ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts an addition to the historiography on Andean Christianity by looking at scholarly ways in which Andeans responded to the challenges of religious conversion and colonial ecclesiastical policies. Their intellectual responses to the violence of Christianity and its magistrates in rural villages defied the cultural and religious hegemony of Spanish colonialism, as exemplified in mid-colonial Peru by the writings of lettered Andeans such as Juan de Cuevas Herrera. A member of the lower church and a contemporary of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Cuevas offered new renditions of Inca myth combined with harsh indictments of ecclesiastics and colonists to lend a measure of legitimacy to Spanish rule through rhetorical devices that resonated with Inca memory and oral narratives. In his writings and local histories lie a fruitful source to understand the Andean reception of colonial Christianity.
