Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800) (review)

The field of Atlantic studies has come into its own with the founding of the journal Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives in 2003 and the establishment of interdisciplinary Atlantic studies symposia and programs in the United States and Europe at schools such as Harvard, Rutgers, Louisiana State, the University of Iowa, the University of Liverpool, and the University of Padua. According to the editors of Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800), “Atlantic Studies rests on the premise that the Atlantic basin forms a community bound by economic, political, and cultural ties” (4). They intend this volume to contribute to the growing conversation regarding parameters and methodologies of the field, moving beyond a focus on the economic, military, and political engines of empire that drove earlier studies. Taking a cultural studies approach, they want to place gender—especially studies of women—and religion at the center of the conversation. Attending to women’s writings and experiences, they argue, better exposes the significant roles women played in creating a complex Atlantic world. This is surely true. More problematic, however, is the editors’ presentation of religion, which appears as a kind of sui generis entity, separate from, rather than thoroughly entangled with, all other aspects of human life and culture: “Religion creates a category of identity sometimes independent of [race, class, and gender] and can provide people with sources of motivation and agency in its own right. . . . [A] focus on religion opens our eyes to alternative, non-political ways of imagining space” (7).

Despite this apparent desire to treat religion as a special, independent category, the volume’s essays, for the most part, ground the religious motivations and experiences of the women and men they study in the dynamic politics of everyday life. All of the essays use writings by women or about women, some more focused on literary analysis than others. The book is organized into three sections. Part 1, “Theoretical Reflections on Women and Religion from an Atlantic Perspective,” includes a chapter by Lisa Vollendorf, “Transatlantic Ties: Women’s Writing in Iberia and the Americas,” that is the most literary of the collection. Vollendorf tracks the common rhetorical strategies (especially that of humility) and themes (such as the fashioning of Catholic femininity) in Hispanic women’s writing, beginning in Spain in 1580 and then moving to the Americas about one hundred years later. Influenced by the literary productions of Teresa of Avila, most of the writing occurred in convents, where women were educated and literate and where there was an established institutional network allowing for the transatlantic exchange of texts and ideas. In her essay, Vollendorf provides tables of women writers in Iberia and Spanish America that include titles of their major texts and brief biographical sketches of the authors. These will be eminently useful for other students of Hispanic women’s writing between 1600 and 1800.

Part 2, “Negotiating Belief and Ethnicity in the Atlantic Basin,” includes four chapters, three of which are about Spanish Catholic America and use varying genres of written texts: records of the Church’s interrogations of a woman accused of demonic possession; Spanish and German male-authored hagiographies of holy woman Catarina de San Juan, born in India, enslaved, and sent to New Spain; and court records of blasphemy cases that reveal class and gender dynamics in colonial Mexico. Unique in this section (and the volume) is Jon Sensbach’s “Prophets and Helpers: African American Women and the Rise of Black Christianity in the Age of the Slave Trade.” Sensbach demonstrates that African slaves on the Danish island of St. Thomas in the Caribbean, who had converted to Moravianism through the work of German missionaries, had created an active Protestant community by the 1730s, “a hidden religious world . . . in the heart of the violent plantation slavery system” led by “several hundred black Christian women organizing to preserve their spiritual domain” [End Page 347...