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Madre Maria de San Jose (1656 - 1719)-mystic, chronicler, and co-founder of an Augustinian convent-inscribed her life story within the model of spiritual autobiography set by St. Augustine and Teresa of Avila, but at the same time included her individual story as a seventeenth-century woman of the landowning classes in New Spain. The resulting manuscript records in intimate detail her family life, convent surroundings, and social milieu; it introduces us to a combative and engaging person and gives us a rare and vivid glimpse of a complex society.
List of contents
Preface
Introduction
Translator's Note
Translated Selections
Study
Chapter One: Maria de San Jose's World
I. The Palacio-Berruecos Family and the Hacienda Santa Cruz
Family Portraits
Religious Vocation and Family Relationships
II. Convent Life
Daily Life
The Spiritual Journey
Chapter Two: Gender, Tradition, and Autobiographical Spiritual Writings
The Tradition of Women's Visionary Writings
Imitation, Models, and Training
Maria de San Jose and Her Confessors
Narrative and Rhetorical Strategies
Men's and Women's "Vidas"
Appendix A: The History of Maria de San Jose's Writing Career
Appendix B: Outline of Volumes I-XII and a Chronology
Appendix C: Short Facsimile Selections of Maria de San Jose's Manuscripts
Bibliography
Glossary
About the author
Kathleen A. Myers is a professor of Spanish and adjunct professor of History at Indiana University. Her publications include Word from New Spain: The Spiritual Autobiography of Madre Maria de San Jose (Liverpool University Press, 1993) and numerous articles on a variety of religious women and writers in colonial Spanish America. She has received a grant from the Spanish Ministry for Education and Culture for her work on autobiography and sixteenth-century chronicles of America.
Amanda Powell, poet and translator, teaches Spanish/Latin American literature and literary translation at the University of Oregon. Her translations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry and prose appear in Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (University of New Mexico Press, 1989). With Electa Arenal, she edited and translated The Answer/La Respuesta by colonial Mexican poet Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (The Feminist Press, 1994). Her scholarly essays, translations, and poems appear in a variety of anthologies and journals.
Myers and Powell were awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support research and translation for A Wild Country Out in the Garden.
Summary
An autobiography of a late 17th-century/early 18th-century Spanish-American woman. It captures the spirit of Baroque Mexico and the circumstances in which the majority of Spanish and Spanish American religious women wrote.
