Mission and Ecstasy: Contemplative Women and Salvation in Colonial Spanish America and the Philippines
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STUDIA MISSIONALIA SVECANA CXV Magnus Lundberg Mission and Ecstasy Contemplative Women and Salvation in Colonial Spanish America and the Philippines Lundberg, Magnus. Mission and Ecstasy: Contemplative Women and Salvation in Colonial Spanish America and the Philippines. Studia Missionalia Svecana 115. 264 pp. Uppsala: Swedish Institute of Mission Research, 2015. Author’s address: Magnus Lundberg, Uppsala university, Department of Theology, Box 511, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected] © Magnus Lundberg 2015 ISSN 1404-9503 ISBN 978-91-506-2443-4 http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A790056&dswid=-3689 The printing of this book was made possible by a grant from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation). Cover image: Mariana de Jesús (1618-1645), wooden statue, Quito, Ecuador. Photo: Towe Wandegren, 2013. Printed in Sweden by DanagårdLITHO AB, 2015. Contents Preface ............................................................................................................ 5 Introduction ..................................................................................................... 7 Texts .............................................................................................................. 35 Ideals ............................................................................................................. 47 Love .............................................................................................................. 67 Prayer ............................................................................................................ 97 Suffering ..................................................................................................... 127 Teaching ...................................................................................................... 157 Flights ......................................................................................................... 183 Conclusions ................................................................................................. 215 Bibliography ............................................................................................... 229 Index ........................................................................................................... 261 Preface The idea to write this book was conceived about a decade ago when reading Stephen Haliczer’s Between Exaltation and Infamy, a book about early modern Spanish mystics. Haliczer analyses both women who were considered saintly and those whose experiences were deemed false by the Inquisition. Among many other things, he writes that little over a quarter of all women in his sample nourished dreams about becoming missionaries. Haliczer studies women from peninsular Spain, and I thought that missionary themes would be even more common in texts by and about contemplative women from the Spanish Indies, and that it would be worthwhile to dedicate a major investigation to them. Though concentrating on other research projects, in following years I made a couple of case studies to see if I was on the right track, and it seemed that way. The pilot studies helped me to formulate a concrete project. This book could not have been written without a generous grant from Riksbankens jubileumsfond (The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation), which enabled me to dedicate much time to research between 2010 and early 2014. Another grant from the foundation made the printing of the book possible. The research work as such has been carried out at the Faculty of Theology at Uppsala University, where the Seminar in World Christianity and Interreligious Studies, led by Professor Kajsa Ahlstrand has been a particularly important intellectual milieu for me. On several occasions, parts of the project have been discussed in the Forum for Latin American Studies at Uppsala University and at Swedish Americanist workshops. At those occasions I have received valuable comments. I have also presented my project at international conferences in Warsaw and Lisbon. In particular, I would like to acknowledge Professor Asunción Lavrin, a leading authority in the field of colonial nuns, who read the entire 5 manuscript, made important suggestions and encouraged me. I also want to thank PhD candidate Zanne Lyttle for proof-reading the text. To gather my primary sources, I have visited Chile, Peru, Ecuador and Spain. In the Chilean and Spanish national libraries I had the chance to peruse many important and sometimes unique imprints and I would like to acknowledge the people who have helped me. A particular word of acknowledgement is due to the kind people in the Harry Potteresque Sala Medina at the Chilean national library, who assisted me during an extended stay in 2011. I have also been able to use material from three institutions in the United States: John Carter Brown Library, Lilly Library and Bancroft Library, and I am grateful for their kind assistance. Furthermore, a warm word of thanks is due to the often anonymous people, who through their work have made colonial imprints available on-line, something which is of utmost value to the researcher living far away from the collections. Finally, but also first in the row, I would like to express my immense gratitude to Towe and Naomi Wandegren, whose lives I am fortunate enough to share. I dedicate this book to them. 6 Introduction In 1716, Antonio de Siria published a book about Anna Guerra de Jesús, a devout woman born in present-day El Salvador, who for a long time had lived in Guatemala, and died three years before in an “odour of sanctity”. During her last decades in life she was very close to the author’s own religious order, the Society of Jesus, even wearing a Jesuit garb. Her own spirituality was inspired by their ministry and she was engaged in their evangelizing activities. According to the Siria’s work, the desire for the salvation of all humankind was a major driving force in her piety. In fact, he wrote that a fire of charity burnt within her when thinking about how many people throughout the world, had risked eternal perdition because they had not converted. Siria claimed that God himself had taught Anna Guerra de Jesús how to pray efficiently and suffer vicariously for the non-Christians and sinners, and for the missions and missionaries. When in Guatemala, she was approached by indigenous people, whom she counselled and consoled. She constantly prayed for the souls in purgatory and allegedly made spiritual journeys there and to mission fields, overlooking the state of things. In short, she was thought to contribute to the salvation of others through “the most efficient means that were permitted to her state and sex”, as her hagiographer put it.1 Despite the constrictions of space and agency that were related to their female gender, many women in the Spanish colonial empire, whether nuns or other contemplatives, were said to have similar functions in the missionary enterprise to Ana Guerra de Jesús. As a consequence of their love of God and neighbour, they felt a vocation for missionary work, they prayed and suffered for the salvation of others, they taught and counselled people who came to them with their religious and moral queries, and some claimed 1 Siria 1716; citation on p. 178. 7 that they were transported in spirit to the mission frontiers where they carried out similar work as the male missionaries, albeit in a supernatural way. This book is about religious women’s contribution to others’ salvation in mid- and late colonial Spanish America and the Philippines, a subject that has been little studied in previous research.2 In this investigation, special emphasis is put on aspects of the colonial gender relations that have bearing on the intricate relationships between the apostolic and contemplative forms of religious life as presented in colonial texts by and about these women. The majority of them were nuns, who lived a life in enclosure, a fact that in a most concrete way constrained the physical mobility normally seen as a presupposition for apostolic endeavours. Religious Institutions and Contemplative Women The Spanish colonization of the Americas and the Philippines included the transfer of various religious institutions.3 One of these was the convent. The first nunnery on the continent was founded in Mexico City in 1540. About ten years later the first Caribbean foundation, in Santo Domingo, saw the light of day and in the early 1560s the first convent was built in Lima, while Manila had to wait until the 1620s and Buenos Aires even to the mid- eighteenth-century. During the three centuries of Spanish colonialism over 160 convents were established throughout the Indies. Many of them belonged to Conceptionists, Poor Clares, Augustinians, Dominicans, Discalced Carmelites, and Capuchins, but there were individual Hieronymite, Bridgettine, Cistercian, Trinitarian, and Mercedarian convents, too. In the late colonial era the Company of Mary Our Lady, a teaching order of French origin opened up a few houses and in the 1810s the Ursulines established themselves in Cuba.4 2 In this study, I will often use the expression “Spanish Indies” when referring to the totality of the Spanish areas in America and the Philippines. 3 For global perspectives on the early modern convent, see Evangelisti 2007. For the Spanish development, see Sánchez Lora 1988. 4 The most complete inventory of colonial convents is found in Martínez Cuesta 1995: 622-626. By the year 1600 there were 48 convents in