Convent Life in Colonial Mexico
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17th century
18th century
A01=Stephanie Kirk
A01=Stephanie L. Kirk
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Author_Stephanie Kirk
Author_Stephanie L. Kirk
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HBJK
Category=HRCC7
Category=NHK
Category=QRMB1
Church history
church religion
Convent Life in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities
COP=United States
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exemplary nuns
Format=BC
Format_Paperback
Inquisition documents
inspirational religious biographies
Language_English
latin American history
letters
Monastic and religious life of women
official decrees
PA=Available
poetry
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
sermons
softlaunch
Stephanie Kirk
womens studies
Product details
- ISBN 9780813064932
- Format: Paperback
- Weight: 389g
- Dimensions: 152 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 20 Nov 2018
- Publisher: University Press of Florida
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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The Catholic Church produced an enormous volume of written material designed to ensure the servility of nuns. Reading this body of proscriptive literature alongside nuns' own writings, Kirk finds that practice often diverged from theory. She analyzes how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century nuns formed alliances and friendships in defiance of Church authorities' efforts to contain and control them. In the Mexican convents that form the basis of Kirk's study, nuns developed a powerful, counterhegemonic spirit of female solidarity, establishing communities that made possible a surprising degree of productive autonomy, despite official promotion of oppressive ideas about gender and religiosity. Kirk also examines the motivations and discursive structures behind the Church's desire to regulate all aspects of convent life. Drawing on a rich and diverse body of literature that includes little-known texts, religious tracts, and didactic manuals on convent behavior, historical artifacts including Inquisition documents, letters, sermons, and official decrees, as well as poetry and inspirational religious biographies of exemplary nuns, Kirk's methodology is a departure from studies of the early modern nun as religious writer, focusing instead on the nun as historical agent. Kirk frames her study with well-regarded theory on discourse and gender, including works by Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Joan Scott. Addressing such important questions as the relationship between power and gender, female colonial agency and authorship, early modern subjectivity, and conflicting gender ideologies, Kirk demonstrates that both sides - the nuns and the Church authorities - are shown to manipulate, through conflicting discourses, the nuances of power and resistance. This first in-depth study of the positive community dynamics of female religious in the early modern Spanish world, as seen through their own words, will appeal to scholars of colonial, Latin American, women's, and religious studies.
Stephanie Kirk is associate professor of romance languages at Washington University in St. Louis and the editor of the journal Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. She is the author of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico.
