Mexican Karismata: The Baroque Vocation of Francisca de los Ángeles, 1674-1744 (review)

Francisca de los Ángeles lived a life that exemplified the quintessentially contradictory nature of baroque Mexican society, as Ellen Gunnarsdóttir observes in her compelling biography of the Franciscan beata (lay religious woman). Born into an impoverished and partially mestizo family, Francisca matured into a prominent figure in the spiritual life of the northern city of Querétaro. Foundress of the city's beaterio of Santa Rosa de Viterbo and intimate of the celebrated missionary Fray Antonio de Margil de Jesús, Francisca was nevertheless twice investigated by New Spain's Inquisition. Drawn from childhood to the contemplative life and driven to the recurrent experience of visions and raptures typical of her era's propensity for affective spirituality, Francisca was bound to maintain her focus on the mundane matters required of an administrator.

Gunnarsdóttir's careful treatment of Francisca's life makes an important contribution to the expanding literature on women's spiritual writings in the Spanish colonial world. Many writers, including Kathryn Joy McKnight, Alison Weber, and Jennifer Eich, who have recently treated women's spiritual writings in the Counter-Reformation Spanish world, have adopted a gendered analysis of agency and resistance as a primary vehicle for understanding their religious subjects. Gunnarsdóttir does not ignore the gendered dimension of Francisca's relationship to her confessors, whose duty was to mediate and monitor women's mystical encounters. However, Gunnarsdóttir has other central concerns. She frames Francisca's story in her first and final chapters within the historical setting of Querétaro in the late Habsburg and Bourbon eras, paying particular attention to the development of the city's religious institutions, especially the prominent convent of Santa Clara de Jesús. She addresses, as well, the political history of the Franciscan order's presence in the city. But Gunnarsdóttir's primary interest in this book is with depicting New Spain's baroque religious culture through the experiences of one of the Counter-Reformation's lay religious "foot soldiers in the New World" (p. vii). In this, she succeeds ably. By reproducing detailed accounts of Francisca's lengthy correspondence with several of her confessors, supported by testimony from her inquisition trials and contemporary spiritual tracts, the author creates a vivid portrait of New Spanish piety as seen through the eyes of one its most fervent apostles. Her lucid characterization of the era's religious outlook will assist other scholars in both their teaching and research.

One of the book's many strengths is Gunnarsdóttir's engaging writing style. She includes vivid details that render Francisca fully palpable to her readers. She notes, for example, that in her childhood Francisca had "pranced around … like a tomboy, sunbrowned 'like . . . a Moor'" (p. 22), and uses the beata's letters to effectively illustrate the spiritual and practical woes Francisca experienced in her later years. Gunnarsdóttir also supplies detailed information to flesh out other figures prominent in Francisca's world: her confessors, her inquisitors, and her patrons.

Gunnarsdóttir wishes primarily to make Francisca's life comprehensible to her readers "within the context of an expanding colonial society" (p. ix). But the author occasionally misses opportunities to draw connections between Francisca's spirituality and her social and spiritual climate. She describes, for instance, how on one occasion, Francisca received a visit from an anonymous woman she at first understood to be the devil who deposited a dead newborn on the floor of her cell. In other passages, she details Francisca's graphic visions of purgatory. Gunnarsdóttir might have more effectively conveyed the significance of these and other similar events in the formation of Francisca's spiritual outlook—or used Francisca's experiences to draw conclusions about New Spain's religious context—had she drawn from existent literature about infanticide or religious conceptions of purgatory in New Spain. Despite this limitation, however, this is...