Recent Trends in the Study of Women and Religion in Colonial Mexico

After fifteen years of studying colonial Latin America, I paused at the turn of the millennium to appraise what, by the late 1990s, had become a booming subfield: female religious writing.¹ I was pleased to see that this not only had become a legitimate focus of historical and literary inquiry, but was being integrated into the graduate curriculum as well. Pioneering works by Asunción Lavrin and Josefina Muriel (1960s–1980s), together with groundbreaking literary studies by Electa Arenal, Amanda Powell, Stacey Schlau, and Jean Franco (late 1980s), had set the stage for a decade of vital activity as historians and literary critics defined this new subfield and its possibilities.² As the former worked with new archival materials to understand the social history of women, the latter examined texts written by them and male ecclesiastics to understand the circumstances in which religious women wrote. During this period of extensive research, studies about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz proliferated with the three-hundred-year commemoration of her death in 1695. New interpretations of her life, writings, and cultural-historical milieu contributed to a deeper understanding of the broader, gendered-religious, colonial context. Thus, in 2000, I discussed general trends and identified challenges that the emerging field posed, suggesting that these challenges might be addressed in part by careful attention to the nature of the materials to be analyzed, both as historical documents produced in specific circumstances and as works that participated in well-established legal, cultural, and religious discursive practices.

Pausing now in 2008 to review a few of the more recent publications on colonial Spanish American women and religion, I see a subfield that has gone beyond the foundational work of defining texts, contexts, and terms, and of noting their significance. Since 2000, scholars working in this area generally have employed methodologies that thoroughly acknowledge the complex interplay of institutional and discursive practices, and the role of women and religion within them. With this common point of departure, historians and literary critics have examined a variety of topics, including convent history and writing, lay religious women's lives, inquisitorial testimonies by women, publications by clergy about religious practices, and hagiographic requirements.³

The four books considered here reflect these trends and the range of scholars working in the field.4 One of the field's founders, Asunción Lavrin, has, with noted Mexican religious historian Rosalba Loreto L., edited a volume of primary sources with accompanying studies—Diálogos espirituales: Manuscritos femeninos hispanoamericanos, siglos XVI–XIX—building on their earlier Monjas y beatas: La escritura femenina en la espiritualidad barroca novohispana, siglos XVII y XVIII (Puebla, Mexico: Universidad de las Americas, 2002). This volume will be an essential resource for both scholars and students. Part of a new generation of literary critics, Stephanie L. Kirk carries out close readings of a broad range of texts in Convent Life in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities, further developing research about the methods used by women to establish alliances within the convent and to combat patriarchal proscriptions. Two social historians add suggestive studies to our store of knowledge. In Rebellious Nuns: The Troubled History of a Mexican Convent, 1752–1863, Margaret Chowning branches out from her previous studies in the economic history of colonial Michoacán to write a narrative history about the characters and drama involved in a late-colonial convent conflict. In several chapters of Dangerous...