ABSTRACT
We have organized this book according to three main themes: ‘Censorship and the Body’, ‘Female Authority and Legal Discourse’, and ‘Private Lives and Public Opinions’. The section devoted to ‘Censorship and the Body’ comprises three chapters that engage with the authority that lay women employed through the embodiment of powerful religious experiences, in addition to the ways in which they translated these experiences into narratives. The presence of uncloistered women in the colonial religious milieu proved highly problematic for male officials, who therefore routinely censored the voices of these women. In ‘Divine aspirations: Beatas, writing, and the Inquisition in late seventeenthcentury Lima’, Stacey Schlau posits the Inquisition in Lima, Peru, as an important mechanism in the bureaucratic vigilance by which ecclesiastic and secular officials supervised daily life. One subset of the population that received a great deal of attention from the Holy Office were beatas, non-cloistered religious women, some whom were considered saints by their communities. One of these secular holy women, Jacinta de Montoya, a mestiza and wife of an indigenous beato, sponsored the publication of her husband’s biography after his death at the same time that she recorded her own visions in notebooks. In 1701, she denounced herself to the Inquisition as an ilusa (false visionary), and her writings were transcribed into the records of the Holy Office. Documents pertaining to Jacinta de Montoya’s trial constitute the basis of this essay, which examines
relationships among women and their support of each other’s spiritual methods and goals. Rachel Spaulding’s ‘Covert Afro-Catholic agency’ analyzes inquisitorial
records of Brazil’s first woman writer, African lay holy woman Rosa Maria Egipçíaca. In 1763, Rosa’s miraculous performances caused public scandal and caught the attention of the Portuguese Inquisition. In her testimony, mediated by Churchmen officials, she manipulated the Church space of enunciation to express herself. Spaulding contends that the beata used an overtly orthodox voice to belie a covert heterodox agenda. In addition, her performance revealed her agency and hybrid identity as an Afro-Catholic. Next, in ‘“In so celestial a language”’, Nancy van Deusen pays attention to female voices that are hidden within the words printed on the page and to women who intended to use their bodies as carriers of signs and meaning. Her work considers written descriptions of im/material matter recorded in two seventeenth-century texts in Peru about beatas: Luisa Melgarejo’s rendering of Rosa de Lima’s words after her death in 1617, and the consumption of Angela Carranza’s body parts as healing devices. In the first case, Melgarejo used her body as a text to the extent that she could ‘speak’ the voice of Rosa, which was then recorded in writing. In the case of Carranza, the Lima populace created a female text in the form of a list documenting Carranza’s discarded hair, nails, bodily fluids, and bits of clothing because of their holy and healing powers. Van Deusen argues that we can access Carranza’s hidden historicity by probing the ‘voices’ contained within the Inquisition’s records. The chapters in the second section, ‘Female Authority and Legal Discourse’,
explore women’s powerful presence in political affairs, as well as their understanding of and participation in the legal system. Jeanne Gillespie’s ‘In the shadow of Coatlicue’s smile’ examines four different sources in which women’s voices have been recorded: a poetic Nahua text, accounts of the earliest Euro-American encounters on the island of Hispaniola (Dominican Republic and Haití), a Nahuatl-Spanish legal document about a cross-cultural land dispute, and a letter from a powerful Timucua female leader of La Florida to the Spanish crown. Each of these sources provides evidence of women’s involvement in public affairs even before European explorers encountered the Americas. Gillespie analyzes in detail such interactions by establishing a research model to unearth other examples of Amerindian women’s voices in colonial archives. Sara Vicuña Guengerich’s ‘Inca women under Spanish rule’ complements Gillespie’s work by seeking to uncover the voices of female eyewitnesses of the Spanish conquest in the Andes through the analysis of several probanzas de nobleza (proofs of nobility) and probanzas de méritos (proofs of merits) from 1538 to 1618. The numerous probanzas made by the indigenous and mestizo descendants of the Inca elite, and many noblewomen among them, reveal a wealth of information regarding their prominent social and economic roles during the emerging colonial state. Through her study, Vicuña Guengerich questions the transparency of these women’s discourses and focuses on the ways in which they denounce, resist, and reinterpret the Spanish conquest.
