Every student of religion in colonial Spanish America must have marveled about the otherworldliness of female mystics: the strangeness of their live-styles, the extreme intensity of their desires to be one with God, and their immense popularity. What kind of society produced such individuals? Which theology allowed for such living extremes? Being an expert on female lives and female mystics of colonial Peru, historian Nancy van Deusen critically navigates the reader through the bits and pieces from beatification hearings, vidas, entrance petitions, profession documents, relics, or any kind of evidence of the female body in ecstasy to reconstruct in novel ways the limits and potentials of Lima's seventeenth-century female mystics, beatas, donadas, and other pious women. Despite great variety among these pious women, as Van Deusen argues, they were all creators of a unique spirituality; one that found its expression in quotidian practices and in a special relationship with matter. It evolved among women and their networks. This spirituality allowed women to explore, recreate, and expand the limits that a gendered colonial society imposed on them.
Therefore, instead of focusing on the women's aspired otherworldliness, Van Deusen recreates their mundaneness. They were as ordinary as they were not. Lima's most famous saint, Rosa de Lima, for example, while usually presented as a pious woman who flagellated her own body to the extreme in order to rejoice in mystical union with God, is shown as a woman of flesh and blood. With her female friends she meticulously cared for the cloth that dressed saintly statues. According to Van Deusen, “material objects were often the tutorial ‘intermediaries’ between Rosa and her intended audience” (29). The author uses this example to discuss the meaning of tactile senses for female expressions of Catholic spirituality. María Jacinta Montoya, another prominent woman who turned into a saintly person at the end of her life, is presented in her all too human greed to promote her deceased husband's beatification. Did María Jacinta Montoya's interventions in the beatification process of Nicolás de Ayllón provoke the failure of his beatification? Had it been successful, Peru would have had its first indigenous saint. The author convincingly explains why this never happened. In her last example, Van Deusen critically discusses the dramatic circumstance of Josefa Portocarrero Laso de la Vega's choice for a religious vocation and her initiative to found the Monasterio de Santa Rosa in Lima in the early eighteenth century. This daughter of a Viceroy, who other historians have hailed as the strong-willed woman who rejected matriarchal authority, is shown as a fragile learned human being—a victim and agent within a demanding political machinery. Portocarrero Laso de la Vega, with her own interpretation of the theological notion of free will, operated skillfully within the limits of Lima's early eighteenth-century political arena when Bourbon rule supplanted Hapsburg rule. Beyond these famous examples that undergo a thorough reinterpretation, other much less well-known women are also given a voice and image for the first time. The donadas, for example, religious servants who took informal vows, are discussed in their everyday proceedings and desires; living a life in the service of others.
In all these case studies Van Deusen achieves to critically and carefully read through the formulaic nature of her documents; a difficult task in line with her aim to avoid problematic dichotomizations and “the false choice between representation and lived experiences” (9). Van Deusen achieves her aims masterfully. The author carefully discusses the limits of her interpretations. In one instance, however, the reader felt that the author's language obfuscated the fragmented nature of her sources. When the author tells the reader how Santa Rosa de Lima “listened to them [the statue-persons] ‘speak’ and give council,” and adds her interpretation, “through their sense of touch, they learned to feel the sacred energy of the decorated cloth that adorned these beloved statues,” the reader would have expected evidence from a Peruvian primary source. Instead, the author refers to secondary literature that discusses European forms of female spirituality.
To help guide further research I would also like to make two critical interventions. When discussing the outstanding notion of cloth for Santa Rosa and her disciples the reader would have loved to see this question being taken beyond the world of the metropolitan Baroque. Cloth was of utmost importance to Andean people. How does the peculiar female mystics’ relationship to cloth relate to Andean worlds? In more general terms, the reader would have loved to see a critical discussion about the relationship between “the” material and “the” spiritual. While Van Deusen concludes, “to be a truly spiritual being was to reject the superfluous and materialistic nature of the world” (173), the reader wonders how this particular “rejection of the materialistic nature of the world” speaks to the above mentioned female spirituality that was rooted in an intimate relationship with matter as the site of encountering the divine. These critical points notwithstanding, this book immensely amplifies our current understanding of female mystics in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Lima. Its discussion of the normality of the abnormal will inspire many historians in their attempts to explain these and similar religious phenomena.
