The Mystic of Tunja: the writings of Madre Castillo, 1671-1742

Abstract

McKnight, Kathryn Joy.(Amherst, MA: University o f Massachusetts Press, 1997). 284 pp.Madre Castillo of Colombia (Francisca Josefa de la Concepcion) is, along with St. Rose of Lima, among the best known of colonial Latin America's mystic nuns. Author of an autobiographical account (known as the Vida), a spiritual journal which includes mystical poetry in the tradition of the Song of Songs and St. John of the Cross (denominated the Afectos espirituales), and a notebook incorporating revised poetry, a meditation, and various treatises (known as the Cuaderno de Enciso). This Franciscan abbess is also one of only two colonial women writers, the other being the feminist nun, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz of Mexico, to have been traditionally accorded some attention in literary histories and anthologies.Kathryn Joy McKnight, the recent recipient of the Modern Language Association's prestigious Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, has produced the first study outside Colombia to focus exclusively on Madre Castillo, her life and works. Drawing from post-modernist theory on subjectivity and agency, contributions in the burgeoning subfield of Hispanic women religious writers, greater Church history, and her extensive archival research in Colombia, McKnight provides an illuminating examination of the varied forces which helped shape Madre Castillo's religious career and her spiritual discourse.McKnight divides her study into three sections, prefacing these by a brief discussion of the Spanish American literary reception of Madre Castillo's writings. Part One sets forth a theoretical framework for studying the autobiographical sub-genre of the vida espiritual or spiritual life story, of which McKnight makes further use in Part Three when she specifically studies Madre Castillo's vida. Although there are feminine Hispanic autobiographical writings predating Teresa of Avila's vida, the practice of nuns' autobiographical writing became generalized in Spain and its colonies only after the success of the saint's works. Her biography formed an important model for subsequent nun autobiographers, such as Madre Castillo, whose mother read her excerpts from Libro de las fundaciones when she was still a young girl.Like Teresa, later Hispanic nuns wrote vidas typically at the behest of confessors, who used the lives to examine nuns' orthodoxy, i.e. to judge the validity of their visions or ecstatic experiences against the larger backdrop of a chronological life story. In the counter-Reformational context, however, the nun's vida could also be used as material with which to bring glory to the writer's religious order and posthumous fame to herself, insofar as it could be used as evidence in a process of beatification. Interestingly, Madre Castillo's vida appears not to have served the latter purpose. In fact, it was first published in the nineteenth century by her nephew, whose interest was most probably in promoting the family name and reputation.McKnight provides a useful list of eight defining elements of the female-authored vida and discusses various rhetorical strategies available to the nun writer, such as portraying herself as God's amanuensis or as a virile virgin. She makes generic comparisons, for example, explaining how the vida differs from, yet evinces some similarities with, the genres of biography, hagiography, the spiritual diaries and journals, or notebooks, kept by many nuns, including Madre Castillo.McKnight's knowledge of Hispanic feminine spiritual autobiography is extremely thorough. She has read numerous Hispanic nuns' vidas, and also the very few Hispanic male religious vidas in existence. Particularly noteworthy, therefore, is the gendered contrast she discovers between the two.Part Two, entitled Contexts, includes three chapters, the first offering a brief history of women religious writers in Spain and its colonies from the late medieval period to the early eighteenth century. …