Immaculate Conceptions: The Power of the Religious Imagination in Early Modern Spain by Hernández Rosilie (review)

Rosilie Hernández’s suggestive, powerful book analyzes how the idea of the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception shaped the individual, institutional, and structural religious imagination in early modern Spain. After providing a historical context and overview of the hypotheses and principles that guide her study, the author considers written and visual texts from the period to explore how this not-yet official, though widely accepted doctrine, contributed to fluctuating definitions of cultural identity. Specifically, she argues that the production of theological thought and devotional zeal from multiple sites (including the church and popular belief) supported “the creative potentiality of national, communal, and individual religious imaginaries” (6).

Chapter 1, “The Anatomy of the Religious Imagination,” outlines the theoretical framework for examining the “controversial and slippery indeterminability of the mystery of Mary’s Immaculate Conception” (5). Further, after defining “religious imagination,” a foundational concept of the book, Hernández affirms that she intends to demonstrate how the Immaculist religious imaginary, based on Mary’s exceptionality (her freedom from sin, mediated by her humanity), contributed to a notion of self demarcated not only by hegemonic rules, but also adapted and reshaped by individuals in varying forms; a complex notion of agency underlies her argument.

A detailed outline of medieval and early modern theologians’ explanations of Mary’s immaculacy follows; examples include the fourth century tota pulchra prayer and the debate between Dominicans and Franciscans regarding the Virgin’s purity. Next, Hernández reviews “the politics of immaculacy”: she claims that devotion to the Immaculate Conception “perfectly fitted the Spanish Habsburg religious and political imaginary, its claim of purity—religious and racial—and its ambition for supremacy within a contentious diplomatic and militarized European arena” (33). The chapter ends with preliminary conclusions about why Immaculate Conception carried such symbolic potency in the early modern Spanish religious imagination.

Chapter 2, “An Army of Peers,” brings together sermons, treatises, religious theater, and popular poetry, contending that “... the mystery of and the theological premises that frame Conceptionist thought were readily available to be appropriated and reproduced by male and female authors with widely varying degrees of theological and artistic formation for a popular audience” (75). Beginning with Diego Pérez de Valdivia’s Tratado de la singular y purísima concepción de la Madre de Dios (1582), which established the principles of God’s absolute will and Mary’s exalted humanity, reproduced in myriad subsequent treatises, including those by Gonzalo Sánchez Lucero, Pedro Suárez de Castilla, Rodrigo Manrique, Vicente Justiniano, Francisco de Torres, and Pedro Núñez Bosch, the case for immaculacy was based on the theological discourse of ineffability and the mystical experiences of prominent religious figures, such as John of Patmos.

Three religious plays, by Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Blas Fernández de Mesa, staged as a comedia de corrales with twisted love plots, death threats, and political intrigue (61), are studied. Each incorporates the 1,484 miraculous appearance of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception to Beatriz da Silva, the noblewoman who later founded the Order of the Immaculate Conception. The productions echo standard depictions of this Virgin in painting and iconography; in Tirso’s, for instance, Mary, the only eternal and immaculate human being, is a young child. In these plays, dramatic spectacle allows the audience to witness, even participate in, the visionary narrative. Hernández maintains that theater’s ability to produce a tangible figure on stage particularly lends itself to a manifestation of the sacred in the familiarly human.

Lastly, the verses of six amateur women poets, all of whom participated in a poetry contest printed as Justa poética en defensa de la pureza de la Immaculada Concecpción de la Virgen Santísima (Zaragoza, 1619), and none of whom published any other work, are discussed. The poems by Gerónima Marqués, Juana Garc...