This article examines the ways in which enslaved litigants engaged with the ecclesiastical courts in 17th century colonial Lima. The article analyzes a sample of the types of litigation instigated by Peruvian slaves to assert their conjugal rights, to effect transfers of ownership, and to enforce oral promises of manumission. It also deals with complaints of domestic violence, abandonment, destitution, and infidelity brought by enslaved women. The article uses accusations of concubinage and adultery, and “crimes against public morality” to explore the role of church courts in policing the boundaries of inter-ethnic relationships. This article should interest scholars of slavery working at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, particularly with regard to distinctions between the civil and common law systems of slavery. It should also interest historians of comparative family law and the canon law’s treatment of marriage, illegitimacy and concubinage. How does a comparative perspective add to our understanding of the way that sexuality, race and gender influence family law, and vice versa? How does recourse to the court either influence hegemonic norms of marriage or contest these? Finally, the article should also interest those using legal records as narratives to “write history from below” through the optics of legal anthropology and critical legal studies.

Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Legal Activism and Ecclesiastical Courts in Colonial Lima, 1593-1689

In 1629, Gaspar Zape sought a preliminary injunction in Lima's ecclesias tical court against Geronimo Vosmediano de Leon to prevent him from shipping Juliana Bran off to Chile. Gaspar learned that Vosmediano de Leon, his wife's owner, planned to send Juliana off to Chile as a wet nurse for his newborn granddaughter. Acting quickly, Gaspar sought court intervention basing his injunction on his right to marital unity and cohabitation that was the prerogative of enslaved married couples granted by the Siete Partidas} Vosmediano de Leon responded by invoking his

Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Legal Activism, and Ecclesiastical Courts in Colonial Lima, 1593–1689

El articulo propone dos periodos principales de intensificacion agraria en la Peninsula Iberica: La transicion del Campaniforme a la edad del Bronce y la del Bronce Final a la Edad del Hierro. Ambos momentos se relacionan con cambios en los sistemas de herencia por via femenina y son detectables a traves del analisis de la orfebreria y de los ajuares funerarios.

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La novia vendida: orfebreria, herencia y agricultura en la protohistoria de la peninsula iberica

Fractional Freedoms explores how thousands of slaves in colonial Peru were able to secure their freedom, keep their families intact, negotiate lower self-purchase prices, and arrange transfers of ownership by filing legal claims. Through extensive archival research, Michelle A. McKinley excavates the experiences of enslaved women whose historical footprint is barely visible in the official record. She complicates the way we think about life under slavery and demonstrates the degree to which slaves were able to exercise their own agency, despite being ensnared by the Atlantic slave trade. Enslaved women are situated as legal actors who had overlapping identities as wives, mothers, mistresses, wet-nurses and day-wage domestics, and these experiences within the urban working environment are shown to condition their identities as slaves. Although the outcomes of their lawsuits varied, Fractional Freedoms demonstrates how enslaved women used channels of affection and intimacy to press for liberty and prevent the generational transmission of enslavement to their children.

Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700

raised here, such as women’s legal status and employment, are treated there in greater detail (Arrom, 1977). The author wishes to thank the Joint Committee on Latin American Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council for its financial support of the dissertation research. She is also grateful to the Seminario de Historia Urbana (Departamento de Investigaciones Hist&oacute;ricas, Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia), a Mexican research team of which she was a member from 1974 to 1975, for facilitating this investigation. Comparative research has revealed significant variations in marital customs in different areas of the world. From the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, Western Europe was characterized by late marriage and large numbers of adults who never married. In contrast, marriage was nearly universal in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe where, especially in the case of women, individuals married young (Hajnal, 1965). These marriage patterns reflect deep-seated cultural traditions distinguishing Europe from the non-western world. Until now, Latin America has been excluded from the discussion of marriage patterns because of the dearth of research on this area. This study of Mexico City in 1811 is intended to provide comparable data on how Latin America fits into these global patterns. The analysis of age at marriage and proportions marrying also illuminates two questions central to an understanding of Mexican society. First, it explores social consequences of the European conquest and colonization of Indian Mexico. Did Spanish marital customs prevail by the nineteenth century, or had a new and distinctively Mexican culture been forged out of disparate elements? Alternatively, was the hierarchical class/race structurecharacteristic of colonial societies which incorporated the vanquished peoplesreflected in the coexistence of different marriage patterns among the descendants of the conquering and conquered groups? Secondly, what do marital customs reveal about the roles of women in early nineteenth-century Mexico? Their daily activities over a lifetime were shaped by whether or not they married and by the portion of their lives spent in a single, married, and widowed state. It has been widely believed that until recently Latin American women had few alternatives to matrimony and motherhood, responsibilities they assumed at a tender age (e.g., Williams, 1945:234, 813; Lavrin, 1976: 253). Thus it might be expected that Mexi-

Verena Martines-Alier

Papers

Elopement and seduction in nineteenth-century cuba