colonial Spanish America. The Americas 62 (1): 17–46.
Epstein, Robert, Mayuri Pandit, and Mansi Thakar. 2013. How love emerges in arranged marriages:
two cross-cultural studies. Journal of Comparative Family Studies 44 (3): 341–60.
Fallena Montaño, Rosa Denise. 2013. La imagen de María: simbolización de conquista y fundación
en los valles de Puebla-Tlaxcala: la Conquistadora de Puebla, la Virgen Asunción de Tlaxcala y
Nuestra Señora de Los Remedios de Cholula. PhD. diss., Universidad Autónoma de México.
Figlerowicz, Marta. 2012. Affect theory dossier: an introduction. Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and
Social Sciences 20 (2): 3–18.
Finucane, Ronald C. 1997. The rescue of the innocents: endangered children in medieval miracles.
New York: St. Martin’s Press.
French, William E. 2015. The heart in the glass jar: love letters, bodies, and the law in Mexico.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Frevert, Ute. 1995. Men of honour: a social and cultural history of the duel. Translated by Anthony
Williams. Cambridge: Polity Press.
———. 2011. Emotions in history: lost and found. The Natalie Zemon Davis annual lecture series.
Budapest: Central European University.
García Márquez, Gabriel. 2003. Love in the time of cholera. Translated by Edith Grossman.
New York: Vintage Books.
Garrido, Margarita. 1998. Entre el honor y la obediencia: prácticas de desacato en la Nueva Granada
colonial. Historia y Sociedad 5: 19–35.
Gauderman, Kimberly. 2005. The authority of gender: marital discord and social order in colonial
Quito. In New world orders: violence, sanction, and authority in the colonial Americas, edited by
John Smolenski and Thomas J. Humphrey, 71–91. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
González, Ondina E., and Bianca Premo, eds. 2007. Raising an empire: children in early modern
Iberia and colonial Latin America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Granados Salinas, Rosario Inés. 2012. Fervent faith. Devotion, aesthetics, and society in the cult of
Our Lady of Remedios (Mexico, 1520–1811). PhD. diss., Harvard University.
Graziano, Frank. 2016. Miraculous images and votive offerings in Mexico. Oxford. Oxford
University Press.
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 421

Gross, Daniel M. 2006. The secret history of emotion: from Aristotle’s rhetoric to modern brain
science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Guzmán Campos, Germán, Orlando Fals-Borda, and Eduardo Umaña Luna. 1988. La violencia en
Colombia: estudio de un proceso social. 2 vols. Bogotá: Círculo de Lectores.
Hecht, Tobias. 2002. Minor omissions: children in Latin American history and society. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press.
Hughes, Jennifer Scheper. 2010. Biography of a Mexican crucifix: lived religion and the local faith
from the conquest to the present. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Johnson, Lyman L., and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, eds. 1998. The faces of honor: sex, shame and violence
in colonial Latin America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Klaniczay, Gábor. 2010. Healing with certain conditions: the pedagogy of medieval miracles.
Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes 19: 235–48.
Kroll, Jerome. 1977. The concept of childhood in the middle ages. Journal of the History of the
Behavior Sciences 13: 384–93.
Krötzl, Christian. 1989. Parent-child relations in medieval Scandinavia according to Scandinavian
miracle collections. Scandinavian Journal of History 14 (1): 21–37.
Latassa, Pilar. 2016. ‘If they remained as mere words’: Trent, marriage, and freedom in the
Viceroyalty of Peru, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The Americas 73 (1): 13–38.
Larkin, Brian. 2010. The very nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and religious reform in Bourbon
Mexico City. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Lewis, Laura A. 2007. From sodomy to superstition: the active pathic and bodily transgressions in
New Spain. Ethnohistory 54 (1): 129–57.
Leys, Ruth. 2011. The turn to affect: A critique. Critical Inquiry 37 (3): 434–72.
Lindholm, Charles. 2006. Romantic love and anthropology. Etnofoor 19 (1): 5–21.
MacCormack, Sabine. 1984. From the sun of the Incas to the Virgin of Copacabana. Representations
8: 30–60.
———. 2010. Human and divine love in a pastoral setting: the histories of Copacabana on Lake
Titicaca. Representations 112 (1): 54–86.
Mandell, Elisa C. 2010. Posthumous portraits of children in early modern Spain and Mexico.
Hispanic Issues On Line 7: 68–88. http://hdl.handle.net/11299/182931 [last accessed 13
January 2018].
Matt, Susan J., and Peter N. Stearns, eds. 2014. Doing emotions history. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
Mause, Lloyd de. 1974. The history of childhood: the evolution of parent-child relationships as a
factor in history. London: The Psychohistory Press.
Neu, Jerome. 2002. Reply to my critics. Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for
Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 108 (1/2): 159–71.
Newton, Hannah. 2017. Holy affections. In Early modern emotions: an introduction, edited by
Susan Broomhall, 67–70. New York: Routledge.
Oord, Thomas Jay. 2005. The love racket: defining love and agape for the love-and-science research
program. Zygon 40 (4): 919–38.
Orsi, Robert A. 2016. History and presence. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press.
Panksepp, Jaak. 1998. Affective neuroscience: the foundations of human and animal emotions.
New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2011. What is basic about basic emotions? Lasting lessons from affective neuroscience.
Emotion Review 3 (4): 387–96.
Plamper, Jan, ed. 2015. The history of emotions: an introduction. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Poole, Stafford. 1995. Our Lady of Guadalupe: the origins and sources of a Mexican national symbol,
1531–1797. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Premo, Bianca. 2008. How Latin America’s history of childhood came of age. The Journal of the
History of Childhood and Youth 1 (2): 63–76.
422 K. S. COUSINS

Ramírez, María Himelda. 2006. Los discursos sobre el abandono a la infancia en la sociedad barraca
de Santa Fe de Bogotá, siglo XVII. Tabula Rasa 4: 203–16.
Ramos Gavilán, Alonso. 1621. Historia del célebre santuario de Nuestra Señora de Copacabana y sus
milagros e invención de la cruz de Carabúco. Lima: Gerónimo de Contreras.
Reddy, William M. 1997. Against constructionism: the historical ethnography of emotions. Current
Anthropology 38 (3): 327–51.
———. 2001. The navigation of feeling: a framework for the history of emotions. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
———. 2012. The making of romantic love: longing and sexuality in Europe, South Asia & Japan,
900–1200 CE. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2014. Emotional styles and modern forms of life. In Sexualized brains: scientific modeling of
emotional intelligence from a cultural perspective, edited by Nicole C. Karafyllis and Gotlind
Ulshöfer, 81–100. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Restrepo Zea, Estrela. 2007. El concertaje laboral de los niños abandonados en Bogotá, 1642–1885.
In Historia de la infancia en América Latina, edited by Pablo Rodríguez Jiménez and María
Emma Manarelli, 263–80. Bogotá: Universidad Externado de Colombia.
Rodríguez Jiménez, Pablo. 2007. Los hijos del sol: un acercamiento a la infancia en la América
Prehispánica. In Historia de la infancia en América Latina, edited by Pablo Rodríguez
Jiménez and María Emma Manarelli, 27–60. Bogotá: Universidad Externado de Colombia.
Roldán, Mary. 2002. Blood and fire: la violencia in Antioquia, Colombia, 1946–1953. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Rosenwein, Barbara H. 2002. Worrying about emotions in history. American Historical Review 7
(3): 821–45.
———. 2006. Emotional communities in the early middle ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
———. 2010. Problems and methods in the history of emotions. Passions in Context I (1): 1–32.
———. 2016. Generations of feeling: a history of emotion, 600–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Rubin, Miri. 2009. Emotion and devotion: the meaning of Mary in medieval religious cultures.
Budapest: Central European University Press.
Salles-Reese, Verónica. 1997. From Viracocha to the Virgin of Copacabana: representation of the
sacred at Lake Titicaca. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Schroeder, O.P., Reverend H. J., trans. 1978. The canons and decrees of the Council of Trent [1545–
1563]. Charlotte, NC: Tan Books.
Seed, Patricia. 1988. To love, honor, and obey in colonial Mexico: conflicts over marriage choice,
1574–1821. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Sigal, Pete. 2003. Male homosexuality in colonial Latin America. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
———. 2007. Queer Nahuatl: Sahagun’s faggots and sodomites, lesbians and hermaphrodites.
Ethnohistory 54 (1): 9–34.
———. 2009. Latin America and the challenge of globalizing the history of sexuality. American
Historical Review 114 (5): 1340–53.
Silverman, Lisa. 2001. Tortured subjects: pain, truth, and the body in early modern France. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Spurling, Geoffrey. 1998. Honor, sexuality, and the colonial church: the sins of Dr. Gonzalez, cathe-
dral canon. In The faces of honor: sex, shame and violence in colonial Latin America, edited by
Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, 45–67. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press.
Taylor, Scott K. 2008. Honor and violence in Golden Age Spain. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Taylor, William B. 1979. Drinking, homicide, and rebellion in colonial Mexican villages. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
———. 1987. The Virgin of Guadalupe in New Spain: an inquiry into the social history of Marian
devotion. American Ethnologist 14 (1): 9–33.
———. 1999. Our Lady of Guadalupe and friends: the Virgin Mary in colonial Mexico City. Morrison
Library Inaugural Address Series. Berkeley: University of California.
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 423

———. 2003. Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe in the seventeenth century: hagiography and beyond. In
Colonial saints: discovering the holy in the Americas, edited by Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff,
277–98. New York: Routledge.
———. 2005. Two shrines of the Cristo Renovado: religion and peasant politics in late colonial
Mexico. The American Historical Review 110 (4): 954–74.
———. 2010. Shrines & miraculous images: religious life in Mexico before the Reforma. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press.
———. 2011. Marvels & miracles in late colonial Mexico: three texts in context. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press.
———. 2016. Theater of a thousand wonders: a history of miraculous images and shrines in New
Spain. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Tobar y Buendía, O.P., Fray Pedro de. 1986. Verdadera histórica relación del origen, manifestación y
prodigiosa renovación por sí misma y milagros de la imagen de la sacratísima Virgen María Madre
de Dios Nuestra Señora del Rosario de Chiquinquirá. [Facsimile of the first edition of 1694.]
Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo.
Tortorici, Zeb. 2018. Sins against nature: sex and archives in colonial New Spain. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Twinam, Ann. 1998. The negotiation of honor: elites, sexuality, and illegitimacy in eighteenth-
century Spanish America. In The faces of honor: sex, shame and violence in colonial Latin
America, edited by Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, 68–102. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press.
———. 1999. Public lives, private secrets: gender, honor, sexuality, and illegitimacy in colonial
Spanish America. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Uribe-Uran, Victor M. 2001. Colonial ‘baracunatanas’ and their nasty men: spousal homicides and
the law in late colonial New Granada. Journal of Social History 35 (1): 43–72.
———. 2013. From ‘domestic violence’ to violence(s) against women in modern Mexico and Latin
America. Hemisphere 22: 5–13.
———. 2016. Fatal love: spousal killers, law, and punishment in the late colonial Spanish Atlantic.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Vences Vidal, Magdalena. 2008. La Virgen de Chiquinquirá, Colombia: Afirmación dogmática y
frente de identidad. Mexico City: Museo de la Basílica de Guadalupe.
Villa-Flores, Javier, and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, eds. 2014. Emotions and daily life in colonial Mexico.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Villamarín, Juan A., and Judith E. Villamarín. 1982. The concept of nobility in colonial Santafé de
Bogota. In Essays in the political, economic and social history of colonial Latin America, edited by
Karen Spalding, 125–53. Newark: University of Delaware.
von Germeten, Nicole. 2013. Violent delights, violent ends: sex, race, & honor in colonial Cartagena
de Indias. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Wetherell, Margaret. 2015. Trends in the turn to affect: a social psychological critique. Body &
Society 21 (2): 139–66.
Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. 2008. Women and gender in early modern Europe. 3rd ed. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.