Lima Produces Saints for Spain and the Caribbean: The Miraculous Case of Antonio de San Pedro

Abstract This essay follows Antonio de San Pedro (d. 1622), a Portuguese New Christian who was punished by the Lima Inquisition for Judaizing. Surprisingly, San Pedro went on to become a Discalced Mercedarian friar in Andalusia, and, following his death, the new order’s candidate for beatification. Reading inquisitorial records alongside printed hagiographies from Cádiz (1670), Seville (1688) and Lima (1692), among other documents, this study illustrates how the social landscape of the New World shaped opposing narratives about both heresy and conversion. This article also demonstrates different racial perspectives on New Christians of Jewish origin, as knowledge about San Pedro’s “impure blood” was manipulated in distinct ways to support his holiness and came to highlight the Catholic virtue of the city of Lima. San Pedro’s life and its later narrations thus call attention to less familiar intersections of sanctity and race in the early modern Iberian world, between Spain and Spanish America, Judaism and Christianity, religious deviance and sainthood.