Embodying the Sacred: Women Mystics in Seventeenth-Century Lima by Nancy E. Van Deusen (review)

In her latest book, Nancy van Deusen offers an erudite and creative approach to the history of women and religion in the viceroyalty of Peru’s capital city. Van Deusen stresses that women, in their striving to achieve their spiritual goals, often had to combat the local Holy Office tribunal, other Church and state authorities, and even their own families, but they were not rebels or actively resisting masculine spiritual leaders. Instead, they were forging their own quotidian but simultaneously transcendent paths.

Over the course of the book, Van Deusen provides a four-sided frame for her depiction of Rosa of Lima, her followers, and other less successful or famous religious figures, centering her analysis on the following themes: that we can understand mystical piety via everyday tangible experiences that embody divine messages through the five senses; that women’s spirituality was often centered on their relationality with others; that saintly women worked as local spiritual leaders and teachers; and that we must complicate the “I” in their autobiographical writings. Van Deusen argues these themes with a close study of several women whose biographies prove how the mundane and social aspects of mysticism allowed all social levels in Lima access to it, from poor African-descent servants in convents to the viceroy’s wealthy and devout daughter.

In the first three chapters, van Deusen focuses on material and immaterial embodiment, beginning with an exploration of Rosa de Lima as an effective teacher who used tactile gendered tasks such as sewing and decorating statues to model how work connects daily life to the divine. It is refreshing to consider Rosa as an intelligent, practical, and socially enmeshed mentor, not just a pallid, self-mortifying martyr. In the writings of Rosa’s followers, the saint’s body and their own bodies became mystical texts themselves.

In a fascinating case of a woman who achieved momentary popularity and even the support of Augustinian friars for her living and embodied saintliness, the physicality of mysticism extended even to followers collecting her nail clippings, dirty wash water, and feces left on the street. This woman, named Angela de Carranza, marketed herself literally as a walking relic, whose every effluvium left behind sacred traces of her connections to the divine. Predictably, Carranza aroused Holy Office suspicions, and the inquisitors interrogated and imprisoned her. Their displeasure with the commercializing of her personal relics led to burning all the collected bodily leavings and souvenirs that she had sold to her many ardent followers. Carranza’s brief fame and subsequent fall into enclosed oblivion unfortunately tainted other women who sought recognition for their living saintliness, including a woman who advocated strongly but ultimately without success for the beatification of her indigenous husband.

Others had more modest goals, such as hopes of a life as a devout nun or donada (a servant “donated” by oneself or others who took a lifetime vow to work in a convent). These women more successfully negotiated the racial and gendered hierarchies of Lima’s spiritual opportunities. Donadas and their male counterparts numbered in the hundreds in Lima, constituting a class of well-connected, hardworking women and men who sometimes even received special recognition as saints—most notably the African-descended Saint Martín de Porres and, less well known, the mystic Ursula de Jesús. Van Deusen concludes the book with the biography of a viceroy’s daughter who, like all of the other women mentioned above, struggled to achieve her spiritual goals and personal pious agency. In this case, her family refused to accept her desire to stay in Lima and become a nun in a convent. Therefore, the young Josefa Portocarrero Laso de la Vega took her demands all the way up to the royal court, finally succeeding in disobeying her mother’s wishes that she return to Spain with her substantial inheritance.

By the end of this book, Lima has come to...