A Wild Country Out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journals of a Colonial Mexican Nun (review)

A Wild Country Out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journals of a Colonial Mexican Nun. Edited and translated by KATHLEEN A. MYERS and AMANDA POWELL. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Illustrations. Maps. Appendixes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. xxxv, 386 pp. Cloth, $39.95.

Readers familiar with the study of colonial women writers will recognize Kathleen A. Myers as one of the pioneers in English-language criticism on the subject with her Word from New Spain: The Spiritual Autobiography of Madre Marla de San José (1993). Amanda Powell collaborated on the translations in Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau's groundbreaking Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (1989). These two scholars have come together in a new critical edition on María de San José, A Wild Country Out in the Garden, which is a thoughtful and solidly-researched contribution to the field of colonial studies.

In Spanish America, women's autobiography is rooted in the hagiographic tradition of vitae, in which, at the request of the confessor, nuns wrote about their spiritual lives in autobiographical form. With over 2,000 surviving pages, María de San José (Mexico, 1656-1719) is one of the most prolific of such writers. The sixth daughter of a landowning family whose fortune was in decline, María experienced a spiritual conversion at the age of 11 and spent the next 21 years trying to become a nun. Once she took her vows as an Augustinian Recollect in Puebla, she quickly rose within the order, went on to found a new convent in Oaxaca, and was even promoted for beatification after her death. A hagiographic version of María's life story including excerpts from her notebooks was published in 1723, but the original manuscripts remained missing until 1984, when Myers discovered them by chance at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island.

As Myers rightly notes, just as we seek to recuperate the voices of those who questioned the system, our understanding of the colonial period should not exclude those who sought to accommodate their voice within the orthodox Catholic tradition, which also can tell us a great deal about the patterns of everyday life in viceregal Spanish America. At the same time, because she professed as a nun at the relatively late age of 32 and had no formal education, the numerous pages María dedicates to her secular life offer an invaluable glimpse into her world from a woman's point of view. Although the translation strikes a good balance of the different facets of her work (in particular, of her visionary encounters), the primary focus is on María's autobiographical account. Through the experiences of her mother and seven sisters, the narration presents the spectrum of options--albeit limited--that women could (honorably) follow in seventeenth-century Mexico. One of María's sisters remained with her unmarried brother on the hacienda, likely managing it herself for the last ten years of her life. A second, unable to enter a convent because of a physical deformity, lived as a religious lay woman in Puebla. Two more sisters in addition to María professed as nuns, and the remaining three married, although one died as a result of her pregnancy. Although economic factors could very well have determined the fate of the women in María's family, this sister's experience as well as that of her mother, who from the time of her marriage at the age of 15 until her husband's death never left the house and bore 11 children, suggests one reason the convent could have been a desirable option for women in colonial society. Nonetheless, the delicate negotiation of power within the family is strikingly mirrored in the convent's hierarchical relations among religious women, their confessors and ecclesiastic authorities.

The superb translation is supplemented by...