Overview

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.

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9780822369899

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Reviews

Nancy E. van Deusen conjures the vibrant confessional world of Lima while conveying an extremely textured sense of women's lives, down to the feeling of cloth and the frisson of hair and bone and blood. Beautifully written, Embodying the Sacred models a women's history that does not make, or require, a false choice between representation and the lived experience of early modern women. This is an important book for anyone in women, gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, regardless of time and place. A fabulous read. -- Antoinette Burton, author of Africa in the Indian Imagination: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation No one makes colonial Spanish American spirituality as material-in all senses of the word- as does Nancy van Deusen. The book reanimates Lima's religiously devoted female inhabitants from spiritual autobiographies, fragmentary petitions, and beatification records: women who transmitted a gendered, colonial Catholic theology. The result is a critical intervention in the history of gender and religion, and a master class on how to read things in the past. -- Bianca Premo, author of The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire

No one makes colonial Spanish American spirituality as material-in all senses of the word- as does Nancy E. van Deusen. The book reanimates Lima's religiously devoted female inhabitants from spiritual autobiographies, fragmentary petitions, and beatification records: women who transmitted a gendered, colonial Catholic theology. The result is a critical intervention in the history of gender and religion, and a master class on how to read things in the past. -- Bianca Premo, author of * The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire * Nancy E. van Deusen conjures the vibrant confessional world of Lima while conveying an extremely textured sense of women's lives, down to the feeling of cloth and the frisson of hair and bone and blood. Beautifully written, Embodying the Sacred models a women's history that does not make, or require, a false choice between representation and the lived experience of early modern women. This is an important book for anyone in women, gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, regardless of time and place. A fabulous read. -- Antoinette Burton, author of * Africa in the Indian Imagination: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation *

Author Information

Nancy E. van Deusen is Professor of History at Queen’s University; author of Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain, also published by Duke University Press, and Between the Sacred and the Worldly: The Institutional and Cultural Practice of Recogimiento in Colonial Lima; and editor of The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Ursula de JesÚs.

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