La lección de las monjas : el sector crediticio colonial, la historia de género y una revolución historiográfica inacabada

Abstract

This paper offers a critical review of the way, in which financial history specialists and gender historians have studied the role of women’s convents within the credit sector in colonial Spanish America. The outsized role of religious institutions in the provision of credit in viceregal Spanish America was initially mostly studied by scholars interested in gender history (Lavrín 1966, Burns 1999). Their prime interest meant that nuns’ contribution to the creation of a financial system sui generis in the Spanish colonial world was left mostly unexplored. At the same time, their very valuable insights into the role of women’s convents as credit institutions were marginalised by financial historians who within a euro-centric frame of a fixed developmental paths towards “modern” credit markets described these lending activities as “archaic” practices. I argue that a two-fold invisibility has hampered our understanding of the role of women in colonial Spanish American finance: that of a financial sector in the studies of gender historians and that of female religious actors in financial history.