Journey Of Five Capuchin Nuns

Nuns Navigating the Spanish Empire tells the remarkable story of a group of nuns who traveled halfway around the globe in the seventeenth century to establish the first female Franciscan convent in the Far East. In 1620 Sor Jerónima de la Asunción (1556–1630) and her cofounders left their cloistered convent in Toledo, Spain, journeying to Mexico to board a Manila galleon on their way to the Philippines. Sor Jerónima is familiar to art historians for her portrait by Velázquez that hangs in the Prado Museum in Madrid. What most people do not know is that one of her travel companions, Sor Ana de Cristo (1565–1636), wrote a long biographical account of Sor Jerónima and their fifteen-month odyssey. Drawing from Sor Ana’s manuscript, other archival sources, and rare books, Owens’s study offers a fascinating view of travel, evangelization, and empire.

The ten essays in this interdisciplinary collection explore the lives, places, and stories of women in the Iberian Atlantic between 1500 and 1800. Distinguished contributors such as Ida Altman, Matt D. Childs, and Allyson M. Poska utilize the complexities of gender to understand issues of race, class, family, health, and religious practices in the Atlantic basin. Unlike previous scholarship, which has focused primarily on upper-class and noble women, this book examines the lives of those on the periphery, including free and enslaved Africans, colonized indigenous mothers, and poor Spanish women. Chapters range broadly across time periods and regions of the Atlantic world. The authors explore the lives of Caribbean women in the earliest era of Spanish colonization and gender norms in Spain and its far-flung colonies. They extend the boundaries of the traditional Atlantic by analyzing healing knowledge of indigenous women in Portuguese Goa and kinship bonds among women in Spanish East Texas. Together, these innovative essays rechart the Iberian Atlantic while revealing the widespread impact of women's activities on the emergence of the Iberian Atlantic world.

The Politics and Poetics of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz examines the role of occasional verse in the works of the celebrated colonial Mexican nun. The poems that Sor Juana wrote for special occasions (birthdays, funerals, religious feasts, coronations, and the like) have been considered inconsequential by literary historians; but from a socio-historical perspective, George Antony Thomas argues they hold a particular interest for scholars of colonial Latin American literature. For Thomas, these compositions establish a particular set of rhetorical strategies, which he labels the author's 'political aesthetics.' He demonstrates how this body of the famous nun's writings, previously overlooked by scholars, sheds new light on Sor Juana's interactions with individuals in colonial society and throughout the Spanish Empire.

Cover -- Halftitle -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Unveiling the Manuscript -- Chapter One. Toledo to Cadiz -- Chapter Two. Cadiz to Mexico -- Chapter Three. The Manila Galleon -- Chapter Four. The Convent in Manila -- Chapter Five: Literacy and Inspirational Role Models -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Through a thoughtful consideration of the complexity of the religious landscape of the Atlantic basin, the collection provides an enriching portrayal of the intriguing interplay between religion, gender, ethnicity, and authority in the early modern Atlantic world.

Popular English travel guides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted that women who wandered too far afield were invariably suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. As the essays in Travel and Travail reveal, however, early modern women did travel, often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fiber. Female travelers were also frequently represented on the English stage and in other creative works, both as a reproach to the ban on female travel and as a reflection of historical women’s travel, whether intentional or not. Travel and Travail conclusively refutes the notion of female travel in the early modern era as “an absent presence.” The first part of the volume offers analyses of female travelers (often recently widowed or accompanied by their husbands), the practicalities of female travel, and how women were thought to experience foreign places. The second part turns to literature, including discussions of roving women in Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, and Thomas Heywood. Whether historical actors or fictional characters, women figured in the wider world of the global Renaissance, not simply in the hearth and home.

The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Early Modern Spanish Literature and Culture introduces the intellectual and artistic breadth of early modern Spain from a range of disciplinary and critical perspectives. Spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (a period traditionally known as the Golden Age), the volume examines topics including political and scientific culture, literary and artistic innovations, and religious and social identities and institutions in transformation. The 36 chapters of the volume include both expert overviews of key topics and figures from the period as well as new approaches to understudied questions and materials. This invaluable resource will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in Hispanic studies, as well as Renaissance and early modern studies more generally.