ABSTRACT
The exclusion of secular women writers like the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish women travelers above mentioned could be understood in an area of studies in which petitions, accounts and letters of Indies, and private letters, have not been considered part of a literary tradition. This chapter discusses the textual production written solely by secular women in colonial Spanish America. Letters and petitions initiated by women served legal interests and were produced by means of a notary or attorney. Many petitions and other texts produced for legal purposes, as well as poetic texts, were published only after they received ecclesiastical, social, and scholarly approval by censors. The private nature of personal letters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not necessarily correlate to what we understand as "private correspondence". Personal letters that were for private communication were not exposed, in principle, to public scrutiny.
