By focusing on the importance of music (both words and cadences) in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexican convents, this book deepens and greatly enriches our understanding of nuns’ spiritual lives in Mexico. Music was the essential vehicle through which they expressed their faith and guaranteed their salvation and the salvation of others. Most often scholars have sought to understand nuns’ spirituality by analyzing their autobiographies, but while these texts give us glimpses of the interior worlds of their female authors, there are problematic layers of inauthenticity since they were almost invariably commissioned and edited, sometimes heavily, by male ecclesiastics (usually the nun’s spiritual advisor). Other scholars have used art created by contemporaries to get at religious women’s spirituality. Again, there is much that can be inferred from these productions, but almost never were they painted by the nuns themselves. Music, however, Favila argues in this book, while also highly mediated and indeed regulated, gave nuns a direct means to heighten their engagement with doctrine and to articulate their spiritual identities. Speaking/singing the words of the villancicos, psalms, and chants allowed them to interpret ritual by using their own voices and to imagine themselves as central to Christ’s mission of salvation.

The book is comprised of five chapters. Three of them center on key features of Catholic doctrine that were especially relevant in female convents and especially meaningful to the nuns. These are the Immaculate Conception (Chapter 1), the Eucharist (Chapter 4), and the Passion (Chapter 5). Two other chapters are more concerned with the physical world in which music was created: Chapter 2 on the physical space of the choir and the way it shaped spirituality, and Chapter 3 on the recruitment of young girls as the musicians and singers that the convent depended upon. Together, even for a reader like me, without the training to fully understand the ways Favila works with the music he found, they build a convincing picture of the importance, even the centrality, of this understudied aspect of daily life in the convents and the spiritual lives of the nuns. As the chapter organization suggests, a significant proportion of this book about music is not actually directly about music, but rather about how important elements of Catholic doctrine were heard, interpreted, and internalized through music, which requires long stretches of explication of doctrine. Most readers of this journal will probably find this an attractive part of the book because the result is a new and different way of thinking about how contemporaries understood doctrine and made it their own.

Favila is to be commended for his diligence in excavating convent archives and other collections in search of the raw materials with which to build his case. It is a strong case, and it is bolstered by the author’ skill in using theory and his resourcefulness in identifying other possible aids to understanding (for example, Fanny Calderón de la Barca’s first-hand accounts of nineteenth-century convent singing), to help fill in gaps. It is also strengthened by felicitously expressed insights that derive not from theory but from the author’s own sensitivity and historical imagination. The title is a good example. “Immaculate sounds” starts from the premise that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception made Mary “worthy of being the mother of the redeemer Jesus Christ, thus, becoming a co-redeemer herself (3).” From this premise, it follows that the “immaculate” (chaste and cloistered) nuns were in their own minds and in the minds of others “elevated to the status of co-redeemer,” their veiled voices “essential for salvation.”

Still, the archival record is more fragmentary than Favila would have liked, and he frequently expresses hope and confidence that more convent music will eventually be located. There was not enough, for example, for him to treat convent music in a deeply historical way, for example, to build in any sense of change over time from a seventeenth-century world in which the female convents were for the most part quite wealthy (and thus able to afford musicians) to a late eighteenth-century world where this was much less clearly the case. The author is quite up front about what he could and could not do. I think readers of this journal will find that despite his own laments about archival thinness, Favila has accomplished a great deal with this book, restoring awareness to twenty-first-century readers of this crucial role that music played in convent life and indeed in broader understandings of doctrine among the people of New Spain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.