A remarkably comprehensive, this volume makes a valuable contribution to our understanding not only of the vast array of sexual practices that existed in colonial Latin America but also of the complex interplay between sexuality and the social order. The collection, which has two parts, “Unnatural Heresies” and “Unnatural Crimes”, is situated historiographically in the “Foreword” by Asunción Lavrin, distinguished Professor Emerita of Arizona State University and a pioneer in studies of women, gender, and religion in colonial Hispanic America. Lavrin notes that current trends in sexuality studies have evolved such that what was once shunned as “deviant” sexuality and forbidden for open discussion has now been brought to light through extensive and careful archival investigation, such as we find in the nine chapters that follow. As the work demonstrates, in the ecclesiastical and civil cultures of Latin America founded upon Roman Catholic theological principles, what was “unnatural” was any sexual act not directed towards procreation. These “unnatural” sexual practices included sodomy, masturbation, “unnatural” sexual positions, and bestiality, and indirectly, incest, solicitation in the confessional, demonic sex, the sexual desecration of sacred images and the Eucharist, abortion, infanticide, and suicide.
As the authors make clear, the significance of archival research into colonial sexual practices is not that we should discover some unknown form of sexual transgression, or simply to compose lists of these malefactions in the Latin American context, but rather to try to understand how ecclesiastical and civil officials, as well as ordinary people, perceived and dealt with them. Furthermore, as editor Zeb Tortorici queries in the “Introduction” to the book, it is unclear how sexual practices could be declared “unnatural” when they “still used Nature's materials and processes” (4). This fact leads to the more profound and essential issue explored by each scholar: What was it about each “unnatural” sexual act that offended against what the Roman Catholic Church understood to be a central theological tenet? Rather than merely reducing each sexual offense to a crime which in some way nullified the procreative ends of the sexual act, the critical contribution that this collection makes is its multifaceted exploration of the connection between the theological motives of those who committed “unnatural” sexual transgressions and the Church's judgment of those motives. If, as Nora Jaffary correctly asserts, our age is “obsessed with sex”, the temptation for academic researchers has been to focus too much on the lurid details of purportedly vile, unrestrained sexual indulgences (46). With this work, and its call to return to the richness of archival sources, Tortorici and his fellow essayists open a broader discussion about the shifting understanding of “Nature” and the “unnatural” by ecclesiastical and civil officials, and everyday citizens throughout colonial Latin America. The editor states that one of the primary goals of the work “is to disentangle and unravel the convoluted definitions and connotations of Nature and the unnatural that traverse the European side of the discourse of colonial Latin America, and the wider Iberian Atlantic world” (6). A second goal is that of examining more carefully those sexual offenses that approximated the “unnatural” but were not declared as such (6–7).
A fitting start to the collection is a study of the case of Fray Esteban Sobrino, a Mercedarian priest who committed suicide in the prison of the Holy Office in Cartagena de las Indias in November of 1779. Having been found guilty of the natural crime of solicitation of women in the confessional, and the unnatural offense of solicitation of men in the confessional, indecent physical contact with male slaves and other men, and sodomy with men of various ages, all of which was known wherever he had exercised his priestly ministry, Sobrino was surreptitiously buried in unconsecrated ground. The ecclesiastical figure responsible for this action was the Inquisitor Félix Villegas, who, in the file he kept on Sobrino, demonstrates the inconsistencies in the Roman Catholic Church's handling of “unnatural” sins by rationalizing his actions by underscoring the unnatural aspect of death by suicide, which was clearly sinful and a grave offense before God. Wishing to spare the local Church the embarrassment of revealing Sobrino's crimes, the Inquisitor had sought to hide the entire affair, relying on his understanding of the “unnatural” as the justification for his actions.
This collection reminds us that archival documents are our best means of returning, at least in part, to the world in which they were composed. Two cases of the “unnatural” are particularly intriguing: that of María Gertrudis Arévalo, who confessed to having masturbated with the Holy Eucharist in the hopes of being struck down by an angry God, and thus proving to herself his existence (Chapter 2), and the tale of doña María de Ocampo, who claimed to have had sexual relations with the Devil (Chapter 3). In both instances, the Holy Office appeared to be little concerned with details of the sexual acts themselves, but rather, with the spiritual disposition of the women brought before them. The same is true of the cases of “female sodomy” in Brazil, which were treated as proximate forms of heresy because they were actions that were “against nature” and therefore errors of faith (Chapter 4). As all of the cases above demonstrate, what is very much at issue is the desire—sexual and spiritual—of the individuals involved, which often led to conflicting definitions and Inquisitorial reports regarding what constituted sins “against nature” (“contra naturam”). As José Ignacio Eyzaguirre's General Confession shows, many “unnatural” acts of which he accused himself fell within the category of “experimenting with nature itself” (Chapter 5).
In the same way, cases of same-sex relations between women in eighteenth century Quito were also judged to be “unnatural”, although ultimately the women were punished not for their sexual sins but “excesses” of drinking, partying, unproductivity, and their inability to meet social and marital obligations (Chapter 6). Members of the Inquisition seem to have distinguished between “unnatural” acts of sodomy and homosexuality, yet, as archival sources have revealed, the distinction between the two was often unclear if not utterly addled (Chapter 7). The same confusion is in cases of incest, as these related to the marriage of cousins and questions of rape by intimate members of one's family (Chapter 8). Finally, bestiality, construed as being “unnatural” but less so in rural circumstances in which “natural” sexual relations were deemed to be inaccessible, was a thinly-veiled excuse for not applying the death penalty to such offenders (Chapter 9).
The volume concludes with an “Epilogue” by Peter Sigal, who argues that now, as the contributors have broken down the barriers between the study of “natural” and “unnatural” sexual practices, they ought to “develop a historically specific and rigorously theoretical analysis of sexual pleasure in the colonial past” (222). Without doubt, this collection makes a critical contribution to the study of sexuality in colonial Latin America, and its contributors applauded for their careful scholarship, their attention to detail, and their willingness to engage in such a controversial but necessary area of research.
