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Ethnohistory 49.4 (2002) 885-888



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Wild Country Out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journals of a Colonial Mexican Nun. Selected, edited, and translated by Kathleen A. Myers and Amanda Powell. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. xxxv + 386 pp., preface, introduction, notes, bibliography, maps, illustrations, appendixes, glossary, index. $39.95 cloth.)
Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico, 1580 to 1750. By Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. xvii + 202 pp., preface, acknowledgments, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. $30 cloth, $16.95 paper.)

These two books serve to introduce most scholars to a unique genre of colonial Latin American writing: the spiritual journals of nuns. They use these documents in two rather distinct ways. Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela considers them in light of other documents that described the spiritual life of the colony. She uses travelers' accounts and colonial hagiographies as well as traditional sources such as inquisition and other court records, petitions, and other documents coming out of the convents. Conversely, Kathleen A. Myers and Amanda Powell focus in specifically on the spiritual journals of one particular nun, Sor María de San José, who entered the Convent of Santa Mónica in Puebla in 1687 at age thirty-one. During her religious life, Sor María wrote twelve volumes of spiritual journals, which are extracted and translated in this work. Consequently, while closely related, these two works go about their business in strikingly different ways. Vera Tudela presents a broad picture of the spiritual life of Mexican nuns and the role of the convent based on many documentary sources, while Powell and Myers focus in on one very unique individual and present her writings for the first time to an English-speaking audience.

Vera Tudela focuses on issues related to the transmission of peninsular Spanish culture to the New World and its adaptation and modification in [End Page 885] that environment. She likens this to the observations that Spaniards themselves changed after residence in the Indies. At the same time there was an adoption of local products and ways of doing things by the new Spanish residents, such as the spread of the tortilla among Spanish colonists. Just so, she looks at the continuity and change of Spanish spiritual norms from the convents of the peninsula to those of the colony.

The first chapter deals with what has been called the "shock of the new." Vera Tudela attempts to see the transformation of the nuns and of their conventual life in transplanting the institution from the Old World to the New. She does this in part by seeing how influences from travel literature begin to appear in hagiographic writings. The middle three chapters focus on the individual and collective biographies and stories of the nuns and their convents. The second chapter looks at the foundation of the Carmelite convent of San José, later made famous in don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora's Parayso occidental, and the various influences that came to bear in that institution and its later development. The third then shifts the focus to the nuns themselves, specifically to the correspondence between one nun, Sor Sebastiana Josefa de la Santísima Trinidad, of the convent of San Juan de la Penitencia, and her confessor, José Eugenio Valdés. This correspondence was then later reworked to provide the basis for a hagiography. The fourth chapter then looks at the Inquisition and its investigation of possible heresy among the Mexican Carmelites. This investigation was based on disputes among the nuns and their superiors regarding supervision by the secular or regular clergy. The final chapter focuses on the discussion regarding the possible foundation of a convent for noble Indian women. This discussion highlights many of the themes that Vera Tudela has developed regarding the application of peninsular norms to the new environment and the modification of local practices for Spanish utilization.

The work also contains three documentary appendixes. The first is a selection from the confessional...

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