Sanctified Subversives: Nuns in Early Modern English and Spanish Literature by Horacio Sierra (review)

What is it about Catholic nuns that prompts centuries of fascination and hostility? When and why are they regarded as pitifully imprisoned in their physical and psychological regimens—chumps for Christ—and when as magnificently, spiritually free? For feminists, are they seen as instruments of patriarchal repression, or as its victims, or as embodying some third option, whether creative or furtive? Horacio Sierra analyzes the complex cultural attention that convent life receives in the early modern imaginary by looking at how nuns' lives and choices are represented in a selection of culturally resonant texts: in English, William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure, and Aphra Behn's The History of the Nun; and in Spanish, María de Zayas's Desengaños amorosos, prose and poetry by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and the life narrative of Catalina de Erauso.

For historiographical reasons, more nuanced attention has been paid to nuns' self-representations and social roles in Hispanism than in English studies. Given longstanding assumptions in the English-language world that Catholic institutions and doctrines are especially stultifying if not damaging, this book helpfully demonstrates that many women found convents an appealing milieu that offered homosocial community; a relative loosening of gender norms (women held a wide range of offices and responsibilities); a greater measure of self-determinism than in the secular context; and not least, a respected relationship to the transcendent. This book affords a special contribution to scholarship by presenting the convent as both a literal and a figurative space of central, potent significance in the early modern imagination, rather than the marginal and negligible role reassigned to it in modernity.

Chapter one, "Early Modern Nuns in Context," maps the contrasts between the increasingly harsh English rejection, and concurrent Spanish entrenchment, of Catholicism, sketching the key role of the convent from early Christianity to the Protestant rupture, when it became for England an official marker of a vilified "Romish" past (leading to massive dissolution of religious houses). For Spain and its colonies, convents grew in civic as well as ecclesiastical prestige as sites for personal and collective redemption, even while the Council of Trent sought to restrict nuns' personal agency (which female communities resisted and in some cases ameliorated).

Sierra's book addresses a comparative field deserving attention; however, contextualizing the nuns' lives and the ways in which convents were seen in England requires a survey of a greater range of primary as well as secondary studies than has been mustered for the Spanish world. As his first chapter indicates, a preponderant view of British literary, cultural, and religious histories typically foreshortens, understates, or occludes a combative and long-unsettled historical process. Not only the practice but indeed the very record of Catholicism was suppressed—especially as linked to the Stuart monarchs—in favor of an insistently Protestant Tudor version of the English past. This elision ignores the vital and ongoing, although fraught, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century presence of English Catholic cultural expressions (indeed, of English baroque literary and artistic style). Although English nuns existed, their presence was long ignored and their individual and communal cultural expressions have only recently begun to be studied. By contrast, the rediscovery of troves of convent writings from both Iberia and Latin America has spurred early modern Hispanists, especially in women's and religious studies, to investigate these materials, generating what are now extensive secondary studies of convent life and cultural production. Sanctified Subversives usefully presents examples that bridge this divide.

Chapter two, "Reclaiming Isabella, the Queer Virgin," examines forms of agency that Protestantism largely denied to women, but which Shakespeare's Isabella, in Measure for Measure, forges for herself through her apparent (although ambiguously inconclusive) rejection of marriage and motherhood in favor of the convent. Here, Sierra's attentive reading parses the challenge to heteronormativity staged through Isabella's commitment to chastity. This discussion...