Holy Women and Hagiography in Colonial Spanish America

Abstract

AbstractHoly women and hagiography (autobiographies and biographies of saints and holy persons) were defining features of the “spiritual renaissance” that flourished in Spanish American cities during the 17th and 18th centuries. Recently, scholars have expanded their traditional focus upon nuns and convent literature to consider hagiographical texts about pious laywomen, or beatas, among them non‐elite, native, African, and mixed‐race holy women. This article considers recent approaches to holy women and hagiography, which rethink the “marginal” or “subversive” position of beatas and non‐Europeans within colonial Spanish Catholicism. These studies also challenge historiographical narratives about the uniformly repressive nature of Counter Reformation Catholicism and illustrate how priests diversely responded to the intersection of Universal Catholicism and local religion in colonial Spanish America. The scholarship under review suggests that the evangelizing spirit of the Counter Reformation and enthusiastic lay female religiosity, which crossed racial and class lines, fostered more flexible ideals of feminine and non‐European piety than previously imagined. More broadly, these studies rethink approaches to religion that emphasize paradigms of domination versus resistance, dichotomize official and popular Catholicism, and isolate religious experience and practice from broader and more complex colonial contexts.