Synopses & Reviews
Policies concerning marriage, morality, and intimacy were central to the efforts of the Spanish monarchy to maintain social control in colonial Charcas. The Bourbon Crown depended on the patriarchal, caste-based social system on which its colonial enterprise was built to maintain control over a vast region that today encompasses Bolivia and parts of Peru, Chile, Paraguay, and Argentina. Intimacy became a fulcrum of social control contested by individuals, families, the state, and the Catholic Church, and deeply personal emotions and experiences were unwillingly transformed into social, political, and moral challenges.and#160;In Of Love and Loathing, Nicholas A. Robins examines the application of late-colonial Bourbon policies concerning marriage, morality, and intimacy. Robins examines how such policies and the means by which they were enforced highlight the moral, racial, and patriarchal ideals of the time, and, more important, the degree to which the policies were evaded. Not only did free unions, illegitimate children, and de facto divorces abound, but women also had significantly more agency regarding resources, relationships, and movement than has previously been recognized. A surprising image of society emerges from Robinsandrsquo;s analysis, one with considerably more moral latitude than can be found from the perspectivesand#160;of religious doctrine and regal edicts.
Review
andldquo;No one has so systematically and thematically mined the range of documents and sources to paint such a comprehensive portrait of the collective conjugal history of a society, especially for the Andean regions [as Robins has]. . . . Scholars of gender relations and sexuality as well as legal historians will find much to like about this book.andrdquo;andmdash;Kathryn A. Sloan, author of Runaway Daughters: Seduction, Elopement, and Honor in Nineteenth-Century Mexico
About the Author
Nicholas A. Robins is a teaching associate professor in the Department of History at North Carolina State University. He is the author of several books, including Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes and Priest-Indian Conflict in Upper Peru: The Generation of Rebellion, 1750andndash;1780.