The Devil, Women, and the Body in Seventeenth-Century Puebla Convents

The mystical and supernatural experiences that many nuns faced in seventeenth-century convents in Puebla shaped New Spain's spirituality. These experiences and the way they were recounted provided the elements for an archetype of conduct and for socially accepted virtues. Using their imagination, these nuns, servants of God, enlightened and morally exemplary, maintained a direct relationship between the convent, the supernatural world, and colonial society.

Anthropological studies of popular religion have emphasized, almost exclusively, the collective and public aspects of religious expression but have ignored private, individual piety. ¹ Yet collective and private religious expressions have been linked throughout history. When individual manifestations of religious expression were socially endorsed, these private forms of piety influenced the creation of identity and models of behavior. Because these archetypes of religious conduct were so important within colonial culture as a whole, it is important to gain an understanding of the events that led to their formation and the way in which they travelled from the culture of the convent to that of the larger society.

In this article I focus upon the lives of individual nuns and how events in their lives influenced the creation of a religious identity and an ideal of feminine conduct in the colonial period. I concentrate upon the way in which some seventeenth-century Poblano nuns struggled against the Devil, especially as he appeared in animal form. These battles occurred within the norms of the prevailing cultural imagination and religiously accepted practices. Out of their victories over the Devil, these nuns and their adherents created a prototype of desired female bodily control and constructed models of accepted feminine gestures.

In the local culture of seventeenth-century Puebla, residents identified with the nuns' private lives and accepted these women as symbols of religious perfection. The convent's cultural influence linked individual nuns to the community around them. This culture provided a framework within which individual nuns' feats became extremely significant for society at large. It was in this way that particular religious practices that developed behind the convent's cloistered walls were communicated and became an important part of local religiosity. The supernatural experiences reported by nuns were apparently rare, but they became part of the local urban devotion and Creole culture. The hagiographies of nuns emphasized these apparitions as part of a cultural process. The supernatural events, properly interpreted, directed women towards the kind of goals, methods, and values to which they should aspire in order to conform to the model of ideal femininity established by the nuns.

The sources for this study consist primarily of letters written by the nuns' friends or companions who were following their confessors' orders. These documents differ from the printed hagiographies in that the authors were closer to the protagonists and their writings are therefore more revealing. In the biographies that came at a latter stage, confessors interpreted this material and adjusted it to the pertinent religious canons. Although the confessors who wrote biographies of the nuns used the materials produced within the convents, they left aside many aspects of the "marvellous." They tended to focus on the ordering of information to convey the story and the miracles that supported doctrinal conventions.

Three nuns who experienced these visions, and who were recognised as visionaries by the society of Puebla and the official church, took their vows and lived in the convents of la Purísima Concepción, Santa Teresa, and Santa Mónica. Some of the other nuns who wrote about Isabel de la Encarnación ² and María de Jesús ³ did so at the behest and under the direction of their mutual confessor and spiritual director, Father Miguel Godínez. ⁴ The life of María de San José (1656-1719) also provides some examples of supernatural manifestations. She joined the cloistered Augustinians in the Convent of Santa Mónica. ⁵

These documents are...