The consolidation of Roman Catholicism in the sixteenth century saw the spawning of convents in Spain, France and Italy and the rise of a special form of female spirituality that attracted hundreds of women to the stark premises of what was apparently a life of self-denial and curtailment of the will. The foundation of convents in Mexico was part of that western cultural trend. By the end of the seventeenth century convents were part of the urban landscape of all major cities in the viceroyalty. Female conventual life has always been the object of popular as well as intellectual curiosity. In their time convents had the appeal of the sacred, the forbidden and the inaccessible, but the reality of quotidian contact between nunneries and the city helped to render them less formidable than their outward appearance. The convents' ties with the male ecclesiastics who ruled them and the nuns' own spiritual relationship with their confessors created special circumstances of male-female power hierarchy that have attracted a significant number of scholarly commentaries.
The appeal of convents as the only female corporate institutions with an independent life and an economic standing is enhanced by the fact that the most notable colonial writer, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, was a nun herself. Literary and cultural scholars engaged in the study of Sor Juana and other nuns have delved into some of the historical aspects of convent life, largely through specimens of documentary evidence used as texts charged with multiple subtle meanings to be decoded with the help of contemporary theoretical analysis. The latest contribution to the cultural interpretation of cloistered life by Stephanie L. Kirk hinges around the concept of two communities, ‘the de jure ideal community desired by the authorities and the de facto convent community as experienced and created by the women who inhabited it’ (p. 8). She argues for the recognition and understanding of the nuns' agency to mobilise themselves against the patriarchal controls that constantly repressed them. Kirk sees a strong polarisation between male and female in their power relationships, with the male authorities pursuing canons of suppression of the female body and the female will through didactic texts, inquisitorial questioning and diocesan legislation. On the other hand, the collective ties forged by nuns within the cloisters injected life into their acts of resistance and were the source of their own sense of community, expressed through their literary initiatives or through acts of personal and communal resistance.
To illustrate the male authorities' desire to encase and eventually to extinguish any female independence, Kirk uses two texts by Jesuit Antonio Núñez de Miranda, a seventeenth-century theologian who wrote two guide books for would-be nuns before and after profession. Didactic texts are emblematic of the male assumption of leadership to straighten out female corruptibility and teach the perfection of personal solitude, a principle totally opposed to the female friendship ties she explores in the following chapters. Turning to personal rebellion against the powerful discourse of male domination and the existence of personal affective ties among nuns, Kirk studies one Inquisitorial case of what was known as a ‘bad friendship’ between a nun and a servant, and the mobilisation of two convents in the city of Puebla against the imposition of communal life in the 1770s.
On the personal level, mala amistad was an ambiguous term applied by confessors to close friendships among women in the convent. The nature of such friendships eludes a precise definition as they are nowhere clearly explained. While it is possible to see some homoerotic meaning in such relationships, they also implied affective attachment to others without necessarily being sexual. Kirk is correct in seeing the case she studies as a possible example of a lesbian relationship muffled by conventual life and the servant's abandonment of the cloister. However, extending the mantle of homoeroticism to all citations of ‘bad friendship’ (in didactic treatises as well as in those cases scrutinised by the Inquisition) is risky and not convincing to historians.
On the other hand, the confrontation between the diocesan ecclesiastical authorities and the convents under their jurisdictions over the style of life of the latter is a better example of gendered conflict. Citing from the address of Puebla's Bishop Fabian y Fuero to the nuns and the responses of the convents of La Santísima Trinidad, Santa Inés and Santa Clara, Kirk analyses the dialogue of power and resistance in this well-known struggle. She provides a full reading of several key documents that convincingly confirms the dialectic between the dissenting voices of the nuns and those of fiercely overpowering men who wished to be obeyed.
A final long chapter is dedicated to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz as an emblematic figure of the clever nun who dared to carve a space of her own within the cloisters, and who engaged in reciprocal relations of appreciation and support with other nuns. Kirk uses two recently discovered texts: the letter of Serafina de Cristo and the Enigmas dedicated to a group of Portuguese nuns. This chapter is a detailed literary analysis of both documents which remain little known outside the circle of literary critics. The Serafina de Cristo letter is at the centre of a scholarly tempest on its authorship and intent. Kirk takes a bold stand by declaring it is the product of another nun's pen, a statement of defence and solidarity with Sor Juana, then under attack by some ecclesiastical authorities for authoring a theological text. In Portugal, a group of nuns created an unpublished book with a series of poems dedicated to Sor Juana, containing also her intellectual gift to them, a set of poems known as the Enigmas. These are twenty poems to be deciphered by the recipients, all critical of worldly love, interpreted by Kirk as heterosexual love, and reaffirming the existence of a special community of kin souls who shared not just a secret but a very real enjoyment of their femaleness, their love for each other, and their intellectual gifts.
As a historian I appreciate the desire to extend the discussion of women and conventual life beyond the narrow confines in which it was originally set by some famous male writers. In the last twenty years women literary scholars have contributed much to turn that view into a more complex and fruitful engagement with cultural life in the viceroyalty, even though most of their work focuses on Sor Juana. However, I see risks in approaching historical situations with a limited array of evidence supported by a variety of contemporary theoretical readings. Kirk argues for the validity of using theory to enliven and renew the interpretation of women's world in the past. Her challenge is addressed to literary critics, but it also concerns historians, of course, as long as cultural history is based on the same documents. I admire her wholehearted support for a women's world although the dialectic opposition of male and female is possibly too strongly drawn. Ultimately, when scholars take risks challenging and reinterpreting the past they enliven and renew academia. This work will engage other scholars into doing just that.
