ABSTRACT
This chapter uses Noël Valis's work on cursilería as a springboard to explore the discourses of saintliness found in non-fictional religious texts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses on the potential cursilería of the religious texts in relation to modernity and Spain's problematic national identity, and in relation to gender roles and ideologies. Valis argues that lo cursi arises amid the 'cultural bind in which Spain found itself' in the nineteenth century, in relation to processes of modernity and the development of national identity. The understanding of cursilería as a phenomenon arising in the nineteenth century and associated with the feminine, links it with the notion of the 'feminization of religion' often, proposed by historians of Europe as characteristic of this period. Ruth Harris explains that this notion was developed to account for two perceived issues in nineteenth-century religion: 'the massive influx of women into the religious orders and the so-called devotional "revolution"'.
