Technologies of the self: The letters of eighteenth-century Mexican Jesuit spiritual daughters

History of Religions

Volumn 47, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 282-303

  Molina, J Michelle ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249510140     PISSN: 00182710     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/589782     Document Type: Review

References (54)

1. Paul Rabinow, "Introduction: The History of Systems of Thought," in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), xxvii.
2. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation; The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York and London: Norton, 1966), 58.
3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 20-21.
4. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction. Ibid., 122.
5. Arnold Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 53.
6. A. Davidson. The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts. Ibid., 54.
7. Michel De Certeau, The Mystic Fable, vol. 1: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 9.
8. Asunción Lavrín, "Espiritualidad en el claustro novohispano del siglo XVII," Colonial Latin American Historical Review 4 (1995): 156.
9. Jean Franco's Plotting Women posits the sexual division of labor between raw material (the mystical and religious experiences of women) and production (the published works of male clergy).
10. See Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
11. Aside from some work on women's last wills and testaments (see Frank Saloman, "Indian Women of Colonial Quito as Seen through Their Testaments," The Americas 44, no. 3 [1988]: 325-41) and the vast literature surrounding poet Sor Juana Ines De la Cruz, most discussions of women's writing are about female religious autobiographies.
12. See Franco, Plotting Women;
13. Kathryn Joy McKnight, The Mystic of Tunja (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997);
14. Ronald Morgan, Spanish American Saints and the Rhetoric of Identity, 1600-1810 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002);
15. Kathleen A. Myers, "The Mystic Triad in Colonial Mexican Nuns' Discourse: Divine Author, Visionary Scribe and Clerical Mediator," Colonial Latin American Historical Review 6, no. 4 (1997)
16. and Neither Saints nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
17. McKnight, The Mystic of Tunja, 7.
18. For a new and alternative interpretation positing that hagiography was produced in collaborative relationships between nuns and their confessors, see Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents (Ithaca, NY, and New York: Cornell University Press, 2005). Bilinkoff's earlier studies of women in Avila, Spain, attempt to put the brakes on runaway interpretations of the compulsory nature of religious practice. Contending that recent studies have placed too heavy an emphasis on "coercive gendered power relations," Bilinkoff argues that closer attention should be paid to the relationship between confessors and penitents. Further, she notes the reciprocity of confessional relationships and puts confessor and penitent on more equal footing than earlier studies have allowed. Her study is focused more on spiritual collaboration than on spiritual obedience.
19. See also Jodi Bilinkoff, "Confessors, Penitents and the Construction of Identities in Early Modern Avila," in Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe (1500-1800): Essays in Honor of Natalie Zemon Davis, ed. Barbara B. Diefendorf and Carla Hesse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993),
20. "Confession, Gender, Life-Writing: Some Cases (Mainly) from Spain," in Penitence in the Age of Reformations, ed. Katherine Lualdi and Anne Thayer (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000),
21. and "The Many 'Lives' of Pedro De Ribadeneyra," Renaissance Quarterly 52, no. 1 (1999): 180-96. This latter article is particularly important because she argues that religious men also grappled with the issue of "obedience."
22. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993);
23. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
24. See the succinct version of the argument in Saba Mahmood, "Feminist Theory, Embodiment and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival," Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2 (2001): 203.
25. Mahmood, "Feminist Theory, Embodiment and the Docile Agent," 203.
26. Michel Foucault, "The Battle for Chastity," in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 195.
27. Ignatius of Loyola, Ignatius of Loyola: Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, ed. George E. Ganss (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1991), 129.
28. John W. O'Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 131.
29. Loyola, Ignatius of Loyola: Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, 139.
30. Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 17.
31. Document 9, excerpt from "Spiritual Directory of the Mixed Life," in On Giving the Spiritual Exercises: The Early Jesuit Manuscript Directories and the Official Directory of 1599, ed. Martin E. Palmer (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996), 43.
32. Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press/Belknap, 1996).
33. Darcy Donohue, "Writing Lives: Nuns and Confessors as Auto/Biographers in Early Modern Spain," Journal of Hispanic Philology 13, no. 3 (1989): 238.
34. Asuncion Lavrín, "La vida femenina como experiencia religiosa: biografía y hagiografía en hispanoamerica colonial," Colonial Latin American Review 2, nos. 1-2 (1993): 39.
35. See Myers, "The Mystic Triad in Colonial Mexican Nuns' Discourse," 498-500;
36. Jean Pierre Caussade, A Treatise on Prayer from the Heart: A Christian Mystical Tradition Recovered for All (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1998), 104.
37. Rebecca Lester, Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 18.
38. Luis De la Puente, Guía espiritual en que se trata De la oración, meditación y contemplación (1609),
39. as quoted in Maria Dolores Bravo Arriaga, El discurso De la espiritualidad dirigida: Antonio Núñez De Miranda, confesor De Sor Juana (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autonoma De Mexico, 2001).
40. Caussade, A Treatise on Prayer, 127; emphasis added.
41. Tanya M. Luhrmann, "The Ugly Goddess: Reflections on the Role of Violent Images in Religious Experience," History of Religions 41, no. 2 (2001): 133-34.
42. Women's reticence to write biographically was not limited to the early modern period. For example, in her study of Caroline Angebert's correspondence with psychologist Victor Cousin, Jan Goldstein noticed in Angebert's letters a reticence to reveal details about her life story. She suggests that "the absence from the letters of more detailed biographical information conveys Angebert's desire to commune with Cousin as one disembodied intellect to another." See Jan Goldstein, "Saying 'I': Victor Cousin, Caroline Angebert and the Politics of Selfhood in Nineteenth-Century France," in Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics and the Psyche, ed. Michael S. Roth (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 325.
43. Steve J. Stern, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men and Power in Late Colonial Mexico (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 99.
44. Lavrín, "La vida femenina como experiencia religiosa," 30.
45. Phyllis Mack, "Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency: Reflections on Eighteenth-Century Quakerism," Signs 29, no. 1 (2003): 153-54.
46. Denise Riley, Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 2.
47. Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 45.
48. He modeled the bequest of his heart on the similar endowment made by St. Francis De Sales to his spiritual daughter, St. Jane Chantal. The Sacred Heart of Jesus was an important icon for the Society of Jesus. St. Francis De Sales was himself very influenced by the Jesuits, being a student and remaining a Jesuit "spiritual son" (i.e., he had Jesuit confessors). The cult of the Sacred Heart did not "take off" until the late seventeenth century, when Margaret Mary Alacoque had visions in which Christ removed his burning heart and held it out to her as a symbol of his suffering humanity. See Raymond Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 9-33.
49. Miruna Achim, "Mysteries of the Heart: The Gift of Bishop Fernandez De Santa Cruz to the Nuns of Santa Monica," Colonial Latin American Review 14, no. 1 (2005): 87.
50. Jesuitas II-25, Exp. 207, Letter G. Importantly, "language of the heart" was not gendered female. For example, a man named Fray Francisco wrote to Márquez and signed his letter, "Your humble son whose heart loves you." See Jesuitas II-25, Exp. 60.
51. Amy Hollywood, "Inside Out: Beatrice of Nazareth and Her Hagiographer," in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. Catherine M. Mooney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 78.
52. In the late sixteenth century, the Vatican issued a briefing recognizing the right of women in convents to choose their own confessors. Teresa of Avila had been a strong advocate of "learned men" as counselors; otherwise, "not being enlightened himself, he cannot enlighten others, even if he tries." Quoted in Patricia Ranft, "A Key to Counter Reformation Women's Activism: The Confessor-Spiritual Director," Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 10, no. 2 (1994): 17.
53. James Fernandez, Apology to Apostrophe: Autobiography and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation in Spain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 29.
54. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 210-11.