Ways of Loving God: A New Religious Sensibility in Enlightened Portugal. Censoring the Correspondence of Soror Joana do Louriçal (1779)

Abstract


 When, in 1779, the nuns of the convent of Louriçal addressed to the Real Mesa Censória a request to print the sixty-two letters that the Poor Clare nun Joana do Louriçal had written to her confessor, they might not have expected their project to be frustrated. Among the problems pointed out, gender bias and a new religious sensibility are among the most striking: bloody penance provokes horror, stigmata arouse mistrust and are considered not suitable for a woman. Furthermore, some aspects of the relation between the nun and her confessor are subject to scandal. I will argue that the political context had changed and with it religious and aesthetic sensibility too. From 1750, an «enlightened» king, D. José I, reigned. Devotion now has to be «regulated», not only in terms of what is heterodoxy, but also in terms of its verbal expression and of another sensibility it conveys.