This contribution assesses the legal struggle of Juana Godínez to enforce the last will and testament of her owner that she remain within the cloisters of La Encarnación (a cloister for wealthy Limeña doncellas in the seventeenth century) as a free person. Juana had to fight to remain within La Encarnación as free. According to the terms of the will, if she were to leave the convent, she would have to pay 400 pesos for her freedom. Did her owner’s testament in fact grant Juana autonomy to choose how she would live her life after her death, or did the testament give her an option to remain within the cloister (the only home she had ever known) as a freedwoman? The fact that Juana “chose” to remain within the cloister while litigating her case, and that she refused the option of self- purchase prompts us to think of what freedom meant to enslaved women who belonged to religious communities. Juana’s case—and her alleged choices afford us an opportunity to think through freedom in the early modern slaveholding world.

In 1760, Anna Maria Lopes de Brito, knowing that she was suffering from a life-threatening disease, made the necessary preparations for her death. Brito registered a will, where she identified herself as a native of the Coast of Mina, in Africa. She also revealed that her owner “mercifully” freed her and her husband, “for which reason they married each other,” and that the couple had built a modest estate through gold mining. Finally, Brito declared that, as a member of the black brotherhood of Our Lady of Rosario, her body would be buried in the brotherhood’s chapel, where masses would be celebrated for the benefit of her soul’s salvation. The records Anna Maria Lopes de Brito left behind reveal something of the life of a freed African woman in colonial Brazil’s slave and mining society. Brito’s freedom was marked by limitations she faced in her choice of life partner, occupation, and social relationships. Still, Brito used different legal resources available to her to secure in death some of the benefits freedom had to offer: the care of her community for her well-being in the afterlife, and the assurance that the fruits of her labor would continue to benefit her children.