Matrices of Devotion: Lima's Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Devotional Prints and Local Religion in the Viceroyalty of Peru

This dissertation analyzes how local devotional prints united South America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, creating a shared regional sacred geography parallel or even in opposition to that imported from Europe. I argue that locally made prints representing regionally situated miracle-working paintings and sculptures allowed devotion to these images to travel throughout South America, forging a new community of devotees linked by a Catholic sacred geography specific to the region. This project shifts away from the centre-periphery, Europe-New World, model taken by prior studies of prints in South America, and moves towards one that privileges the local and regional as a site for the creation of knowledge, religion, and culture. In so doing, I demonstrate the secondary importance of the mimetic, hybrid, or perceived European qualities of prints, focusing instead on the ways in which diverse communities defined by ethnicity, profession, class, or, often, shared concerns about the afterlife, employed prints to recruit new members, express belonging, or guarantee contracts of mutual support.