Embodying the Sacred: Women Mystics in Seventeenth-Century Lima

Abstract

In this rigorously researched analysis of the lives of holy women in colonial Lima, Nancy van Deusen offers an exploration of female networks and their particular relationship to embodied holiness. She uses women's engagement with material objects as a primary focus to link a series of case studies, as such objects had both spiritual and didactic potential. As religious women moved in and out of spaces that were exclusively feminine, they communicated theological, devotional, and spiritual knowledge to each other. The monograph argues that women used such knowledge to gain greater autonomy and power.Part 1, “Material and Immaterial Embodiment,” focuses on material objects and their crucial role in early modern spiritual practice. It is divided into three chapters, each of which discusses the ways in which religious objects—such as sacred art, devotional books, and relics of living saints—became animated through the process of devotional focus. It further demonstrates how the objects activated multiple sensorial experiences that heightened women's access to the divine.Chapter 1 centers on Lima's most famous holy woman, Saint Rose of Lima, and her relationship with her female disciples. Rose, van Deusen demonstrates, taught her disciples through her own engagement with statues, print engravings, and cloth. Rose's example communicated how touch in particular could act as a conduit to the divine. In chapter 2, van Deusen expands the theme of materiality and the senses by focusing on the bodies of female mystics and their embodied experience of divine union. Here she connects mysticism with the practice of reading, arguing that holy women transformed into a kind of text that could be read. Seventeenth-century beata Ángela de Carranza, the subject of chapter 3, promoted herself as a living saint through distribution of her body parts (hair, nails, etc.) as though they were relics, highlighting how pieces of bodies could act as evidence for holiness. Taken together, these three chapters reveal how gendered activities connected to wider Catholic beliefs about the divine power of material objects.Part 2, “The Relational Self,” shifts to a discussion of how holy women constructed self-identities in relationship to others—specifically within communities of women and their networks of sociability. Chapter 4 addresses the vocations of women of color as donadas in Limeño convents. Donadas were essentially servants who had been “donated” to convents, usually beginning as slaves to well-to-do nuns (p. 96). Van Deusen looks at large-scale patterns by analyzing the applications of nearly 500 women to take vows as donadas, arguing that their lowly status in the convent did not bar them from spiritual and social networks and that many were able to achieve meaningful spiritual lives.In chapter 5, the author turns to María Jacinta Montoya, who toiled for years on behalf of beatification of her husband, Nicolás de Ayllón. Nicolás was a rare example of a holy person who was at once of low social status (a tailor), married, and indigenous. María Jacinta's efforts were complicated by her support of the controversial beata Ángela de Carranza (the focus of chapter 3) and her entanglement with the Inquisition. But the chapter focuses on María Jacinta's efforts to position her husband's holiness in relationship to herself in a kind of mirroring, contrasting her sinfulness with his saintliness. The last chapter discusses a civil suit that erupted between an affluent mother and her daughter, Josefa Portocarrero Laso de la Vega, over whether the daughter could take vows as a nun instead of getting married as her mother desired. The conflict between the two revolved around how each understood the application of the theological concept of free will. The chapter demonstrates how the relationship between Josefa and her mother shaped important discussions about adult women and freedom of conscience in eighteenth-century Lima.In the conclusion, van Deusen draws together the main themes of the book's case studies and argues that networks of women played crucial roles in the spread of information about the divine among women. The first and second parts of the book could be connected a bit more clearly, as they occasionally felt like different books, particularly with the strong focus on theoretical frameworks in the first part and the employment of social history methodologies in the second. Nevertheless, van Deusen is deft at uncovering fascinating and little-known women whose lives reveal a spectrum of behaviors, beliefs, and activities that shed new light on early modern devotional practices. While the focus here is on Lima, it is easy to see how van Deusen's female religious culture reverberated throughout the Catholic world.