Table Of ContentNeither Saints nor Sinners:
Writing the Lives of
Women in Spanish America
Kathleen Ann Myers
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Neither Saints
nor Sinners
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Neither Saints
nor Sinners
w r i t i n g t h e l i v e s o f w o m e n
i n s p a n i s h a m e r i c a
Kathleen Ann Myers
1
2003
3
Oxford New York
Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai
Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi
São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto
Copyright © 2003 by Kathleen Ann Myers
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Myers, Kathleen Ann.
Neither saints nor sinners : writing the lives of women in Spanish America.
p. cm
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-19-515722-2; ISBN 0-19-515723-0 (pbk.)
1. Nuns—Latin America—Biography—History and criticism. 2. Latin American
literature—To 1800—History and criticism. I. Title.
BX4225 .M94 2003
271'.900228—dc21
[B] 2002071519
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Bob
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Preface
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God.
—John 1 (Rev. Std. Bible)
By the early modern period hundreds of women wrote about their experience of the
divine in Italy, France, Spain, and Spanish America. In the Spanish-speaking world in
particular, in the wake of the famous mystic author Saint Teresa of Avila (1515–1582),
hundreds of religious women were asked by their spiritual directors to write about their
lives. They spoke of visionary experience of God rather than book knowledge. Spiri-
tual directors mixed sincere concern for the salvation of their “spiritual daughters’”
souls with a desire to create new texts aimed at inspiring Christian readers.
The use of the written word to further the Word of God is as ancient as lit-
eracy and religion. Beginning in the fourth century with the compilation and can-
onization of certain texts to create the Bible, the Roman Catholic Church privileged
the written word as the physical locus of God’s presence and will and the one “true
Book.” Within a few centuries, a new narrative tradition—the lives of the saints—
was promoted to instruct Christian communities. Written records made of saints’
life stories formed a narrative tradition that was intended to inspire emulation by
listeners and readers. Over time, Christianity equated not only the Bible but also the
narrative lives of the saints with the Word of God. The most popular collection of
saints’ lives in the Spanish-speaking world notes: “The saints’ lives are a sure decla-
ration of Holy Scripture.”*
By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Hispanic world, the hagiographic
tradition had become intertwined with religious women’s own spiritual writings and
with clerical biographies of these women. Scholarly awareness of early modern
women’s spiritual autobiographical accounts has increased dramatically in the last
two decades. Studies often examine these writings for evidence of self-representation
and narrative authority, without regard to the different religious genres and the
church’s requirements for first-person narratives in the period. Other studies exam-
ine the relationship between genre and life representation, but they usually focus on
a single author and do not place these writings in the larger context of other women
writers and clergy.
In this volume, my goal is to illuminate the different church practices that led
to religious conventions for confessional autobiography and hagiographic biogra-
phy and their roles in formulating identity. I focus on early modern life writings by
or about holy women (known as vidas). The two main forms of vidas were confes-
sional, autobiographical accounts written by the women themselves and reverent
*“La vida de los santos es declaración cierta de las sagradas escrituras.” Pedro de Ribadeneyra,
“Al Cristiano lector,” Flos Sanctorum, paragraph 2.
viii Preface
biographies (also called hagiographies) written by others about saints and holy people
after their death. I study a single period, continent, and religious phenomenon: the
life writings by and about six religious women living in seventeenth-century Spanish
America. I show the lively interaction between rules for behavior and between women’s
own lives and the church’s reinterpretation of these lives, a process I call “rescripting.”
This approach uncovers the widespread cultural religious codes that established
models both for a life and for the life narrative, and it shows how these were key to
the building of many people’s identity in the colonial period. Looking at dozens of
autobiographical texts, which in most cases are just now coming to light, and at scores
of published biographical texts, we see that religious women played an important
part in establishing a spiritual-cultural colonial power. They were considered icons
of heroic virtue who brought blessings to their cities, to the New World, and ulti-
mately to Christendom itself. The texts I consider here are part of an intricate pro-
cess by which women formulated their own identities—identities that reflected
expectations for women, but at times deviated quite significantly from them.
My own process of coming to understand the essential interrelationship between
individuals and the colonial church and society that emerged through life writing
practices began in 1984, when I rediscovered the colonial Mexican nun María de San
José’s twelve-volume confessional journals, which had been lost, and the hagiographic
biography about her.* I began to examine why there were so few known writings by
religious women in the early modern period and what the lives of women who lived
hundreds of years ago could tell us. My work coincided with general interest in the
study of life writings by anthropologists, historians, and literary critics, who began
to publish research that filled in enormous gaps in our knowledge about how people
lived and thought in the early modern period. The new research gave us glimpses,
often for the first time, into the lives of slaves, native Americans, and visionary women.
I spent years piecing together the roles of church rules, confessors, and family. As
my ears became more accustomed to the language of religious texts, I began to rec-
ognize in María’s journals narrative echoes from the life stories of Sts. Teresa of Avila,
Rose of Lima, and Catherine of Siena, among many others. I became aware of the
strong network that existed between Spanish America’s leading church officials and
religious women. María and her famous counterpart Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, for
example, wrote for the same bishop (Fernández de Santa Cruz). Sor Juana was com-
pared to her contemporary, the infamous transvestite Catalina de Erauso, known as
the “Lieutenant Nun” (La Monja Alférez). Catalina had audiences with the king of
Spain and the pope. Clearly, these women were central to colonial and European
society. I realized that to understand this intricately intertwined religious, literary,
and historical context, I needed to study these religious women both as historical
subjects and as authors of a growing tradition of life writing.
Looking to critical studies about early modern religious women and their writ-
ings, I saw three general approaches to Hispanic texts. The first is reflected in a group
of pioneering studies or anthologies of nuns’ writings by Asunción Lavrin (1978),
*The manuscript was not cataloged but was in the collection owned by the John Carter Brown
Library, Providence, Rhode Island. See chapter 3 of this book for more information.
Preface ix
Josefina Muriel (1982), Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau (1989), and Isabel Poutrin
(1995). These works exposed us to a variety of authors, although at times they con-
fused male biographical rescripting and quoting of nuns’ writings with the women’s
own words.* The second approach is taken by a cluster of monographic studies and
critical editions of individual women writers—in particular, Alison Weber’s and Carol
Slade’s studies of Teresa of Avila (1990, 1995), Mary E. Giles on María de Santo
Domingo, and Ronald Surtz on Juana de la Cruz (1990)—and, on nuns in America,
such as Kathryn Joy McKnight’s work on the Colombian mystic Madre Castillo
(1997). These studies examined mystic women’s use of religious precepts and narra-
tive strategies to gain authority. A third approach has been used in the last few years
as more nuns’ writings have been brought to light from the archives and studied as a
corpus. The valuable work of Sonja Herpoel on Peninsular nuns (1999) and Kristine
Ibsen’s study of Spanish American nuns (1999) have synthesized previous work on
the confessional vida genre and the dynamics of authority and added new authors to
the list. Much of this work has been informed by groundbreaking studies in other
areas, such as medieval women mystics and seventeenth-century Protestant and New
French women life writers. (I am thinking here, in particular, of the work by Caroline
Walker Bynum, Elizabeth Petroff, Karen Scott, and Natalie Zemon Davis.)
This book paints another part of this canvas: the role of religious women in the
development of the literary genres we now call autobiography and hagiographic bi-
ography (vidas). The project brings together a survey of the church processes that
sought to identify saints and sinners—in particular, the processes of canonization
and the Inquisition—with the study of the sacrament of confession, which required
the telling of one’s life story. I argue that the categories of saint and heretic set the
extreme limits for self-representation, while confession served as a catalyst for life
writings. In between the two extremes and through the vehicle of confession, we
see a surprising variety of life paths, among them, those of a mystic, a soldier, and
a poet. In all, I examine six representative women, their writings, and their historical
circumstances.
Although I began this specific project only three years ago, it has been a long
time incubating. My teachers Alan S. Trueblood, Stephanie Merrim, Roberto
Gónzalez-Echevarría, Geoffrey Barrow, and William Woolley, and my students Grady
Wray, Kristin Routt, Galen Brokaw, Mónica Díaz, Rebecca Marquis, and Mario
Ortiz, among many others, have all taught me how to better hear the voices of the
past. To Nina Bosch I am grateful for her cheerful and efficient help on the prepa-
ration of this manuscript. My wonderful colleagues Amanda Powell, Antonio Rubial,
Frank Graziano, Asunción Lavrin, and Cathy Larson all played a very significant
part in the formulation of this project and urged me on to its completion. I am
particularly indebted to Mary E. Giles for her input on this project, to Nina Scott
for many of the translations, and to my readers Mark Feddersen and Kathryn Joy
McKnight, who provided me with valuable suggestions on the manuscript.
*Some twentieth-century scholars have taken biographers’ quotes from the women’s accounts to be
verbatim. Often the citations are altered by the biographers and therefore represent a blending of the nun’s
own words with her confessor/biographer’s. See chapter 3 of this book for a study of this process.
