Description
Book SynopsisThrough the lives of religious women in colonial Lima, a new understanding of the ways in which pious Catholic women engaged with material and immaterial notions of the sacred or were themselves objectified as conduits of the divine in spiritual narratives.
Trade Review"Important reading for those interested in women’s expressions of devotion in colonial Lima and modes of theorizing spiritual practices more generally. . . . Particularly valuable for giving voice (and body) to female figures and their devotional models." -- Gabrielle Greenlee * H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews *
"Nancy Van Deusen offers a suggestive and rewarding path to analyze how women felt and embodied their relation to God and the divine in seventeenth-century Lima. . . . This work is a notable contribution to understanding the complexities of women’s spirituality." -- Asunción Lavrin * Catholic Historical Review *
"This is a powerful monograph that creatively embraces the fragmentary and contradictory texts and objects that mystical women left behind." -- Karen B. Graubart * American Historical Review *
"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." -- Erin Kathleen Rowe * HAHR *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Part I. Material and Immaterial Embodiment
1. Rosa de Lima and the Imitatio Morum 23
2. Reading the Body: Mystical Theology and Spiritual Actualization in Early Seventeenth-Century Lima 47
3. Living in an (Im)Material World: Ángla de Carranza as a Reliquary 71
Part II. The Relational Self
4. Carrying the Cross of Christ: Donadas in Seventeenth-Century Lima 95
5. María Jacinta Montoya, Nicolás de Ayllón, and the Unmaking of an Indian Saint in Late Seventeenth-Century Peru 117
6.
Amparada de mi libertad: Josefa Portocarrero Laso de la Vega and the Meaning of Free Will 143
Conclusion 167
Notes 175
Bibliography 231
Index 259
