ABSTRACT
What comes to mind when we think of texts produced by women in the early modern period are the life writings, literary or artistic creations of Teresa of Ávila, María de Zayas, or Sophonisba Anguissola. As many of us are aware, however, the texts produced by or even about women are limited. Over the decades historians, anthropologists, art historians, and literary scholars have developed specific methodologies for culling out female voices, especially of those who were in some way disenfranchised and whose voices are severely compromised.2 As feminist scholars of the early modern, we search for the ‘contours of affirmation’, trying to circumnavigate what has been lost and peel away the absences, or decode the opaque male-generated references hovering in these records.3 As we navigate available texts, we find ourselves having to redefine the contours of autobiographies or biographies, determine the parameters of the confessor-confessee relationship, and detect the voice of a woman facing Inquisition authorities.4 We search for the gendered spaces of contestation or dialogic interventions where we might find distinct narrative stratagems. Some of us locate female voices in the spiritual vidas (life writings) of nuns or literary works by gaining an understanding of context, discursive power dynamics, or by considering the symbolic integrity within a document. We are constantly struggling to give the voices of women an audible, narrative weight. And so, given our ‘mission’, how might we think about new ways to probe new kinds of texts, and locate voices that transcend literal speech on a written page? How might we grasp early modern sensibilities and the ways subjects appropriated female-generated, non-literary texts? With those questions in mind, I would like to turn to the main focus of my
chapter and consider two different texts created in seventeenth-century Lima, Peru. The first contains the words spoken by a mystic while in an ecstatic trance and the other is a list of relics of a woman condemned as a false mystic. In each I will consider the relationship between female voice and the creation, transmission, and reception of texts. I will probe the multivalent meanings of ‘voice’, which included the body engaged in mystical rapture or fragmented into physical objects labeled as relics. I argue that both were readable texts, following the arguments made by historian Roger Chartier. Texts, as he posits, ‘did not necessarily come in book form: some were orally produced works, or visions
which were then rendered into a narrative structure using language and symbols to invite interpretation and appropriation’.5 Both the form of transmission (orally, in writing, or through a visual performance) and reception (how the ‘language’ of that text was received by means of the senses) are key to understanding early modern ideas about how mystical language was transmitted and how different kinds of texts, the subject of this essay, were created. In the early modern period, according to Michel de Certeau, spiritual practices created new spaces (texts) from which Spirit could speak and from where different utterances were rendered knowable.6
