You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This translation of part of the diary of a 17th century Peruvian mystic includes the convent life of slaves and former slaves and baroque Catholic spiritual experiences from the perspective of a woman of color.
None
The Human Tradition in Colonial Latin America is an anthology of stories of largely ordinary individuals struggling to forge a life during the unstable colonial period in Latin America. These mini-biographies vividly show the tensions that emerged when the political, social, religious, and economic ideals of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial regimes and the Roman Catholic Church conflicted with the realities of daily living in the Americas. Now fully updated with new and revised essays, the book is carefully balanced among countries and ethnicities. Within an overall theme of social order and disorder in a colonial setting, the stories bring to life issues of gender; race and ethnicity; co...
This is the untold story of how black saints - and the slaves who venerated them - transformed the early modern church. It speaks to race, the Atlantic slave trade, and global Christianity, and provides new ways of thinking about blackness, holiness, and cultural authority.
In seventeenth-century Lima, pious Catholic women gained profound theological understanding and enacted expressions of spiritual devotion by engaging with a wide range of sacred texts and objects, as well as with one another, their families, and ecclesiastical authorities. In Embodying the Sacred, Nancy E. van Deusen considers how women created and navigated a spiritual existence within the colonial city's complex social milieu. Through close readings of diverse primary sources, van Deusen shows that these women recognized the divine—or were objectified as conduits of holiness—in innovative and powerful ways: dressing a religious statue, performing charitable acts, sharing interiorized spiritual visions, constructing autobiographical texts, or offering their hair or fingernails to disciples as living relics. In these manifestations of piety, each of these women transcended the limited outlets available to them for expressing and enacting their faith in colonial Lima, and each transformed early modern Catholicism in meaningful ways.
None
Examines how black intermediaries in colonial Spanish America influenced written portrayals of virtuous and beautiful blackness.
Teresa de Santo Domingo, born with the name Chicaba, was a slave captured in the territory known to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese navigators and slave traffickers as La Mina Baja del Oro, the part of West Africa that extends through present-day eastern Ghana, Togo, Benin, and western Nigeria. Upon the death of her Spanish master, Chicaba was freed to enter a convent. The Dominicans of La Penitencia in Salamanca accepted her after she had been rejected by several other monasteries because of her skin color. Even in her own religious community, race put her at a disadvantage in the highly stratified social hierarchy of monastic houses of the era. Her life story is ...
Presenting a remarkable set of previously unpublished papers, this book concerns the bewitchment, possession and exorcism of two seventeenth-century nuns living in exile in an English convent in the Spanish Netherlands. The two women left behind an extensive set of personal writing that reveals unprecedented detail about their devotional lives and spiritual states before, during and after exorcism. Unlike other similar cases, here the women write for themselves; for the first time in 350 years this book allows their voices - and their silences - to resound in all their vibrancy. An extensive introduction discusses the politics of piety and possession at a time when exorcism had become increasingly contentious, amidst conflicting claims for rival church reform. The book includes both autobiographical and biographical material, written by the nuns and about them, and casting new light on processes of female self-writing at just the time when the 'modern subject' is often said to have emerged.