Mission and Ecstasy

This well-researched study focuses on the religious life of professed nuns and laywomen in mid- and late colonial Spanish America and the Philippines. In early modern Catholic discourse, female virtue was based on adherence to silence, obedience, chastity, and enclosure. Magnus Lundberg does not question that contemplative women in the Spanish Indies upheld these ideals. Rather, he aims at examining to what degree these women “had or were given agency within the constrictions of the colonial-ecclesiastical gender system” and assumed a more active, even missionary role (p. 27). The author understands mission as including acts made by a person that are perceived to be in favor of others' salvation (p. 16). In this manner, Lundberg challenges the distinction between an apostolic and a contemplative religious life and rethinks the role of women in church history.Lundberg utilizes a large corpus of printed sources. He uses some confessional writings by women such as spiritual autobiographies, letters, chronicles, and journals, but the lion's share of his sources are biographical texts written by churchmen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Lundberg discusses the different genres used as source material in the chapter titled “Texts,” and his thesis about the missionary role of contemplative women is developed clearly and logically throughout the remaining six chapters, which are structured around six female missionary engagements or different ways that these women transcended the limitations of their reclusion and undertook apostolic work. For example, Lundberg argues that the “burning” love for God and neighbor that these women declared to profess heightened their humanitarian inclinations and fueled their desire to go out into the mission fields. Contemplative women also believed that prayer and communication with God could bring about the conversion of others and increase the fervor of missionaries. These religious women were also convinced that their suffering (fasting, self-flagellation, maladies, and diabolical assaults) was a source of salvation and could release souls from purgatory. Although women could not officially teach in public settings, they did act as spiritual advisers and taught Christian doctrine if approached. The last apostolic contemplative method that the author discusses is the spiritual journey to faraway mission fields in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. During these flights, pious women preached and oversaw the work of male missionaries, effectively linking these women to the global Catholic missionary enterprise. Lundberg nicely frames each chapter with an initial discussion of theological content that helps the reader assess the chasm between the apostolic actions of these women and the strict, more passive Catholic ideals that they were supposed to enact.Lundberg's work builds upon studies of Hispanic convent literature that have blossomed since the 1990s with the work of Asunción Lavrin and Kathryn Burns. In addition, this book offers a number of insights into women's agency. Lundberg makes a compelling case for the participation of women in both the Spanish colonization of the New World and the implantation and reproduction of Spanish Catholicism. In that sense, Mission and Ecstasy echoes recent works by Kathleen Myers, Amanda Powell, Jacqueline Holler, and Vera Tudela that see female mysticism, convent life, and women's religious writings not necessarily as resistance to a patriarchal order but as extensive participation in the orthodox religious world of the Catholic Church.Most of the author's source material comes from Mexico and Peru, with also a good representation of cases from Quito, Colombia, and Chile. Although Lundberg relies on only a couple of sources from the Philippines, Mission and Ecstasy is commendable for including this far-flung, often neglected colony in an overall reflection on female religious life in the Spanish empire.The internal organization of the chapters and the treatment of the sources pose some limitations to the rich diversity of Lundberg's research material. The lengthy collection of examples presented in each chapter results in a fairly redundant narrative in which the uniqueness of each woman's experience gets diluted, as if the desires and worries of nuns and other contemplative women were uniform across the spectrum of geographical scenarios. The political, economic, social, and cultural context of each colonial setting likely shaped the concerns and life occurrences of these women, and an examination of these circumstances might have rendered a more dynamic and stimulating analysis of the sources. For example, Lundberg tells us that women were troubled by the lack of missionaries or, more generally, the failure of the missionary enterprise (pp. 95, 146, 188, 200). But these statements remain vague without a discussion of the challenges specific to each region and time period, such as the level of Spanish settlement, the characteristics of the native population and their degree of resistance to Spanish civilization, or the extent to which missionary effectives were deployed. Similarly, when describing the missionary fields and peoples that these women concerned themselves with, Lundberg refers to “blacks,” “Indians,” “pagans,” “heretics,” “land of the Moors,” “parts of Asia,” and other terms that call for more specific geographic and ethnic explanations.That being said, the book is well organized, and its prose is clear, elegant, and free of jargon. The book will attract historians of the church and convents in the context of Spanish colonial America and early modern history, and it certainly should be of interest to students and specialists in the fields of religion, mission studies, nuns and convent literature, women and gender studies, literary studies, and theology

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Colonialism · Complicity · Confession (law · Confessional · Contemplation · Obedience · Political science · Politics · Silence · Social science · Sociology · Theology · Virtue · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy · Religious studies

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