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

In her remarkable study of Guatemala's late colonial period, Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara lays out the case that significant numbers of non-elite women in Guatemala's two capitals are better understood not as socially marginalized, but as centrally active in Catholic institutions, exercising agency and shaping society. The author presents meticulous archival research to show how non-elite, laboring, single and, often, mixed-race women created mutually-beneficial alliances with male clergy, gained moral status, exercised spiritual authority, obtained protection, and acted at the center of social debates, influencing public religiosity, education, and politics. Her focus on non-elite women makes this book ground-breaking. Especially interesting is Leavitt-Alcántara's argument that the alliances between these women and the church forged alternative ideals of the feminine, allowing flexibility on married status and sexuality and endorsing apostolic labor by women in the world, rather than removed from it. The author demonstrates the difference for these women's lives of very local circumstances, shaped by Santiago de Guatemala and Guatemala City's distance from imperial power centers as well as their particular economics, demographics, and religious institutions.

Leavitt-Alcántara's scholarship builds on and extends recent work by feminist historians and literary scholars that questions the image of women as limited to marginalized lives, whose public engagement is limited to manipulation as pawns in the struggles of patriarchal players. A few of the key recognizable scholars with whose work Alone at the Altar dialogues and which it extends include Ibsen, Jaffary, Mannarelli, Myers, Poska, Twinam, and Van Deusen.

At the heart of Alone at the Altar stand 539 wills, the entirety of the extant wills written in Guatemala's capitals in thirteen separate years, representing the period from 1700 to 1870. Leavitt-Alcántara applies quantitative analysis to this corpus, attentive to gender difference, marital status, alliances with religious orders and membership in third orders and confraternities. Almost half of the 539 wills (49%) were made out by women. Many of these women—33% to 72% depending on the year—did not use the honorific title of "doña," thus suggesting non-elite status. Beyond quantitative methods, the author teases out life narratives from these wills, illustrating her arguments with real and distinctive women. A hagiography and a pro-canonization archive bring into fuller view the lives of two particular religious women. The beata Anna Guerra de Jesus was an abandoned wife; the nun Sor María Teresa Aycinena, the daughter of a powerful merchant. Drawing on hagiographies, ecclesiastical chronicles, documents of foundation, and confraternity membership rolls, Leavitt-Alcántara makes sense of these two extraordinary lives as deeply representative of pious female activity of their times.

Part One of Alone at the Altar sets up Santiago de Guatemala as a city of women, mostly poor, including many single mothers and abandoned wives. These women did not fit the imperial ideal of femininity. Yet the Church—particularly Jesuits and Franciscans—valued their institutional involvement and apostolic service in the extended spiritual conquest. By examining wills, the author finds that women will-makers made alliances with priests and members of male religious orders at much higher rates than did male will-makers. These women paid alms, visited the sick, accompanied bodies to funerals, and participated in collective devotions and feast days. In return, they gained protection in this world and the next; wore publicly the prestigious third order habit; developed spiritual networks; exercised leadership in confraternities; and named male clergy as their will executors. Contrary to male clergy in the colonial centers of Mexico and Lima, those in Guatemala saw social status of these women with greater flexibility, where creating enclosed beaterios and convents was prohibitively expensive and the Inquisition distant. Men and women embraced medieval models of female piety in the world, through models such as Catherine of Sienna and Rose of Viterbo. Jesuit...