Women's Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Spanish America (review)

Women's Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Spanish America. By KRISTINE IBSEN. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ix, 202 pp. Cloth, $49.95.

In many ways 1999 was the year of the "boom" for contextualizing studies of early modern Spanish and Spanish American religious women's writings. As the millennium came to a close, a handful of books were published that examined the interface between period institutional codes and groups of women writers. Until recently, monograph studies of single authors or anthologies had characterized the field. Kristine Ibsen's Women's Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Spanish America is an important contribution to the move towards broader studies. Whereas Stephanie Merrim's Early Modern Women Writers and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1999) places this famous nun within the milieu of other secular writers, and Sonja Herpoel's A la zaga de Santa Teresa (1999) examines nearly two-dozen Spanish religious women's spiritual autobiographies, Ibsen's work focuses on writings of eight colonial Spanish American nuns. She links their work to period cultural and religious practices in order to highlight the commonalities and differences in women's strategies for self-representation. Ibsen's thesis and theoretical framework follow commonplaces of the field: how the reader, in particular the confessor who ordered the account, influenced the discursive strategies used by religious women as they recorded their life stories (p. vii). Working with notions of "agency" and "subject positions," she argues that women created "multiple models of representation" within hierarchical systems that monitored their lives and, in so doing, the nuns created roles for themselves as heroines (p. 18). In a well-informed and well-documented study, Ibsen proceeds to explain the essential interrelationship between early modern spiritual autobiography and the practice of Roman Catholic confession, the role of women's bodies in Christianity, and the requirements for becoming a saint (chapter 1). The five chapter studies on the nuns' writings offer a series of readings on the innovative uses of church conventions to construct a variety of identities and voices (chapters 2-6).

Selecting writers from the mid to late colonial period (1650-1800) and from geographical areas representing most of Spanish America (Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru), Ibsen's forte is the breadth of authors and manuscripts studied. Her selection of women who wrote in a variety of genres, including spiritual autobiography, letters, and short confessional accounts, allows the reader to glimpse the extent of this confessional, self-representational practice in colonial Spanish America. Ibsen brings to light both already published works and new manuscript material. In this way, she contributes to the important process of recovering women's writings from the archives.

The chapter studies alternate between analyzing a single author (chapters 2, 4, 6) and sketching the general hagiographic paradigm for religious women's life stories (chapter 3) and the mystic model for authority (chapter 5). Chapter 2 presents a solid study of the relatively well-published Colombian Madre Castillo, and follows in the same vein as Kathyrn Joy McKnight's monograph on this nun, The Mystic of Tunja. Chapter 3 provides a highly informative discussion of period hagiography and nuns' self-portraits as "suffering saints" (p. 84). Using a handful of nuns' life writings, including Gerónima del Espíritu Santo, María Coleta de San José, María de San José, María Marcela, and María Manuela de Santa Ana, Ibsen convincingly argues that they attempted to inscribe themselves into models of heroic virtue, writing what Kate Greenspan has coined "autohagiography." The relatively unpublished works of the Mexican Sebastiana Josefa de la Santísima Trinidad help us see this representational strategy at work. In chapter 4, Ibsen studies the central role of Sebastiana's body and suffering in the writing of a saintly life story. Chapter 5 deftly links together baroque theories on visualization and dialogue to argue that through using a "theatricalized sign system" (p...