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1 Uncounted Hispanic nuns wrote about their Lives from the end of the fifteenth into the eighteenth centuries.1 Many composed poems, plays, and letters as well. Some wrote in their own hand; some dictated oral narratives ; many copied manuscripts for each other. More still provided ecclesiastics with reports and testimony and supplied the faithful with guidance, instruction, advice, consolation, and protection. Since nuns, like Hispanic women in general, were supposed to refrain from public activities, inner-directed religious experience was considered most appropriate to them, and it was that experience they wrote about most frequently. Some nuns also translated and reinterpreted the scriptures, the Church Fathers, and contemporary preachers. They described and addressed questions of religious life that counterbalanced the formality and distance, the control and indirectness, of Church Rules and rituals. Few women of the period wrote, but nuns were a great exception to that rule.2 They contributed to the verbal, musical , and artistic production of a time renowned for its creative fecundity. This book tells the story of nuns who wrote. They came from Spain and the Americas, from wealth and from poverty; they included the granddaughters of Jews and the daughter of one of Spain’s greatest dramatists. In our view, they all struggled to find their own voices and, within the confines of the convent, to live their own lives. Excerpts from the writings of some of these Sisters are included in this study to allow them to speak for themselves. None of the material has ever received wide circulation; much of it had never been published before our first edition . Because of new interest in women’s history, material buried in convent and library archives for centuries is finally being permitted to surface. The accepted literary canon has always paid homage to the spiritual values of women’s religious writing but has relegated the texts to the shadows. Santa Teresa de Jesús (1515–82) and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–95) were for a long time the only two Hispanic women of the Golden Age or Spanish Renaissance to be judged major writers.3 Saint Teresa and her work enjoyed enormous popularity, especially after her canonization in 1622. We regard the written material produced by the Introduction Reclaiming the Mother Tongue: History and Spiritual Politics 2 inTrOducTiOn nuns who claimed her as a spiritual mother to be essential to an understanding of the history, psychology, literature, spirituality, and sexual politics of the period. Sor Juana’s example of interdisciplinary inquiry and her feminist sense of lineage reached a limited audience in her own time but are inspiring a wide one in ours.4 We have discovered in the passages cited and selected in the following pages a hitherto neglected record of women’s experience and opinion. In exploring the works we assume their literary, social, and historical importance. To be sure, nuns’ spiritual autobiographies contain prescribed structures, order, meanings, themes, and formulas and reflect the hagiographic and biblical rhetoric of the Church, which could either approve or censor all writing. But when they are removed from a rigid framework, the Lives, poems, plays, and letters by the Sisters reveal patterns that contradict their stated intentions and express instead the authors’ individuality . While the purported objective of their work is always the praise of God and promotion of both the author’s and the audience’s fidelity to the Church, we have discovered much more: rare glimpses into daily life, relationships of strife and affection with other women, flashes of insight, assertions of individual power, and daring leaps into the submerged inner world of imagination and feeling. In fact, in these texts resides almost the only record we have of the consciousness of early modern women in Hispanic lands. We also consider these works, created by women who lived cloistered among women, to be a reclaiming of the “mother tongue.”5 This expression designates the vernacular, the language of birthplace and family, primarily of women. In addition , we use it to refer to the work of “mothers” in a woman’s religious and literary tradition that grew largely separate from, although partly parallel to, the culture of men.6 By far the most significant predecessor for the writers who appear in this book was Saint Teresa, the great mystic, writer, and reformer of the Carmelite Order. She herself issued from a milieu rich in mystic and monastic women. She wrote in a context of other writing women, who were her...

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