Autobiography and Letters of a Spanish Nun
Product details
- ISBN 9780866985598
- Weight: 338g
- Dimensions: 158 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 01 Nov 2016
- Publisher: Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies,US
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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When María Vela y Cueto (1561–1617) declared that God had personally ordered her to take only the Eucharist as food and to restore primitive dress and public penance in her aristocratic convent, the entire religious community, according to her confessor, “rose up in wrath.” Yet, when Vela died, her peers joined with the populace to declare her a saint. In her autobiography and personal letters, Vela speaks candidly of the obstacles, perils, and rewards of re-negotiating piety in a convent where devotion to God was no longer expressed through rigorous asceticism. Vela’s experience, told in her own words, reveals her shrewd understanding of the persuasive power of a woman’s body.
Susan Diane Laningham is associate professor of European history at Tennessee Tech University.
Jane Tar is associate professor of Spanish at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.
