These grandiose profession ceremonies drew in a host of urban citizens to the convent churches. Nuns in New Spain were celebrated with music and elaborate rituals when they took the habit and professed in a convent. More broadly, these studies rethink approaches to religion that emphasize paradigms of domination versus resistance, dichotomize official and popular Catholicism, and isolate religious experience and practice from broader and more complex colonial contexts. The scholarship under review suggests that the evangelizing spirit of the Counter Reformation and enthusiastic lay female religiosity, which crossed racial and class lines, fostered more flexible ideals of feminine and non-European piety than previously imagined. These studies also challenge historiographical narratives about the uniformly repressive nature of Counter Reformation Catholicism and illustrate how priests diversely responded to the intersection of Universal Catholicism and local religion in colonial Spanish America. This article considers recent approaches to holy women and hagiography, which rethink the "marginal" or "subversive" position of beatas and non-Europeans within colonial Spanish Catholicism. Recently, scholars have expanded their traditional focus upon nuns and convent literature to consider hagiographical texts about pious laywomen, or beatas, among them non-elite, native, African, and mixed-race holy women. Holy women and hagiography (autobiographies and biographies of saints and holy persons) were defining features of the "spiritual renaissance" that flourished in Spanish American cities during the 17th and 18th centuries. As a consequence of their love of God and neighbour, they felt a vocation for missionary work, they prayed and suffered for the salvation of others, they taught and counselled people who came to them with their religious and moral queries, and some claimed that they were transported in spirit to the mission frontiers where they carried out similar work as the male missionaries, albeit in a supernatural way. Despite the constrictions of space and agency that were related to their female gender, many women in the Spanish colonial empire, whether nuns or other contemplatives, were said to have functions in the missionary enterprise. The majority of them were nuns, who lived a life in enclosure, a fact that in a most concrete way constrained the physical mobility normally seen as a presupposition for apostolic endeavours. In this investigation, special emphasis is put on aspects of the colonial gender relations that have bearing on the intricate relationships between the apostolic and contemplative forms of religious life as presented in colonial texts by and about these women. This book is about religious women’s contributions to others’ salvation in seventeenth and eighteenth century Spanish America and the Philippines, a subject that has been little studied in previous research.
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