“Nobody removes it, under penalty of mayor excommunication”. Public writing and confessionalization in Córdoba del Tucumán during the Colonial Era

Abstract

Through the written culture, aspects of the process of social discipline are studied in Cordoba del Tucuman during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Within the confessionalization paradigm, we analyse how writing helped to generate effective devices —specifically the Edicts of the Inquisition and wooden boards of excommunication— for the monarchical and ecclesiastical power to seek for social legitimacy. In Córdoba, the agents considered in this study are varied. From the governor and bishops to even curates, aldermen as well as mayors and episcopal vicar generals in vacant See are considered.
In the so-called “pedagogy of fear”, writing was a forceful vehicle used by both powers —sometimes competing—, to discipline not only the elites but also the popular sectors, literate or illiterate, to standardise and to set a religious conformity in the inhabitants. This was something impossible to carry out without visibility and of great visual impact in the public space. It is there where public writing played a central role.