Monjas y beatas

Roman Catholic women’s spiritual writings represent a challenging, and sometimes dangerous, balancing act. Monjas y beatas explores the contradictions inherent in such literary self-expression, presenting portions of previously unpublished spiritual writings of five novohispano women. The authors explore the tension between individual self-expression and self-understanding, on the one hand, and conformity to institutional demands and replication of established religious models on the other. They are also attentive to how these women adapted their religiosity to local circumstances.The introduction provides a historical context for these women and their literary works. Lavrin and Loreto note, for example, that in the post-Tridentine period, interaction between confessors and holy women gave rise to new forms of female literary self-expression at the same time that heightened vigilance against heterodoxy forced them to be somewhat circumspect. Despite these limitations, a diversity of female social types (cloistered nuns and noncloistered laywomen or beatas from distinct social origins) were able to confidently express their individuality through written descriptions of mystical experiences, ascetic exercises, and day-to- day religious activities.The five chapters that comprise the heart of this study each present an introduction to one colonial-era writer and manuscript, followed by a transcription of a selected portion of the manuscript. While certain themes run throughout—for example, the now empowering, now restraining relationship between male cleric and female writer—the book’s format also enables the reader to come to terms with the different literary genres, as well as with the distinct social or personal circumstances that shaped the form and outcome of each literary effort.As Loreto points out, the line between one genre and another was often very fine. She analyzes the manuscript notebooks of María Francisca de la Natividad, a poblana nun whose confessor commanded her to write down the mystical experiences of her renowned sister in religion, Isabel de la Encarnación. What begins as biography, however, “shifts subtly into autobiography” (p. 8) as passages describing the life of Isabel merge “silently and almost imperceptibly” (p. 11) with biographical and mystical elements of María Francisca’s own life. Loreto then ably explains how such spiritual writing shaped the author’s individual self-consciousness. Kathleen Myers and Lavrin present texts of two nuns who had been commanded to write down their personal mystical experiences. Myers is attentive to the “mystical triad” of female writer, male confessor, and divine audience. “The act of writing,” she notes, “becomes a balancing act: a confession and an apologia pro vita sua before God and his intercessor, a vehicle for revealing the mercies of God as well as a creative way of representing the ‘I’” (p. 81). Lavrin’s reading of the spiritual diary of Sor María de Jesús Felipe (written in monthly entries during 1758) is notable for its balanced rejection of presentist interpretations that often view confessors as “sinister figures” (p. 114), treat the rhetoric of humility as a “form of rebellion” (p. 116), or “see Freudian undercurrents” in the erotic language of spiritual union (p. 119).In contrast to cloistered nuns, laywomen’s writings ran a greater risk of offending ecclesiastical sensibilities due to their relative autonomy. Antonio Rubial García presents the case of Josefa de San Luis Beltrán, a beata whose writings survived as a result of her run-in with the Inquisition. While the content of her visions tended to be orthodox, the audacious nature of her personal claims (including a vision of herself marching in a heavenly parade alongside Jesus Christ and the saints) eventually got her into trouble; she died in the jails of the Holy Office. In this intriguing case, the female mystic took the initiative vis-à-vis her male counterpart, commanding him to write down her visions. Altering her voice in order to present messages from Jesus Christ or the Virgin, she spoke as a sort of spirit medium whose authority, therefore, was unassailable. A contrasting case is that of laywoman Francisca de los Angeles of Querétaro, whose personal connections with such well- known clerics as Antonio Linaz and Antonio Margil de Jesús allowed her greater freedom of self-expression. Ellen Gunnarsdottir presents several decades of letters to male clergy, prominent laypersons, and local nuns. Despite the protective covering of her social alliances, however, we see in Francisca’s letters a gradual shift from a focus on the internal, spiritual experience to preoccupations with the day-to-day concerns of administering the beaterio that she had helped to establish.While most such women’s spiritual writings remained unpublished in their day, and many of them have been lost to posterity, they nevertheless shaped the publications of male clerics who used them as primary sources for their authorized biographies or chronicles. In his highly influential work on mystical theology, the Jesuit Miguel Godínez relied heavily on manuscripts of well-known local female mystics, including the notebooks of María Francisca de la Natividad. Thus, these women “gradually wrote themselves into the . . . history of viceregal culture” (p. 7). Readers will gain fresh insights into this process, not so much because the work’s content is novel, but because the authors provide fresh and diverse literary examples from which to compare and contrast. Historians and literary scholars fluent in colonial-era Spanish will gain new insights into the lives and minds of such women writers and new appreciation of their literary output

Art · Asceticism · Context (archaeology) · Expression (computer science) · Heterodoxy · Literature · Mysticism · Orthodoxy · Religiosity · Theology · Early Modern Women Writers · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American history and culture · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

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