Quill and Cross in the Borderlands: Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue: 1628 to the Present by Anna M. Nogar

Abstract

Reviewed by: Quill and Cross in the Borderlands: Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue: 1628 to the Present by Anna M. Nogar Virginia Garrard Quill and Cross in the Borderlands: Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue: 1628 to the Present. By Anna M. Nogar. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. Pp. 457. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Anna Nogar's work is a meticulous and mesmerizing archival and literary study of the seventeenth-century Spanish nun, mystic, and phantasm, Sor María de Ágreda. Although her literary work is now nearly forgotten, Sor Maria was a noted author during Spain's Gold Age, both in Iberia and in New Spain (greater Mexico). Her most widely read and influential book, La mística ciudad de dios (The Mystical City of God), was a treatise that popularized the theology of the Immaculate Conception, a doctrine that the Virgin Mary not only "conceived without sin," but that Mary, too, was divinely seeded into her mother's womb without 'the stain of original sin." Nogar's aspiration in this study is to restore Sor María to her rightful place in the literary canon. While the idea of the Immaculate Conception first appeared during the Middle Ages, it gained new prominence in the early seventeenth century when its fiercest proponents, the members of the Franciscan Order, used it as a doctrinal bludgeon against the Dominicans, who, not coincidentally, were their main competitors on the mission frontiers of the New World. Despite being an arcane religious text, thanks in part to heavy Franciscan promotion, La mística ciudad de dios circulated widely both in Spain and among New Spain's far-flung letrados. Among others, the book deeply influenced one of New Spain's most noted writers, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, once the Vatican [End Page 224] finally adopted the doctrine in 1854, and theological treatises no longer captivated a popular readership, Sor María's book largely disappeared. There is an entirely different aspect of Sor Maria de Ágreda's notoriety, however, that continues to endure. This is the nun's mythos as "The Lady in Blue," a spectral being who was at one time every bit as well-known as her counterpart, La Llorona. This story comes from Sor María de Ágreda's claims of "spiritual travel," in which she purported to have bilocated to northern New Spain to preach to Indigenous people now known as the Jumano Indians to affect their conversion to Christianity. Sor María, a cloistered nun who never set a terrestrial foot outside of her convent in Ágreda, Spain, described the Jumanos (who lived in Texas between the Rio Grande and Río Conchos and traded with the Pueblos in present-day New Mexico) in remarkably accurate detail, as she did the landscape and physical attributes of the region. When missionary friars later entered the Southwest, they were astonished to find the local populations' collective recall of a kindly Lady in Blue—the color of the Conceptionalists, Sor María's Order—who had introduced them to the True Faith. To seventeenth-century ears, Sor María's tale was not all that extraordinary, although it did earn her an investigation by the Inquisition. Claims of bilocation were not altogether uncommon in the early modern period, especially in pious women, whose very constrained social worlds made them unusually receptive to divine visions, revelations, and mystical bodily experiences, which they would later record to edify the faithful. Perhaps more surprising is the willingness of missionary friars and Spanish explorers to use the "protomissionary" work of Sor María to guide them in their travels and their work among the native peoples. Nogar notes that even in the late eighteenth century, Jesuits on the northern frontier, including California's premier missionary, Junípero Serra, relied on Sor María's travel writing as a type of guidebook, ethnography, and template for mission. The last chapter of Nogar's work brings the story of Sor María Ágreda/ the Lady in Blue to the present day. By the twentieth century, around...