[Karen R. White]

Kathryn Santner’s recent article for JSAH 21(4) titled “Money and a Room of One’s Own: Convent Cells and Self Fashioning in Colonia Peru” presents some intriguing material for the History of Interiors. I would be interested to learn how other HIG members have responded to the essay.

To start, I am especially interested in Santner’s identification of the ‘estrado’ as an interior zone made spatially distinct not by walls but by an low wooden platform or dais. Santner links this aspect of the Spanish Colonial interiors she discusses and a Spanish Iberian interior convention of “resting on cushions and carpets [that] took root in the Iberian Peninsula during the period of Islamic rule.” (445) Perhaps I am not the only one to notice the spatial (but not decorative) remnants of a traditional Islamic interior here – I’m thinking of the tasar or raised platform separated from the ataba at a room’s entrance (as in the Qa’a of the Damascus room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, that is so nicely discussed in this Smarthistory video: Qa’a: The Damascus room – YouTube).

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