The Venerable Sor María de Ágreda (1602–1665), also known as the “Lady in Blue” in the folklore of the American Southwest, was a cloistered Spanish abbess who could claim three extraordinary accomplishments unlike those of any other mystic of her era.
First, she claimed to have bilocated more often and more dramatically than anyone else ever in all of Christian history. While strictly enclosed at her Discalced Franciscan convent of the Immaculate Conception in the remote town of Ágreda, in the borderland of Castile and Aragon—constantly visible to her sisters there—Sor María ostensibly crossed the Atlantic Ocean over five hundred times to evangelize the Jumano natives in another borderland, the northern reaches of New Spain, now known as Texas and New Mexico. Dubbed the “Lady in Blue” by her aboriginal American catechumens, due to the color of her habit, Sor María became a legendary figure in the Catholic world, and especially in Spain's colonies.
Second, as if this supernatural feat were not sufficiently impressive, Sor María also penned a minutely detailed biography of the Virgin Mary—over a million words in length, supposedly dictated by the Blessed Virgin herself—in which the Mother of God proclaimed the veracity of her immaculate conception and of her role as co-redemptrix of the human race, sharing in the salvific sacrifice of her son Jesus Christ. Condemned by the theological faculty of the Sorbonne in Paris, this massive text, titled The Mystical City of God, was nonetheless approved by other Catholic centers of learning—such as the universities of Louvain, Toulouse, and Salamanca—and continued to be published repeatedly and to circulate widely for centuries with the church's blessing in various translations.
Third, within a worldly sphere, thanks to her notoriety, Sor María assumed the role of informal confessor and adviser to King Philip IV of Spain. Arguably the most powerful European monarch at that time, he exchanged over three hundred letters with her over a twenty-year stretch, all of which deal with intimate details of the king's personal life—including his adulterous liaisons, court intrigues, and affairs of state.
Anna M. Nogar's perceptive analysis of this remarkable nun's life and legacy does not delve into Sor María's relationship with Philip IV, or all that much into the European dimension of this nun's supernaturally charged life. Instead, it focuses more intensely than anyone ever has before on the intimate relation between the legend of her bilocations and the reception in the New World of her monumental Mystical City of God, especially in Mexico.
In doing so, Nogar lifts the Lady in Blue legend out of the relatively narrow Iberian and Southwestern borderlands’ folkloric contexts in which it has been lodged for generations, placing it in a much broader American colonial context, correctly calling attention to the fact that the legend of the bilocating nun cannot be fully understood or appreciated without taking her writings into account. As Nogar says at the outset, making the distinctiveness of her objectives as clear as possible: “The singular importance of Sor María's writing in New Spain has not emerged in earlier studies of the Lady in Blue, or of the nun herself. This book seeks to remedy this omission” (5).
Nogar's book consists of two asymmetrical but interconnected sections. The first two chapters, which comprise the shorter section, delve into the sources of the bilocating legend in the colonies and in Spain, as well as into Sor María's mystical writing. These chapters provide one of the most succinct, yet most thorough, introductions to the life and work of Sor María available in any language. The longer section, which consists of the remaining four chapters, shifts the focus squarely to the New World and to the various ways in which the publication and circulation of Sor María's Mystical City of God popularized the legend of the Lady in Blue among a very wide colonial and post-colonial audience, down to the present day.
Writing about someone whose life and writings involve claims considered outrageously impossible by most contemporary scholars is challenging—to say the least—and so is having to interweave historical, theological, and literary analysis of the significance of any such wonder-worker, but Nogar grapples with this challenge successfully.
Steering clear of the most troublesome aspect of Sor María's life—whether or not the truth of her supernatural claims can be proven—and focusing instead on how her Mystical City of God turned these claims into an enduring legend, especially in the New World, Nogar has shed new light on one of the oddest figures in early modern Catholicism as well as on the various ways in which every age constructs its own relevance for religious and cultural myths. Tracing the impact of that legend all the way to the present day in multiple contexts, including that of artistic expression, Nogar skillfully enhances the significance of Sor María, calling attention to it in novel ways, beyond the concerns of historians and theologians. And she does so insightfully, with an impressive balance between scholarly rigor and narrative flair.
