Sarah E. Owens offers a pathbreaking global history from the perspective of the religious women who travelled across the Atlantic and Pacific worlds in the early seventeenth century to form the first convent for religious women in Manila. Early modern global histories that include religious actors have tended to focus on male members of religious orders, and they have focused in particular upon the Jesuit order. Although there is growing interest in the global history of Franciscan predecessors, this study goes further to challenge the dominant historiography and focuses on the lives of Franciscan women, the Poor Clares. The book tells the story of the life of Sor Jerónima de la Asunción (1557–1630), who travelled the world with nine other religious women between the years 1620 and 1621, but it also transcends the genre of elite biography and represents the stories of many physical and metaphysical journeys. The journeys represented in this book intersect many important themes: the conflicts between religious ideals of poverty and the material demands of building a global religious order, the pressures of post-Tridentine Catholicism, the negotiation of transcultural interactions and discourses of race, and the position and agencies of women in different contexts.
The chapters break down the different phases of their journey, from arranging the expedition and leaving their convent in Toledo and traveling across Spain to the Spanish Atlantic outpost of Cadiz, their Atlantic crossing to Mexico and their trek across Mexico from Vera Cruz to Mexico City and on to Acapulco, their trans-Pacific voyage in the Manila galleon to the Philippines, and how they were carried in litters by native Filipinos to Manila where they founded their Clarissa convent. The final chapter extends the study's textual analysis and contextualization of the lives of religious women and female networks. The book ends with an epilogue on the destruction of the Manila convent in 1945 at the end of World War II.
The book is based on original primary research. It focuses on the 450-folio manuscript written on Manila rice paper by Sor Ana de Cristo (1565–1636), one of the cofounders of the convent of Poor Clares in Manila. Owens found the manuscript in the Toledan Clarissa convent (the Monasterio de Santa Isabel de Los Reyes), which had been the home of the first nuns to travel to Manila. This manuscript focuses on the life of Sor Jerónima, but Owens observes that it is difficult to identify the genre of the manuscript, which is ‘hybrid text’ (8), that is, between biography and autobiography. The book does not include a transcription of the manuscript, but it offers choice excerpts.
Owens uses Sor Ana's manuscript to represent a gendered perspective on the early modern global world. The manuscript is not only a story about a woman written by a woman, but it also offers insights into the lives of many different women and their roles in the Spanish Empire. As the nuns navigate the Spanish Empire, they find out about the importance of the Virgin of Guadalupe from indigenous women in Mexico, converse with a black slave woman who tried to kill herself on the Manila galleon, and discuss religious poverty with nuns in Mexico. The book represents female networks and agency, depicting how the nuns used religious poverty to accrue spiritual power, which they used to extend their patronage network and gain capital for the expansion of their religious institutions. It also represents female religiosity, the importance of visionaries and such mystic role models as Theresa of Avila, and the significance of doctrines such as the Immaculate Conception. In short, the book's gendered reading of early modern global history offers a rethinking of the categories of global history, one that not only represents the lives of women, but also brings into focus their networks, beliefs, bodily experiences and anxieties. This book offers a vivid and compelling account of early modern global history for experts and non-experts alike.
