Convent Life in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities (review)

In this latest contribution to Latin American colonial studies from the perspective of gender, Stephanie L. Kirk proposes to examine how women religious in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico created "alternate"communities through alliances, friendships, and intellectual exchange. To understand how these women challenged restrictions in their writing, she suggests, the texts through which such boundaries were defined and sustained must also be considered. Thus Kirk structures her book as a "tale of two communities": on the one hand, that found in the textual traces of nuns' daily lives, and, on the other, the idealized community by which ecclesiastical and secular authorities sought to manage women's bodies and minds. By extolling the virtues of solitary meditation and self-discipline, Kirk argues, the community imagined in the pages of hagiographies and conduct manuals was "not a community at all" (p. 12).

The first chapter begins with a close reading of two tracts by Antonio Núñez de Miranda, best known today for his role as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's confessor. In her analysis of the Cartilla de la doctrina religiosa (1698), Kirk is especially attentive to the text's staged dialogue, demonstrating how the priest's narrative authority is complemented by the questions of imaginary novices who model docile behavior for the female reader. The second part of this chapter considers Núñez's Plática doctrinal (1697) from the perspective of a baroque treatment of death and vanitas, offering an intriguing reading of the image of the professed nun's body as dead to the world as a strategy for the containment of women. In the chapter that follows, Kirk turns to inquisition archives to recover the story of a nun accused of an inappropriate relationship (mala amistad) with a servant girl, which she associates with the considerable literature in which "private"friendships (amistades particulares) were discouraged as antithetical to the professed nun's vow to shun all earthly affection. This attempt to discourage contact fits in nicely with the book's discussion of community, even if the reading of the homoerotic dimensions of such friendships may be overstated. The next chapter examines texts related to the eighteenth-century convent reforms known as vida común. These reforms were not merely a form of curtailing luxury. More specifically, they may be seen as an attempt to further restrict women's contact with the world outside and to contain the economic independence enjoyed by many elite women religious. Kirk studies official documents and archival material to demonstrate how some convents bypassed the local religious authorities to take their concerns directly to the viceroy and eventually the king, and her discussion of the rhetorical strategies employed in such exchanges is fascinating. In her final chapter, Kirk brings the book full circle with two works associated with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, regarding the exchange and circulation of female-authored texts among women religious as an "intellectual community," or more hyperbolically, as a "utopian quest" that circumvented the "usual channels of . . . communication controlled by men" (p. 144). Kirk's discussion of an unusual poetic relation between Sor Juana and a literary circle of Portuguese nuns is worthy of note, although it would have been helpful to balance her reading of the poems' same-sex eroticism with a more detailed consideration of their use of rhetorical convention. In short, Convent Life in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities is an interesting and ambitious study of the discourses associated with convent life in Mexico.