Sainthood and Citizenship in Seventeenth-Century Peru: The Feast of Beatification of Rose of Lima

Research Seminar

Data: 18.09.2018
Ora: 14:00
Relatore: Carlos Gálvez Peña
Luogo: Villino Stroganoff, Via Gregoriana 22, 00187 Rom
Ospite: Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte
Contatto: paulinyi@biblhertz.it

Sainthood and Citizenship in Seventeenth-Century Peru: The Feast of Beatification of Rose of Lima

Roughly two years after Rose of Lima was beatified (1669), the Peruvian Dominican Order, asked Juan Meléndez, the Chronicler of the Order, to write a description of the festivities with which the City of the Kings celebrated the promotion to sainthood of her most ilustrious child. Meléndez saved no rhetorical effort to stress the importance of the celebrations that took place in 1668 and 1669.

In that regard, the Festiva Pompa (1671) is not a significant departure from other printed religious celebrations of the period. Yet, a careful reading reveals Melendez' effort to underline the importance of the creole Rose as the axis of a renewed sacramental and political alliance between the Crown and the city gentry evidenced in the processional parades with which both the letter of the Queen Regent and the Papal Bull were received in Lima. Such an intentional design of the city cabildo and the Peruvian Dominicans to appropriate the parades of the Royal Banner and the Holy Sacrament also meant to make Rose a symbolic landmark in the relationship between monarch and his Limenian subjects.

Research Seminar organized by Fernando Loffredo

Carlos Gálvez Peña is Secretario Académico de la Facultad de Letras y Ciencias Humanas at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities of the same university. He obtained a PhD in History at Columbia University and has widely published on the relationship between historiography and religious writing, epic and politics in Colonial Peru.