Alone at the Altar: Single Women and Devotion in Guatemala, 1670–1870 by Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara (review)

In this very interesting study, Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara takes us to the periphery of the Spanish empire to analyze the devotional activities of single women. Her focus is on colonial Guatemala, which has become the subject of more scholarly interest of late, but has often been overshadowed by its powerful neighbour, Mexico (New Spain). Her work expands upon a growing body of scholarship on single women, who have become increasingly important to our understanding of the early modern world as Church-sanctified marriage was not always the norm, either in Europe or in Spanish America, and even when it was, over the course of a lifetime, most women were single for longer than they were married. In line with the current scholarship, this book challenges the primacy of honour and chastity as defining frameworks for women's behaviour in colonial Spanish America. Leavitt-Alcántara convincingly demonstrates that neither the failure to marry nor the loss of virginity constrained single women's participation in Guatemala's vibrant religious culture.

To explore the devotional priorities of urban laywomen, Leavitt-Alcántara has examined 539 women's wills made between 1700 and 1870. In early modern women's history, wills have proven to be a boon to scholars with an interest in non-elite women, whose voices and desires otherwise rarely appear in archival documentation, but to whom Castilian law granted significant access to property. Mining those wills for information, Leavitt-Alcántara demonstrates how single women expressed their piety much like their married sisters — through their affiliation with parish confraternities, their profession to the Franciscan Third Order, and their pious donations, no matter how small.

To broaden her discussion of single women's piety, Leavitt-Alcántara integrates the stories of two renowned religious women, Anna Guerra de Jesús, an abandoned wife and mother who became famous for her saintliness; and Sor María Teresa de Aycinena, a Carmelite visionary and daughter of a wealthy and powerful merchant family, whose outspoken opposition to independence drew her into the political chaos of the early nineteenth century. Although these women were different in nearly every sense other than their piety, paired together, they demonstrate the breadth of single women's religious expression.

In chapter four, Leavitt-Alcántara provides a fascinating discussion about the expansion of girls' schools in Guatemala City at the end of the eighteenth century. She explores how these racially-diverse institutions became the source of strong networks among women and between women and Guatemala's ecclesiastical establishment. This chapter is particularly important because although women had been involved in the education of girls in Spanish America since the sixteenth century, we know little about these teachers as professionals or how even minimal education affected the lives of their students. Leavitt-Alcántara does not explore all of these issues, but she does a good job laying out the development of these schools and provides the basis for further study of the role of women's education in the social, economic, and religious transformations of the late colonial period.

Traditionally, colonial Latin Americanists do not explore the world beyond the wars of independence, and Leavitt-Alcántara is to be commended for her attempt to articulate a trajectory of female religiosity that extended into the liberal post-independence period and the revolt by, and conservative rule of, Rafael Carrera (1837–1868). During this period, although both the Church and the state worked to constrain women's devotional opportunities and promote a piety explicitly grounded in chastity, she finds extensive evidence of single women's resistance to those efforts, as they found new allies and outlets in the Jesuits and religious associations like the Daughters of Mary.

Recently colonial Latin American scholars have begun to contextualize their research within transatlantic and imperial frameworks. Generally, Leavitt-Alcántara is quite good at integrating the...