Grove's Enchantments, the River's Disenchantments

The first annotated edition and translation of Soror Maria do Céu’s The Grove’s Enchantments, the River’s Disenchantments.

A Christian allegory written from a female perspective about a woman pilgrim, The Grove’s Enchantments, the River’s Disenchantments traces the path of the Peregrina. On her journey, she enters the Grove of the Hunter, where she encounters false deities representing the vanities of the world. Escaping the grove, she meets four saints who guide her along the rough road until she unites with the Shepherd in his garden.

This edition contains a comprehensive introduction about Maria do Céu’s life and works, the historical and literary context in which she wrote the allegory, its structure and major themes, and its reception and afterlife. This includes the most extensive biographical information about Maria do Céu available in English.

Soror Maria do Céu (1658–1753) was born in Lisbon, Portugal. At about age fifteen, Maria felt drawn to religious life and entered the cloistered Franciscan Convento de Nossa Senhora da Esperança for the daughters of noble families in Lisbon, where she lived for nearly eighty years. In her convent, she served as portress, mistress of novices, and twice as abbess, and she wrote literary texts in Portuguese and Spanish. During her later years, nine volumes of her lyric and narrative poetry, plays, allegories, fables, aphorisms, biographies, saints’ lives, short stories, microstories, and apologues were published. Cristina A. Cowley, born and raised in Lisbon, is an instructor of Portuguese language and culture at Brigham Young University in Utah and regularly teaches classes for study programs in Portugal. Her research interests include women writers, especially the work of Portuguese nuns. Valerie Hegstrom is Professor Emerita at Brigham Young University, where she taught Spanish literature and served as Coordinator of Global Women’s Studies. Her research focuses on the performance of early modern Spanish theater and the recovery of women writers.