Laywomen and the Making of Colonial Catholicism in New Spain, 1630–1790 by Jessica L. Delgado (review)

In her first monograph, Jessica L. Delgado examines the many strategies by which Mexican women gave form to local religion during the mid-colonial period. Whereas scholars of New Spain have crafted a rich historiography of nuns and their respective convents, Delgado highlights the daily interactions and religious practices of women who did not become brides of Christ. In other words, Laywomen and the Making of Colonial Catholicism in New Spain is a study of the over-whelming majority of New Spain’s women, a daunting task when considering the racial, regional, class and educational complexity of that particular population. Delgado navigates these challenges well by focusing her analysis on rural and urban areas within the Central Mexican region between 1640 and 1770. Her deployment of “spiritual status” as a category of analysis for an individual’s reputation for piety and virtue is an especially helpful concept by which to “understand the co-constitutive nature of racialized, gendered, and economically shaped colonial hierarchies” (10). The book follows a non-chronological, thematic approach with two parts, each consisting of three chapters. Part I focuses on laywomen’s daily interactions with priests, ecclesiastical courts and the sacraments of confession and communion.

Throughout these first three chapters, Delgado demonstrates how women navigated their own religious expectations in relation to sexuality, conjugal expectations, and unwelcome advances by priests and other actors. Part II applies these analyses to specific spaces and institutions that cloistered and contained women. This spatial approach effectively juxtaposes cases in which women voluntarily sought cloister versus other, notably coercive, cases. The result is a fascinating topography of laywomen’s religious experiences in parishes, court-rooms, corrections houses, convents and educational institutions. Throughout these six chapters, Delgado contends that women did not merely react or respond to male religious authority. Instead, laywomen strategically engaged a series of religious practices that “constituted a recognizable, although informal, body of knowledge” that gradually altered institutional practices in Mexican Catholicism (6). The author acknowledges that this was an unbalanced dialogic process as men and women certainly did not compete on equal footing during the mid-colonial period. Nonetheless, her ultimate claim that “women made colonial Catholicism along with men” is convincing throughout the text (259). Two chapters, in particular, deserve further attention. Chapter 2, “Public and Scandalous Sin,” focuses on how women engaged ecclesiastical courts in the city of Toluca. Delgado delved into the records of the local Juzgado Eclesiástico as her primary source. Based on over 290 cases located in the Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de México (aham), Delgado produces a remarkable complement (and, at times, a counterpoint) to Juan Javier Pescador’s research on the Provisorato Eclesiástico of Mexico City. She proves that in Toluca poor women found greater accessibility to ecclesiastical judges despite having fewer interactions with lawyers than in the capital (80). Toluca judges were also willing to swiftly imprison abusive husbands based on their spouses’ testimony, one of the many strategies deployed by laywomen in their negotiation of religion and conjugality. This emphasis on secondary cities offers greater texture and variability to our understanding of laywomen’s colonial religiosity in New Spain by decentering the capital city.

In Chapter 6, “In the Convent but Not of It,” Delgado demonstrates the interlocking effect of race, class, and spiritual status on the lives of convent dependents, servants and slaves. The author wields the analytic lens of race throughout the book, but it is most evident in this chapter. Enslaved women and their children of African descent were ubiquitous in Mexican convents even as their presence challenged the intended racial purity of the cloister. The same could be said for Indigenous servants, mixed-race donadas and other non-Spanish women. Delgado is especially attentive to the fact that even when nuns performed “acts of voluntary debasement” at the hands of their free and enslaved servants, “these were predicated on the hierarchical status...