The burgeoning production of Latin American city- and country-oriented readers in the last decade (Lima, Colombia, Bolivia, etc.) makes each new compilation a competitive challenge. A Companion to Early Modern Lima, however, is well poised as a supplementary edition, containing secondary works focused on a single city in a very specific time period. From its foundation in 1535, Lima was a colonial center that wrested centrality from Cuzco, the old capital of the Inca and perhaps the largest functioning city in the Andes when Pizarro arrived in late 1533. This viceregal capital became a magnet for transoceanic trade, imperial administration, and culture, and over the years it developed its own metropolitan personality.

This volume asserts the centrality of Lima in early modern historiography even though it acknowledges the dispersed power of the Spanish empire, whose political solidity would not have been possible without the existence of interconnected cities (3). The focus is on the variegated nature of the “cultural actors” and networks that engaged in Lima's historical making. Indeed, the compilation renders Lima as a historically complex web of interactions between different groups of indigenous, African, Asian, European, and other Lima-born residents, each bearing distinctive socioeconomic backgrounds.

In Part I, this volume approaches the city's history from pre-Columbian to early colonial times, using geographical, archeological, indigenous, and legal history approaches. This section gives a sense of the territory and the long-standing social formations in the central Pacific coast, before and after the Inca arrival in the region. The contributors also focus on the early colonial institutions that shaped Lima as a multiethnic space where power networks and space management shaped the city's reality beyond ideal visions. The establishment of Spanish courts and jurisdictions, eventually staffed with creole administrators, including some corrupt ones, laid the groundwork for the emergence of formal and informal legal professions that fed a nascent legal market and culture in the city.

The historical formation of the city is approached in Part II from the perspectives of social, economic, indigenous, and intellectual history and literary studies. The reader learns that Potosí silver mining mostly defined the insertion of Lima into the world market, making it a cosmopolitan place where elite groups of merchants, investors, and encomenderos vied for power. The diverse socioeconomic and heterogeneous backgrounds of the Indian migrant-residents and the networks they enlisted as they moved to the city and shared its space with Africans, Asians, and Europeans supplemented the colonial framework of the city. Contributors to Part II also document the origin of higher education and highlight notable and little-known female writers. Together with an intriguing interpretation on how “occult knowledge” (275-310) was read by Andeans and Spaniards, these articles add cultural complexity to the compilation.

Part III introduces the analytical perspectives of cultural history, art and intellectual history, and the innovative approach of soundscape history to discuss early modern Lima's culture. The contribution on the spiritual economy and social welfare functions of cofradías joins studies on religious images, such as Marian paintings and the Virgen of Copacabana, that shaped spiritual edification and the formation of the colonial society. The Virgin reveals the Indians’ cultural negotiation and empowerment strategies, while religious prints conveyed Peruvian experience in a European idiom that exalted the city's sophistication. Contributions on the creole political underpinnings of British piracy literature and the links between church, bureaucracy, and book culture precede the study of Lima's music, which is rendered as a “transversal expression shared by all the repúblicas in the different spheres” (465).

The book offers diverse disciplinary perspectives for the understanding of Lima's complex and rich history. Setting aside the uneven length of articles and the two contradictory explanations for the origin of the city's name (note 3, and page 3 of the introduction), the compilation is a valuable addition for students of early modern global, urban, and Latin American History.