Lima, the “City of the Kings,” was founded in January 1535, and quickly became the center of Spanish control over South America. Located in a fertile irrigated valley close to the Pacific Ocean, it and its nearby seaport of Callao served as the staging center for the final methodical subjugation of the Andes. The establishment of the viceroyalty of Peru in 1542, with Lima designated as its capital and court, then stability following the conclusion of the civil wars between the conquistadors, and finally the discovery of the silver mountain of Potosí in the 1560s, led to rapid growth. From 1570 to the eighteenth century, Lima served as center for the political, economic, military, and ecclesiastical administration of Spain's South Pacific, and territories to Portuguese Brazil's edge.

That such a city should stimulate the interest of historians is not surprising. But given its size and complexity the question is, how best to reconstruct its past. Some Peruvian historians, unsuccessfully, have taken the approach of city biography. Others have structured their work by concentrating on concrete topics within generally limited chronological boundaries. Osorio takes this approach, intending in her tightly packaged five chapter analysis to provide “the rereading of baroque Lima” (2). She is largely successful, with a twist in that she makes it clear that the complex was from its inception destined to be “modern.”

In her compelling introduction she explores the ideas of sixteenth and seventeenth century observers of the city in general, and in some cases Lima in particular. Osorio found that Giovanni Botero's 1588 Le cause della grandezza e magnificenza della citta, with its stress on a city's economy and population, as well as its nobility and courts as fundamental for any “great” city, was instructive. It is this position, rather than the Iberian view of the civitas christiana, that the author adopts. In the first chapter she examines deftly the rapidly growing dominance of Lima as Peru's “head city” at the expense of the pretensions of highland Cuzco, which considered itself to be the capital of the Andean world. In the second she explores the nature of Lima as a court city, the administrative center of the viceroyalty. Of special concern is ceremony, and the formal entrance of the new viceroy is thoroughly explored. There was much city boosterism involved, for city elites hoped for special recognition and favors which the viceroy might bestow. The baroque ceremony of the new monarch and its corollary the exequies at the death of the monarch are central themes of chapter three. The simulacrum gave life to the royal presence in absentia, as it was paraded by the city elite in elaborate baroque public spectacle. And magnificent catafalques were constructed which were central backdrops to the religious sermons and panegyrics associated with the ruler's passing.

The Inquisition and its auto de fé are the subject of the next chapter. Representative of both church and royal authority, the elaborate sets and ornate clothing, as well as the display of the power and wealth of the church and state was theater for all of Lima's citizens. Although not as frequent as some historians have suggested, the cathartic acts reinforced a sense of order and purpose that authorities wanted to instill on the populace. In her final chapter Osorio deals with the baroque imagery of “sainthood and sorcery.” She turns more attention to the elaborate preparations leading to the beatification, then sanctification, of Rosa de Santa María than the beatification of Toribio de Mogrovejo and Francisco Solano, although a similar argument could be made for the two men who later became saints. The modest and more self-contained section on sorcercy is based more on the available Lima records of the idolatry trials than the limited records of the Lima Inquisition. The relation of sorcery to the idea of Lima's baroque is less well developed than other parts of Osorio's analysis.

Osorio's handling is solid, but not without flaw. The Count of Villar, don Fernando (not Francisco, as on 159, 188, n. 100) de Torres y Portugal, who was indeed excommunicated by the Inquisition, did not sit next to the vicereine (111) at the auto de fé of 1587, for she was ill when the viceroy traveled to Peru and had remained behind in Spain, as Osorio herself later noted (188, n. 100). In reference to a royal decree (94, cédula real, which Osorio translates as “Royal Charter”) she notes that the custom of the king's proclamation goes back to 1407 (the correct date is slightly less than a century off, in 1506) when the Duke of Alva (actually the second Duke of Alba, Don Fadrique Alvárez de Toledo) raised the banner of Castile in the name of Philip the Handsome (also known as the “Fair”). And there are a disconcerting number of errors that a discerning copyeditor should have corrected: for example, March 1598 (74) should be 1589, and the Viceroy the Marquis of Montesclaros was not in Lima in 1603 (76), since he arrived there in late 1607.

Cautionary notes aside, this is a welcome first book that will stimulate further investigation of the complex past of arguably the most important sixteenth-century city in America.