Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico 1580-1750 (review)

Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico 1580-1750. By Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. 202 pp. $16.95.

This study of archival material from Colonial Mexico is one of a growing number of books about women religious in the Hispanic world who are "unlike Sor Juana," (Asunsión Lavrin) the poet and dramatist published and celebrated in her own time as the "tenth muse." Josefina Muriel's groundbreaking Conventos de monjas en la Nueva Espana (México, D.F.: Editorial Santiago, 1946) remained in isolation until the 1980s with the publication of her Cultura femenina novohispana. (México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1982). Both of these books remain inaccessible to non-Spanish readers. Symptomatic of a new degree of interest in the English speaking world was the publication of Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau's Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989). Their brilliant selection of texts accompanied by portraits, maps and religious art, along with the wonderful translations by Amanda Powell, brought to life much of the complexity and range of the world of women religious in Spain, Mexico and Peru in the 16^th through 18^th century. Arenal and Schlau's emphasis on the importance of gender, strategies of women's reading and writing as a lens through which to view nuns' writing, have helped make forms such as religious autobiography, hagiography, and visionary writing accessible to a contemporary sensibility.

The geographical focus of Colonial Angels is narrower, giving us glimpses into the fabric of the complex life of women's communities in Mexico City from the early 17^th to the mid 18^th centuries. However Sampson's analysis and interpretation of archival sources, as well as the secondary literature, consider broader perspectives impacting this circumscribed world, such as the accompanying tensions between "colony and capital, center and periphery, new and old. . . male and female and enclosed and free" (x). The appendices, comprising about one third of the book, bring us hitherto unpublished material from convent and inquisitional archives, with an English translation.

In Sampson's first chapter, "Moving Stories," we hear the voice of Sor Sebastiana Josefa as she struggles with writing her spiritual experiences and her relationship to her confessor and her community. Through these writings Sampson explores a broader theme: the intersection of traditional spiritual autobiographies and the popularity of the travel narrative to the New World. Narratives of the founding mothers who made the voyage across the Atlantic became an important part of New World convent history, and though never published, were read aloud to the community to inspire and edify. The actual travel of women religious to the New World inspired visionary writing of women still in Spain, such as Ana de San José, who described her journey in spirit to the Indians to preach and evangelize in the new world. It is curious that Sampson does not mention the most famous of such journeys: that of María of Agreda, whose bi-locations to evangelize in areas of what is now New Mexico became the subject of an inquisitorial investigation (see Clark Colahan, The Visions of Sor María de Agreda: Writing Knowledge and Power [Tuscon: University of Arizona Press], 1994).

Chapter two and chapter four take us into the founding moments of the Carmelite convent of San José and, nearly half a century later, to the depositions of two groups of nuns before the inquisition. Chapter two, "From the Confessional to the Altar: Epistolary and Hagiographic Forms," compares the three extant chronicles by male authors with the numerous accounts of the nuns themselves, the most elaborate being that of the founding mothers, Inés de la Cruz and Mariana de la Encarnación. All of the narratives reflect the influence of Teresa of Avila...