Rebellious Nuns

This volume addresses the life history of an “unsuccessful” Mexican religious community, La Purísima Concepción in San Miguel el Grande, from its eighteenth-century origins to its suppression by the liberals in 1863. The work was made possible by the author’s serendipitous discovery of a wealth of documentation regarding this convent that had been misfiled in the archives of the Archdiocese of Michoacán. These materials detailed the saga of two “rebellions” occurring during the convent’s early decades. The letters, interrogatories, interviews, and official reports of these conflicts, along with more standard sources like documents of profession and account books, form the documentary base for the book.San Miguel el Grande’s first convent, La Purísima Concepción, was established in 1752 with an endowment from the teenaged heiress María Josepha Lina, who also became its first novice. In 1756, four nuns from the Conceptionist Convent of Regina Coeli in Mexico City arrived to establish the religious community. The convent’s life was rocky: the early decades of La Purísima’s existence were marred by internal dissention and rebellions against authority. The convent did not attract the expected numbers of professions, and it never flourished financially. Having survived for a century without having prospered, it was suppressed by the liberals during the reform.Two internal upheavals, which occurred in the first two decades after the foundation, shaped the rest of the convent’s institutional life. The first rebellion in the early 1760s stemmed from the efforts of the first abbess to impose a strenuous regimen of prayer and conduct with a strict interpretation of the vows of poverty and enclosure. The Conceptionist order in Mexico was generally known for the laxness of observance in its convents, where community life (vida común) was often deemphasized or ignored. At La Purísima, dissident nuns, chafing under the harsh rule of the first abbess, successfully challenged her authority and that of her successor. Having won this first round by forcing out the first two abbesses, the “rebellious” nuns moved into leadership positions at La Purísima. This led to a second confrontation half a decade later, this time with the bishop, who sought to enforce the vida común against the wishes of the convent’s leadership. The second rebellion ended in 1772 with the election of an abbess who was a member of the reformist faction. This did not, however, signal a return to strict reformism. In the end, neither side won outright victory; a spirit of accommodation to both groups characterized subsequent convent governance.The rich documentation Chowning discovered allows her to examine in detail the dynamics as well as the causes of these rebellions. She describes how local factors unique to La Purísima, like convent demographics and the expectations of the novices and professed nuns, as well as general attitudes toward conventual reform in the church at large impacted the outcomes of these two serious internal conflicts.Despite the end of open conflict after 1772, the rebellions continued to shape con vent life. The convent never grew the way its founders had envisioned. Having acquired a reputation for upheaval, La Purísima had chronic problems attracting sufficient numbers of appropriate novices for the rest of its institutional life. This problem exacerbated an already precarious financial situation and led to fiscal crisis. This, in turn, further contributed to recruitment problems. Despite this, the convent survived the wars of independence, although it failed to grow and economically prosper in the post-independence period. It was closed in the 1860s, a victim of the liberals’ secularization policies.This work has broader scope than the history of one troubled convent. While studying La Purísima’s specific problems in detail, the book also addresses broader historical themes, including the relationship between the nuns and the male ecclesiastical establishment, the attitude of the church toward women, and the impact of changing ideas on the church’s policies toward the convent. Chowning presents a more comprehensive view of La Purísima than is seen in many works on female religious institutions. She identifies two major approaches to writing the history of convent life, each shaped by the type of documentation available to the researcher. Scholarly works tend to take either a feminist approach, focusing on “the convent as a place where women could create fulfilling and productive communities with a minimum of male intervention” (p. 12), or an institutional one, where “writers have emphasized the social and economic functions of the convent” (pp. 12 – 13). Because of the richness of her sources, Chowning is able to combine these approaches, tracing the history of the institution while highlighting individual participants in its internal conflicts. She also takes advantage of documentation in the archiepiscopal archives to compare La Purísima to other convents that were its contemporaries in the archbishopric

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