Chapter summaries Unquiet Women: From the Dusk of the Roman Empire to the Dawn of the Enlightenment Max Adams

The Will of Ana de la Calle: A Free Woman's Legacy in Colonial Peru

[⚠️ SPOILER NOTICE: This analysis assumes you have read Chapter 44 and explores its full contents, including Ana’s family relationships, property disposition, and posthumous legal dispute.]

Summary

In early 18th-century Trujillo, Peru, a free morena and bread-seller named Ana de la Calle dictates her final testament while sick in bed. The chapter opens by contextualizing the colonial Andean world, where indigenous beliefs persisted alongside Spanish Catholic institutions and legal systems that some women leveraged for protection. Ana’s will reveals a multi-dimensional life: two marriages (first to Pasqual de Segama, then to Agustín de Saavedra), no legitimate children, but one illegitimate daughter, María de la Cruz, whom she names universal heir. She bequeaths a house, modest household goods, and two enslaved people—a woman named María Isabel and her infant daughter Eduvigia—to her daughter. A codicil redirects the enslaved child to Ana’s granddaughter Juana de Silva. Later records of a 1727 lawsuit show Juana attempting to reclaim goods from her own father after María’s intestate death. The inventory reveals items blending Catholic piety, personal adornment, and domestic wealth, while Ana’s nickname, Mama Anica, hints at a possible role as an unorthodox spiritual practitioner alongside her bread-selling trade.

Key Events

Ana de la Calle, a free morena identifying as Lucumí, dictates her will in April 1719 from her sickbed in Trujillo.
She arranges burial alongside her first husband at the monastery of St Francis and leaves funds for masses.
Ana acknowledges her illegitimate daughter María de la Cruz and names her universal heir.
She bequeaths her house to her second husband for life, after which it passes to María.
Enslaved people María Isabel and her one-year-old daughter Eduvigia are listed as property and transferred to María.
A codicil weeks later assigns Eduvigia directly to Ana’s granddaughter Juana de Silva.
After Ana’s death, her daughter María dies intestate; María’s husband Baltasar de los Reyes retains household goods.
In 1727, Juana de Silva and her husband Don Faustíno Vidaurre sue to recover items from Baltasar, producing an inventory of Ana’s possessions that includes religious objects, textiles, furniture, and financial papers.

Character Development

Ana de la Calle: A shrewd, pious, and socially adept free woman of mixed African and indigenous descent. She owns property, slaves, and a business; takes her own surname; shrewdly legitimizes her daughter through inheritance; and may have earned income as a spiritual healer under the nickname Mama Anica.
María de la Cruz Cavero: Ana’s illegitimate daughter, legitimized not by legal decree but by her mother’s public acknowledgment and inheritance. Her surname (of the cross) marks her lower-class piety. She predeceases the lawsuit, leaving her own daughter to fight for the maternal legacy.
Juana de Silva: Ana’s granddaughter, who carries a surname detached from slave origins. Married to a man with the honorific Don, she asserts her rights through the 1727 legal action, demonstrating the continuation of female agency across generations.
Baltasar de los Reyes: María’s husband and a military council member who retains Ana’s goods after his wife’s death, becoming the antagonist in Juana’s lawsuit.

Themes, Symbols, or Motifs

Female Legal Agency: Ana’s will exemplifies how women in colonial Peru—especially freedwomen—used Spanish legal instruments to protect property, provide for daughters, and assert identity, echoing the earlier Anglo-Saxon example of Wynflæd.
Matrilineal Continuity: The transmission of wealth and status through the female line (Ana to María to Juana) challenges patrilineal norms, reinforced by Spanish law where slave status followed the mother.
Spiritual Hybridity: Ana’s items include a piece of the True Cross and a statue of the Virgin, but her nickname Mama Anica suggests parallel practice of unorthodox spiritual rituals, pointing to the survival of non-Christian belief systems within colonial Catholicism.
Material Culture and Status: The bedstead and wheat-colored shawl emerge as the most valuable items, while cheap religious trinkets carry symbolic rather than monetary weight. The cedar trunk with lock signifies control over private wealth.
Identity and Naming: Ana’s chosen street name (de la Calle) asserts professional independence, while her daughter’s pious surname and granddaughter’s neutral one chart a family’s climb from slavery’s stigma toward respectability.

Why This Chapter Matters

Chapter 44 transforms legal documents into a portrait of a living woman. Unlike chronicles of queens or saints, Ana’s story offers rare evidence of ordinary—yet extraordinary—colonial women who navigated racial hierarchies, religious expectations, and economic constraints with skill. The survival of her will, codicil, and lawsuit inventory lets Adams reconstruct not only Ana’s possessions but her strategies: owning slaves as both labor and status markers, bypassing husbands in inheritance, blending orthodox and folk spiritual practices. This chapter also makes explicit the comparative framework of the book by linking Ana to Wynflæd across eight centuries and two continents, showing how wills serve as durable records of women’s power regardless of era.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does Ana de la Calle’s will challenge stereotypes about women of color in colonial Latin America?

Ana’s will reveals her as a property owner, slave owner, lender, and independent businesswoman—roles that defy passive or uniformly oppressed images. She dictated her own terms, protected her daughter, and navigated the legal system adeptly. The nickname Mama Anica further suggests spiritual authority beyond formal church structures.

2. What do the items in Ana’s posthumous inventory tell historians about her social world?

The inventory blends sacred and secular: a relic of the True Cross next to a mirror, a frying pan, and a valuable shawl. The bedstead’s high worth (25 pesos) echoes Viking and Anglo-Saxon patterns where women’s beds were prized heirlooms. Together, these objects map a life combining domestic labor, religious devotion, personal adornment, and careful financial record-keeping.

3. In what ways does this chapter connect to earlier women in the book, such as Wynflæd?

Both women used wills to direct property toward daughters and the church, bequeathed enslaved people, and prioritized bedsteads and locked chests. The chapter explicitly notes these parallels, situating Ana within a long lineage of women who exercised legal agency to shape their posthumous legacies despite patriarchal systems.

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