Nuns Navigating the Spanish Empire
Nuns Navigating the Spanish Empire tells the remarkable story of a group of nuns who traveled halfway around the globe in the seventeenth century to establish the first female Franciscan convent in the Far East.
In 1620 Sor Jerónima de la Asunción (1556â€"1630) and her cofounders left their cloistered convent in Toledo, Spain, journeying to Mexico to board a Manila galleon on their way to the Philippines. Sor Jerónima is familiar to art historians for her portrait by Velázquez that hangs in the Prado Museum in Madrid. What most people do not know is that one of her travel companions, Sor Ana de Cristo (1565â€"1636), wrote a long biographical account of Sor Jerónima and their fifteen-month odyssey. Drawing from Sor Ana’s manuscript, other archival sources, and rare books, Owens’s study offers a fascinating view of travel, evangelization, and empire.
Owens is to be commended not only for the refreshingly clear prose she employs throughout the text, which is welcome to seasoned scholars as well as those just entering the field, but also her unflagging dedication to exploring and sharing the lives of early modern women.
Owens’s lively and eminently readable book demonstrates the significance nuns held for the expansion of the Spanish empire overseas.
Sarah E. Owens deftly uses primary and secondary sources to contextualize Sor Jerónima’s accomplishments in this fascinating monograph, which reads more like a highly accessible popular press book than an impenetrable scholarly tome.
Until the discovery of Sor Ana’s text, scholars were only aware of the manuscript’s existence from various references in published volumes and the positio for Jerónima’s proposed sainthood. Owens’s discovery and exegesis of the complete manuscript fills a known lacuna and thus constitutes a valuable addition to scholarship on nuns and women in the early modern Spanish empire.
Owens is successful in showing how this particular group of Poor Clares used their own writings in the process of dealing with the challenges of building and administering a new convent and maneuvering socially, politically, and spatially within the Spanish Empire.
A rare gendered perspective on Spain’s global empire that brings to light unheard female voices and highlights the agency of this particular group of women.
Owens deserves our deepest gratitude for providing a comprehensive approach to early-modern nuns’ agency that compels us to seek their voices and their vision.
The author excels at comparing [Sor Ana’s] account with others written by men, emphasizing the contribution that her perspective brings.…At the same time, Owens is well-versed in the writings of other nuns from the period, as she places Sor Ana’s writing within the context of other conventual writers and within its historical and literary framework.
Sarah Owens’s Nuns Navigating the Spanish Empire is an exciting and significant addition to the scholarship on early modern convents.…The book provides an amazing window into the intersection of early-modern travel, gender, and religion.
Sarah E. Owens is a professor of Spanish at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. She is the editor and translator of Journey of Five Capuchin Nuns and the coeditor of Women of the Iberian Atlantic.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Unveiling the Manuscript
Chapter One. Toledo to Cádiz
Chapter Two. Cádiz to Mexico
Chapter Three. The Manila Galleon
Chapter Four. The Convent in Manila
Chapter Five. Literacy and Inspirational Role Models
Epilogue
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
