The Virgin and the Globe: The Cosmography of Sor María de Ágreda

In 1616, in a small village in northern Spain, a precociously brilliant teenage girl named María Coronel y Arana composed a text that she titled Tratado sobre la redondez de la tierra y de los habitantes de ella, in which she described the earth and its inhabitants and the ten celestial spheres revolving around the earth. Her stated purpose in writing was to praise God for the wonders of His creation and to inspire others to praise Him as well. The treatise begins: "Wonderful is the Lord as seen in the face of the earth, in having created it and in the providence with which He cares for it … what good reason to praise the Creator of such a structure, the giver of life to the universe!"¹ This youthful work would probably not have survived into the twenty-first century except that María Coronel y Arana grew up to become Sor María of Ágreda, one of the most important and influential figures in early modern Spain. She was an abbess, a prominent spiritual leader, a mystic, a highly respected theologian, and a powerful political figure. As a result, the Tratado sobre la redondez de la tierra, the first of many books Sor María would write over the course of her long and distinguished life, was lovingly copied and preserved in libraries throughout the Spanish empire.²

The Tratado sobre la redondez de la tierra is a rare example of a scientific text by an early modern woman. There is now a considerable body of work demonstrating that early modern women participated in scientific work, including natural history,³ natural philosophy,⁴ alchemy,⁵ medicine,⁶ astronomy, and astrology.⁷ However, women were far less likely than men to write scientific texts, and when they did they were less likely to see their work published. Sor María's treatise is further evidence that women were active participants in the scientific culture of early modern Europe.

When I refer to Sor María as a participant in the scientific culture of the seventeenth century, I mean that she was both an avid reader of scientific literature and the author of a cosmographical treatise. An examination of the Tratado sobre la redondez de la tierra makes clear that Sor María read multiple scientific texts, on subjects including astronomy, geography and the flora and fauna of America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. In characterizing Sor María's reading as a form of participation in scientific culture, I am building on the scholarship of historians of reading who argue that reading is an active process of making meaning from texts.⁸ In much the same way that Inquisition trial records allowed Carlo Ginzburg to reconstruct the reading practices of the sixteenth-century Friulian miller known as Menocchio, I use the Tratado sobre la redondez de la tierra to reconstruct both what Sor María read and how she interpreted what she read.⁹ I also draw on more recent scholarship on scientific amateurs in early modern Europe. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a scientific amateur was a "lover" (from the Latin amare, to love) of science, someone like Sor María who eagerly consumed scientific texts. Historians of science have argued that these scientific amateurs contributed to the scientific culture of early modern Europe, creating the conditions in which scientific expertise, as well as new empirical, experimental, and mathematical methodologies came to be valued over ancient texts and received wisdom.¹⁰ The case of Sor María demonstrates that a religious woman could also be a scientific amateur.

But Sor María did more than read scientific texts; she took the unusual step of composing one of her own. She took material from the books she read (and possibly from oral lessons as well) and used it to construct her own unique vision of the cosmos. She combined material from a variety of texts in novel ways, and she frequently altered the material from her sources to emphasize different moral or spiritual...