Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico (review)

In Brides of ChristAsunción Lavrin reconstructs daily life in the convent through a comprehensive documentation of the individual experience of women religious in Colonial Mexico. Focusing primarily on case studies from convents in Mexico City and Puebla, Lavrin follows the path of nuns' lives "through their own eyes" (p. 4) and on their own terms, from the decision to profess and period of the novitiate through the devotional practices that sustained their piety once they had taken their vows.

Opening with a discussion of the broader social and economic contexts in which convents developed in the New World, Lavrin elaborates the multiple paths to religious life available to women and the degree to which orders were willing to adapt themselves to colonial society. In the second part of the book, each chapter addresses a different material dimension of life in the convent. The level of detail documented here is superb, as Lavrin examines a wide range of issues, from the internal hierarchies of the religious community and rules of governance; practices of discipline and self-mortification; sexuality, sickness, health, and death. The nuns' interactions with one another, with ecclesiastical authorities, and with their spiritual directors are elaborated at length, as are the consequences for those women who transgressed the rules defining such relations. The final three chapters each address a specific topic related to convent life: indigenous convents, the religious reforms of the late-eighteenth century, and the written work of women religious. Especially interesting is the discussion of the controversies arising from the Church's attempt to impose vida comúnand the informal networks of women across convents that developed. Despite the gendered and occasionally misogynous presuppositions of their male prelates, religious women exercised considerable symbolic power in colonial Mexico as "repositories of a special form of spirituality, regarded as desirable in the building of a new society" (p. 1). In Lavrin's epilogue this is extended to suggest how devotional practices "specifically promoted to cater to female affectivity" (p. 351) such as Marian worship have had a lasting impact in Mexican culture.

Meticulously documented with archival sources and the culmination of decades of research, Brides of Christis an invaluable contribution to gender studies and to the wider field of colonial Mexican history.