Santa Catalina, Arequipa, Nun's Cell

1600-1800

Name(s) currently unknown

Arequipa, PER

This room in the convent of Santa Catalina in Arequipa, Peru (called convento in Spanish) was once the living quarters of a Catholic nun. In the 17th and 18th centuries, when the convent was most vibrant, Santa Catalina covered several city blocks and housed about 450 nuns and their servants.

Santa Catalina was founded in 1579 in Arequipa, by a wealthy and well-connected widow, doña María de Guzmán. Before she turned 40, she became the first to live within the convent. She also served as its first prioress. Over time, income from properties across Arequipa would support this establishment, the health of the convent being intimately tied to the financial success of local nuns’ families and the economy of Arequipa itself.

This cell—restored for modern visitors to the convent—appears austere, but nuns of Santa Catalina were able to furnish their apartments elegantly if they had family funds to do so.

Most of the nuns were Creoles from affluent families, some whom brought to the convent black and mulatta slaves. Some of the young women to become nuns were identified in convent records as the illegitimate daughters of wealthy men, and others as mestizas. Thus, the world within the walls of convent, with its mix of ethnicities and stratifications by class and birth, mirrored the world outside its walls.

The nuns of Santa Catalina (Saint Catherine) were the female branch of the Dominican order, but unlike Dominican friars, the nuns were a cloistered order, living out their lives within the confines of the convent walls. Convent life was sometimes chosen for daughters by parents, but it was often freely chosen by widows and unmarried women, being one of the few social options open to women besides marriage.

Carolyn S. Dean

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

Burns, Kathryn. 1999. Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru. Durham: Duke University Press.

Linares Málaga, Eloy. 1972. Guía didáctica para visitar el Monasterio de Santa Catalina. Arequipa: s.n.

Monasterio de Santa Catalina.

Zegarra López, Dante. 1985. Monasterio de Santa Catalina de Sena de Arequipa y Da. Ana de Monteagudo, priora. Arequipa: Corporación Departamental de Desarrollo de Arequipa.