Spectacular Wealth offers a splendid comparative analysis of civic and religious festivals in colonial mining towns of the Spanish and Portuguese overseas empires. Voigt’s book covers two different areas: Potosí in Alto Perú (present-day Bolivia), which was the major supplier of silver for Spain from 1545 until the seventeenth century; and Vila Rico do Ouro Preto and other towns that were founded and rose to prominence in Minas Gerais (southeastern Brazil) after gold was discovered in this region during the late seventeenth century.

Performance theorist Diana Taylor’s distinction in The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003) between the “archive” of written documents (here, the festival accounts penned by authors of European descent) and the “repertoire” of embodied praxis (the performances staged by Amerindians and Afro-Brazilians during the celebrations) informs in great part Voigt’s analyses. Said distinction also serves as the main structuring principle of her book, which consists of two parts, “Texts” and “Celebrants.” The bipartite structure of the monograph is further maintained by the division of each part into two chapters, the first dedicated to Potosí, the second to Minais Gerais. This format allows Voigt to bring out the many striking analogies between both case studies while at the same time acknowledging the historical, ethnic, cultural, and economic differences that characterize each region.

Voigt draws on a large and varied range of published and unpublished sources—the latter gathered at archives in Lisbon, Sucre, and Potosí. At the center of her study, however, are three eighteenth-century texts: Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela’s monumental Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí (completed by his son in 1737, and printed for the first time in its entirety in 1965), Simão Ferreira Machado’s Triunfo Eucharistico (1734), and the anonymously published Aureo Throno Episcopal (1749). Through careful contextualization as well as impeccable and original close readings, Voigt reveals the multiple and at times divergent agendas pursued during the festivals and in their textual representation.

In part 1 Voigt demonstrates how all three authors manage to successfully shift the focus from the metropolis to the remote mining towns, from the declared object of celebration (that is, the viceroy, Corpus Christi, or the transfer of the Eucharist) to those who were organizing the festivities. The texts, rather than exalt metropolitan political or ecclesiastical authority, become a vehicle for local self-celebration. All three texts also respond in one way or another to European views about the moral and intellectual inferiority of New World inhabitants in general, and mining-town residents in particular, through their depiction of the festivals as spectacular displays of religious piety and political loyalty as well as artistic and intellectual ingenuity. Consequently, the festival accounts cannot merely be read as documentary or factual sources. By means of the rhetorical strategies outlined above the texts also have an illocutionary, performative force: they persuade, correct, and refute. In other words, the “archive” becomes in a way part of the “repertoire.”

Conversely, those subordinate groups who form part of the repertoire also strive to partake in the archive, one of the central topics of part 2. After exploring how Amerindian and Afro-Brazilian performances—for instance, Inca processions in Potosí, the dança de Carijós, and the festive coronation of African kings in Minas Gerais—might have held divergent meanings for different ethnic audiences, Voigt focuses in her final chapter on the Black Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary’s direct intervention into the sphere of the archive (traditionally controlled by Europeans or those of European descent) through the Black Brotherhood’s sponsorship of the publication of Triunfo Eucharistico.

Voigt’s monograph is an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship that demonstrates that colonial festivals were not only a means for the metropoles to maintain state and church power overseas; these festivals were also strategically used by the overseas subjects to showcase their loyalty and “spectacular wealth,” which comprised material as well as intellectual and spiritual riches. Spectacular Wealth is an exceptionally well-documented and beautifully written book. In sum: a model of critical clarity.