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  • Convent Life in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities
  • Ellen Gunnarsdóttir
Convent Life in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities. By Stephanie L. Kirk. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. Pp. ix, 241. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $59.95 cloth.

Stephanie Kirk brings an interdisciplinary approach to the study of convents in colonial Mexico by studying texts such as instruction manuals for nuns, admonitory letters written by male clerics, as well as poems, sermons, and official documents, including evidence from Inquisition archives. She argues that we are here speaking of two communities: "the Church's de jure community . . . [and] the nuns' de facto community" (p. 8). In other words: convents as the Church wanted them to be, and convents as they truly were. In pursuit of the former ideal, the male ecclesiastical hierarchy did its very best to control these communities and to coerce their members to live as meek, obedient brides of Christ. The nuns, on the other hand, were skilled resistance fighters and often succeeded in mobilizing their communities against unwelcome intrusions.

Kirk opens with an analysis of the Jesuit Antonio Nunez de Miranda's texts written for nuns and details his gruesome descriptions of the death march a nun must undertake to achieve union with her divine groom. She aptly highlights the excessive and misogynistic language of the text, but often labels as misogyny what is really quite common language in instruction manuals on mysticism. Self-mortification was a revered tool to achieve mystic union, and the bloody—often perverse—tortures that male ecclesiastics inflicted upon themselves were just as enthusiastically advertised and held equal fascination for the populace as did those of the nuns. Based on the texts, Kirk is convinced that the male hierarchy wanted the nuns not only dead and buried to the world, but to themselves as well. But as Saint Theresa herself stated, it was this death that allowed the nun to resurrect herself spiritually to behold the glories of her soul: the Interior Castle, i.e. mystic union. Equally, the author overreaches when she uses one Inquisition case against a nun for mala amistad to argue that same-sex relationships in convents were a primary concern for Church authorities. It is logical to assume, based on the fact that most convents harbored hundreds of women, many of whom had consecrated their bodies to Christ, that clerics would fear homoerotic relationships. But further evidence is certainly needed to throw light on the issue.

The chapter on vida comun, however, is excellently documented and brings the reader closer than any other section of the book to the lived reality of these women, as well as their effective strategies for mobilization. A more balanced approach might take into the equation that all institutions of Creole culture were the target of the Bourbon push to tighten the reins of empire. The Jesuit order, whose schools provided crucial formation for boys of the local elite, is but one well-known example of the same phenomenon. The fight over the vida comun was not merely about men's disgust and loathing of functioning, virtually autonomous female communities, but about cutting out those organs that pumped the lifeblood into Creole culture. [End Page 449] Convents, after all, educated Creole girls and prepared them for active duty as members of that society. Finally, in Kirk's chapter on texts by female secular and religious supporters of Sor Juana, the reader indeed learns that the famed nun enjoyed the support of powerful aristocratic women, but is no closer really to an image of "convent life" in colonial Mexico.

Stephanie Kirk has a strong case here as to the animosity of the Church towards convents, but an over-reliance on critical theory narrows her scope considerably. With each chapter she provides the reader with a fixed theoretical lens through which to consider the subject, thus bringing to light neglected aspects of the literature she studies, but she fails to paint that broad canvas of varying hues and forms that constituted life in Mexican convents. Official Church rhetoric and documented cases of strife may easily lead us away from the fact that on the local level many...

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