Daughters of the Conquistadores: Women of the Viceroyalty of Peru

I had the privilege and honor to be one of Professor Luis Martín's pupils at SMU a decade and a half ago. I recall his playful, excitable and gregarious personality, as well as his trademark lectures in which he typically juggled history, theology, poetry, sociology and hard-core Sevillian gossip!Such is the trademark of his writing in "Daughters of the Conquistadores." Don Luis artfully stretches the imagination of the reader by plotting in occurences and tribulations of nuns, divorcees, concubines, "tapadas" and "beatas" in the colonial Peru of 1550-1800. In a most authentic and self-bred style, he narrates the mysteries and abuses taking place in convents and nunneries, haciendas and palaces; and underlines the influence of women in a society relentlessly dominated by "Don Juanism" and sternly regulated and probed by an over-zealous Catholic church.A book tough to research and tougher to write, "Daughters of the Conquistadores" is fun to read, bare of profound insights and laden with satyrical, albeit tragic, anecdotes.