"Important reading for those interested in women’s expressions of devotion in colonial Lima and modes of theorizing spiritual practices more generally. . . . Particularly valuable for giving voice (and body) to female figures and their devotional models."

- Gabrielle Greenlee, H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews

"Nancy Van Deusen offers a suggestive and rewarding path to analyze how women felt and embodied their relation to God and the divine in seventeenth-century Lima. . . . This work is a notable contribution to understanding the complexities of women’s spirituality."

- Asunción Lavrin, Catholic Historical Review

"This is a powerful monograph that creatively embraces the fragmentary and contradictory texts and objects that mystical women left behind."

- Karen B. Graubart, American Historical Review

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"Van Deusen is deft at uncovering fascinating and little-known women whose lives reveal a spectrum of behaviors, beliefs, and activities that shed new light on early modern devotional practices."

- Erin Kathleen Rowe, HAHR

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.
Les mer
Through the lives of religious women in colonial Lima, a new understanding of the ways in which pious Catholic women engaged with material and immaterial notions of the sacred or were themselves objectified as conduits of the divine in spiritual narratives.
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Acknowledgments  vii Introduction  1 Part I. Material and Immaterial Embodiment 1. Rosa de Lima and the Imitatio Morum  23 2. Reading the Body: Mystical Theology and Spiritual Actualization in Early Seventeenth-Century Lima  47 3. Living in an (Im)Material World: Ángla de Carranza as a Reliquary  71 Part II. The Relational Self 4. Carrying the Cross of Christ: Donadas in Seventeenth-Century Lima  95 5. María Jacinta Montoya, Nicolás de Ayllón, and the Unmaking of an Indian Saint in Late Seventeenth-Century Peru  117 6. Amparada de mi libertad: Josefa Portocarrero Laso de la Vega and the Meaning of Free Will  143 Conclusion  167 Notes  175 Bibliography  231 Index  259
Les mer
"Important reading for those interested in women’s expressions of devotion in colonial Lima and modes of theorizing spiritual practices more generally. . . . Particularly valuable for giving voice (and body) to female figures and their devotional models."
Les mer
“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.”
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780822369899
Publisert
2017-12-22
Utgiver
Vendor
Duke University Press
Vekt
522 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
UP, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet

Om bidragsyterne

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.