Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico, 1580-1750, and: Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World, and: A Wild Country Out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journals of a Colonial Mexican Nun (review)

Abstract

Identity, independence, and a voice: these three subversive characteristics in sixteenth-century women were punishable by death at the hands of the Inquisition. The Inquisition, ever on the lookout for heretics, investigated women who had converted to Catholicism from Judaism and who were guilty of quietly and privately practicing their former religion. Also, at a time when Spain was embarking on colonizing the New World and sending nuns over to establish religious communities,—a second form of colonialism after the Conquest which was political as well as religious—authorities discovered they had a unique problem to contend with, dissent in the Mexican convents. The three texts, Colonial Angels: Narratives of [End Page 203] Gender and Spirituality in Mexico, 1580-1750 by Elisa Tudela, Women in the Inquisition edited by Mary E. Giles, and A Wild Country Out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journey of a Colonial Mexican Nun edited by Kathleen Myers and Amanda Powell, provide first-person narratives and court testimony. Through these first-person documents, the authors describe the pious, political, racist, classist, and historical lives of the holy women inside and outside the convent and the Catholic Church's relationship with them. According to Tudela's sources, the belief was that the nuns in Mexico in the early eighteenth century had apparently "abandon[ed] the purity of their Peninsular origin and becom[e] otras, just as Sahagún had warned happened to all things and persons Spanish" (ix).