Vida de Sor Francisca Josefa de Castillo (review)

The publication of early-modern women’s spiritual writings in the Ibero-Atlantic world and the accompanying boom in scholarship has primed a readership for this new edition of the Vida of Francisca Josefa de la Concepción de Castillo (1671–1742). Out of print for much of the past forty years, two complementary editions are now available. Angela Inés Robledo’s edition of the autobiography of Colombia’s “national mystic” (Caracas, 2007) caters more to a scholarly audience, whereas the work by Beatriz Ferrús Antón and Nuria Girona Fibla reviewed here is more accessible to a general audience.

In their introduction, Ferrús and Girona give primary attention to Castillo’s autobiographical self as an emergent modern subject. In a hierarchical and male-dominated colonial world, they argue, European women were relegated to the role of procreators, erasing them from much of colonial narrative representation. The mostly unpublished genre of spiritual autobiographical writing, which was available to them, required women to write themselves into the scripts of hagiography, making it difficult for them to express singularity and thus modern subjectivity. Ferrús and Girona read Castillo’s Vida as staging her body as a feminine space of pain, illness, and melancholic alienation in which the trace of a modern subjectivity can be perceived (p. 38).

Ferrús and Girona’s analysis of Castillo’s feminine subjectivity provides a helpful approach to a genre so distant from our modern context, precluding, however, a broader presentation of recent scholarship on convent life, its colonial context, the writings of contemporary Ibero-Atlantic women, and Castillo’s role in Colombia’s national literary history. Their up-to-date resource bibliography partially makes up for this narrow focus, although it would be enriched by the inclusion of work by scholars such as Jennifer Eich, Stephanie Kirk, Kathleen Myers, Alexander Steffanell, and Sherry Velasco.

The editors returned to the original manuscript in the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango (Bogotá). They employ the editorial criteria of the Grupo de Investigación Siglo de Oro of the University of Navarre, modernizing spelling, punctuation, and grammar: archaic forms such as recebir, vide, and liciones become recibir, vi, and lecciones. They correct many meaningful transcription errors made by Darío Achury Valenzuela in his edition (Bogotá, 1968)—for example, replacing Achury’s “me aterro” in the Vida’s opening passage to the correct “me alegro,” as Castillo characterizes her attitude toward writing her life story. Unfortunately other errors remain, such as the transcription of the opening abbreviation P. M. as “Por ser” rather than the correct “Padre mío.”

Ferrús and Girona’s most valuable contributions are the footnotes to the text. They translate Latin phrases; note verses quoted from the Breviarium; and identify cultural, historical, and intertextual references. They provide key information including the identity of religious figures and spiritual directors, biographical data, common vida and hagiographical tropes, and historical customs; and they define the colonial vocabulary of illness that Castillo employs. This critical apparatus is essential for novice readers of early-modern nuns’ spiritual writings. One detail that may confuse such readers, however, is the choice of art for the book cover: the “crowned nun” portrait of Sor María Antonia de la Purísima Concepción, born 1755 and professed in Mexico City. The portrait conveys an image of religious culture and agency at odds with those central to Castillo’s Vida.

Robledo’s edition, which displays an 1813 portrait of Castillo on the cover, caters to scholars’ desire for a more conservative treatment of the original language and includes several letters to Castillo from her confessors, as well as the editorial documentation from the first edition (1817). Ferrús and Girona...