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Abstract

In a corpus of sixteenth century testaments selected from those conserved on the Town Clerks Center of the national Archives, different aspects of the structure of this type of text are studied in relation to the representation of the reality of woman in Chile in that period.

From an image that projects such a representation, within the patriarchal system, as a "discreet presence that must only be felt inside boundary lines like a closed garden", some examples of testaments from the corpus are examined, in order to show the variants of representation and, therefore, the diversity of the images of women contained in them, many of which question the stereotypes that our cultural tradition has formed about colonial women.

The study also looks into some aspects concerning the structure, the character; sense and function of the conventional testament text in the Hispanic tradition inaugurated by Alfonso X in his Partidas, together with the transformation observed in them during the baroque actualization of the testament, as effected in 17th Century Chile.