Convents and Nuns: New Approaches to the Study of Female Religious Institutions in Colonial Mexico

Abstract

This article serves as an introduction to the subject of the colonial Mexican convent for non‐experts, while surveying recent historiographical trends. In the past ten years, historical scholarship on nuns and convents has taken three broad directions. First, historians have begun to study other female religious institutions and other kinds of religious women than cloistered convents and nuns, though the number of works that explicitly compare these institutions and experiences is still disappointingly small. Second, historians have focused on the understudied sixteenth‐ and late eighteenth‐century convents, with the result that we are beginning to gain a textured understanding of how the convent changed over time and responded to changes in the world around it. Third, the older feminist scholarship that tended to characterize the convent as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for women – that is, either less subject to patriarchal maneuverings than the outside world, or more so – is being complicated by more subtle approaches that take nuns’ spirituality and the dynamics of community seriously. We are beginning to build a picture of a complex institution that still tells us much about women's experience in the colonial period, but also tells us a great deal about the institutional church and about the religious values of the broader society.

La corte y la sociedad cortesana en el mundo hispánico (siglos XVI-XVIII)

“…Pero donde más se hacía sentir su presencia era en los conventos de monjas, que generalmente eran los primeros en dar la bienvenida a las virreinas a su llegada a la ciudad de México, a veces organizando animados festejos. Como la historiografía más reciente ha puesto de relieve, los conventos y monasterios femeninos desempeñaron un fundamental papel en la sociedad virreinal, no solo en los aspectos religiosos, sino también en los económicos, sociales e incluso políticos, muy lejos de la imagen de unas religiosas aisladas del resto de la sociedad (Chowning, 2008). De ahí que no deban extrañar las estrechas relaciones establecidas entre virreinas, conventos y religiosas (como sus esposos, las virreinas solían favorecer a algunas órdenes y conventos sobre los demás).…”

Introduction

“…Research on women and mission began in the 1990s with a surge of publications on women missionaries. While there has been a long, but somewhat under-studied tradition of Catholic female congregations working in missionary settings (Bruno-Jofré 2005;Burke 2001;Chowning 2008;Cowan 2018;Stornig 2015;Thurman 2002), most research has tended to spotlight Protestant women missionaries. Protestant women were not considered missionaries in their own right until the mid-19th century, when spurred on by the slogan 'women's work for women' , British and American missions began to send out single female missionaries.…”