Sarah Owens's insightful reading of the transoceanic voyage by a group of Spanish nuns to the Philippines offers an intimate view of the travails experienced by women who established the first female convent in Manila in the seventeenth century. Owens examines their travel through a biographical account by Sor Ana de Cristo, one of the traveling sisters. Though Sor Ana ostensibly wrote about the mission's principal figure, Sor Jerónima de la Asunción, Owens illuminates the rich details regarding the nuns’ physical, personal, political, and spiritual travails that weave throughout her narrative. Owens's meticulous parsing of Sor Ana's account is expertly correlated to critical studies of the colonial era, providing readers with a useful historical framework.

The book's chapters follow the chronology laid out in Sor Ana's account, beginning with the nuns’ travel within Spain (chapter 1), crossing the Atlantic to Mexico (chapter 2), traversing the Pacific to the Philippines (chapter 3), and establishing the convent in Manila (chapter 4). The book's final chapter (chapter 5) examines the writer Sor Ana, whose emergent intellectualism and skill as a writer is one of the book's underlying motifs.

In Chapter 1, Owens outlines how advocates in the Philippines and in Spain advanced the proposal for a convent for women in Manila with Sor Jerónima at its head. Sor Jerónima, already abbess of a well-endowed clarisa convent, was surrounded by rumors of sanctity. She was, Owens concludes, a crucial figurehead for the Philippine convent project: “[w]ith the potential of promoting her as a would-be saint, [supporters] saw the spiritual and financial gains as boundless” (20). Sor Ana narrates the nuns’ travel southward through the Spain to the port of Cádiz. Though Sor Ana's rendering of this portion of the journey is less detailed, Owens finds in it valuable information about convent life in Spain, including “concrete examples of musical and theatrical productions created by nuns for entertainment within the convent” (40).

Chapter 2 considers the nuns’ trans-Atlantic passage, and their crossing from Veracruz, through Mexico City, to Acapulco. The nuns traveled cloistered aboard a mercantile ship, Nuestra Señora del Rosario, accompanied by two priests and two male servants. Owens here, as elsewhere in the book, skillfully integrates historical materials to provide context for Sor Ana's economical text, completing the picture painted by the nuns. Once landed in Mexico, the nuns met women and men of many ethnicities for the first time; Owens concludes that Sor Ana's “representation of these peoples, open to evangelization, tells us more about Sor Ana than it does about the Amerindians” (68). Owens examines religious devotional cults in Mexico as described by Sor Ana, including those to the Virgin of Guadalupe and to Juana de la Cruz, whose rosary beads would play a vital role in throughout the nuns’ journey. The chapter concludes with the nuns’ travel to and sojourn in Acapulco, which resulted in grave mosquito-borne illness for Sor Jerónima and others.

Owens outlines the contours of seventeenth-century Pacific travel in Chapter 3, providing essential critical context for the nuns’ remarkable experience on the galleon San Andrés. Again cloistered in a ship, the sisters encounter unanticipated situations and dynamics; as Owens observes, “[t]hrough the eyes of Sor Ana we see what life was like on the ship for the nuns: from their daily prayers and interactions with clerics, naval officers, and common mariners to illness, death at sea, the harsh treatment of a black woman, and the perils of storms and slack winds” (73). The dysentery-like illness harbored by Sor Jerónima and Sor María de la Trinidad worsened in the crude conditions onboard; Sor María perished, and was buried at sea. Owen's reading of the role of María, an African-descendent women onboard the galleon, is particularly perceptive, and provides welcome, necessary perspective to Sor Ana's description.

Chapter 4 finds the nuns arriving in Manila in 1621 to much fanfare—and to prevarications by their convent's sponsor, Ana de Vera. Owens deepens Sor Ana's narrative of the Santa Clara convent's first decade, showing Sor Jerónima's agency (and that of her fellow nuns) in lobbying for the enactment of the First Rule of Saint Clare for the community in the face of resistance from local citizens and church officials, and also in expanding the religious community to Macao. Owens delves into the lives of the nuns themselves (pressed to write about themselves by the Franciscan Commissary General, Alonso de Montemayor) and includes analyses of writings by Sor Juana de San Antonio and Sor Luisa de Jesús. Owens maintains that the last portion of Sor Ana's text “serves also as a type of necrology for the convent, documenting the pious lives and deaths of the first nuns to profess in Manila” (96), including information about Japanese novice Naitō Lucía, the death of Sor Jerónima, and Sor Ana's tenure as abbess of the community.

Owens's final chapter addresses Sor Ana's subjectivity as an early modern woman writer. Owens's deep knowledge of the field is evident as she explains the literary traditions from which Sor Ana drew. Contrasting Ginés de Quesada's biography of Sor Jerónima, which emerges throughout the book, with Sor Ana's, Owens astutely reflects that the nun “subtly inserts her own gendered commentary on Sor Jerónima's life and on the male-dominated world in which they lived” (121), signaling critiques of gendered paradigms penned by Sor Ana. Owens provides shape for the literacy Sor Ana achieved, and defines the networks of women (both contemporaries and predecessors) who encouraged her and provided necessary support for her writing endeavors, among them Mariana de Jesús, Juana de la Cruz, María de Ágreda, and Luisa de la Ascención. Finally, Owens opens Sor Ana's writerly persona to the reader, allowing a glimpse into how the nun “crafted a document under the watchful eye of the patriarchal system” (131) while appropriating and refashioning certain types of misogynistic discourse.

Owens is an expert in the topic of Early Modern women religious travelers; she edited and translated Journey of Five Capuchin Nuns, which tells the story of five Spanish nuns’ eighteenth-century journey through the Andes and Perú, as narrated by the mother abbess. In Nuns Navigating the Spanish Empire, vital reading in the fields of colonial Latin American studies, transoceanic studies, and early modern women's writing, Sarah Owen's methodical approach and expertise deliver a most welcome and significant contribution in this fascinating area.