| Abstrakt: |
On February 16, 1696, Doña Inés Velarde, the widow of Capitán Don Miguel de Vera, a former notary of the Mexico City Cabildo, redacted her will before Juan de Condarco y Caceres, a notary public in New Spain’s capital. Despite the typhus (matlazáhuatl) epidemic that ravaged the city in that year, Doña Inés was in good health. She had carefully prepared for the pious act of will writing, issuing over thirty meticulously designed religious directives in her last will and testament. Two directives in particular reveal much about colonial Mexican religious sensibilities. In the thirty-seventh clause of her twenty-page will, she founded a perpetual act of charity with the capital of 3,000 pesos. |
