69

In this article, I examine how the establishment of a convent in colonial Lima (1624), and more particularly the textual agency of its three founding documents (1623, 1625 and 1629), were employed by the two sisters who founded it, Lucia and Clara Guerra de la Daga. These documents were instruments through which the sisters negotiated gender and family relations within an elite Limeño family from the viceroyalty of Peru. By investing large sums in the convent’s endowment and fashioning the foundational clauses and legal ramifications, the sisters not only to consolidated their spiritual and worldly authority but also set in motion their surreptitious plan gradually to assert control over their immediate family circle, through the making of loans, cells, and dowry grants. The timeless quality of their contractual prerogatives connected the destiny of their family, through future generations, to the convent’s enduring material existence and spiritual authority.