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 Jessica Criales 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, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. 474 pp. $60.00. Sor María de Ágreda (1602–1665) was a Spanish noblewoman who lived her entire life on her family's estate-turned-convent in north-central Spain. Yet in the early 1620s, she was credited with the conversion of the Jumano tribe in what is now eastern New Mexico, some 5,000 miles and an ocean away. According to Franciscan missionary reports, the tribe had been mystically visited by a woman they called the “Lady in Blue,” later identified as Sor María, who told them to listen to the friars who would soon arrive to evangelize them. Beyond her role as a mystical protomissionary, Sor María was also a prolific writer whose works circulated widely, influencing Spanish king Felipe IV, Mexican author Sor Juana, and Californian missionary Junipero Serra. More recently, she has been claimed as part of Southwestern folklore, to the extent that a 2007 Food Network episode credited her with the invention of chile con carne (313)! In Quill and Cross in the Borderlands, Anna M. Nogar picks up these disparate threads of the Sor María story and weaves it into one cohesive whole, arguing that Sor María was a “woman writer of significant authority in New Spain” (6) whose reputation for trans-Atlantic mystical appearances and the textual circulation of her theological expertise were reciprocal elements of her overall fame and impact. Nogar’s book is divided into six carefully researched chapters that consider Sor María and her legacy from the early 1600s until the present day. She begins by analyzing five early versions of the story of the Lady in Blue, written primarily between 1626 and 1634 while Sor María was still alive. Sor María herself, along with Franciscan Fray Alonso de Benavides, the religious administrator of New Mexico, recounted her experiences in a letter designed to encourage Franciscan missionaries in Texas and New Mexico, while several other reports and missionary chronicles mentioned the same events. The story of Sor [End Page 93] María’s appearance lent credence to the idea that Spanish missionary endeavors had received divine blessing. But as Nogar convincingly demonstrates in chapters two and three, her appearance as the Lady in Blue was not Sor María’s only impact on Iberian society. In fact, Sor María was a prolific author whose theological treatise La mistica ciudad de Dios [The Mystical City of God] was republished in at least 72 editions throughout the eighteenth century. A press specifically for Sor María’s work was established, and Felipe IV mandated that copies of her books be sent to the Americas. Unsurprisingly, Sor María’s writings provoked some controversy—but more for her embrace of Immaculate Conception theology than her gender, and never to the extent that her books were prohibited. In fact, Nogar chronicles the many different ways that Sor María’s texts were excerpted, reprinted, or collected into spiritual books; as Sor Juana commented in 1691, “[Sor María’s] writing is everywhere” (102). Furthermore, as Nogar demonstrates in chapter four, copies of La mistica ciudad de Dios accompanied and guided Franciscan friars sent out as missionaries to modern-day California, Arizona, and New Mexico. In her final two chapters, Nogar turns to the fascinating process by which the Lady in Blue legend became a crucial part of Southwestern identity. As she explains, in the early nineteenth centuries, several Tejano intellectuals, all deeply committed to promoting Hispanic identity and history within the United States, retold the story of Sor María as a way of highlighting the region’s Catholic roots. As her legendary status grew, her story was often presented (or conflated) with the tales of La Llorona or Our Lady of Guadalupe—spectral female presences that formed essential components of Hispanic culture, especially...