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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804752831 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/13/2008 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 528 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d) |
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Brides of Christ
Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico
By Asunción Lavrin
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5283-1
CHAPTER 1
The Path to the Convent
"Hermanita, cuando has de dejar de decir que quieres ser capuchina?" Aquí yo le respondía: "Cuando lo haya conseguido lo dejaré de decir." "Little sister, when will you stop saying you wish to be a Capuchin?" And I answered: "When I become one I will stop saying it."
* * *
Renouncing family and the comforts of home to live forever within the restricted walls of a convent was a choice of life that today seems too remote and too demanding for our highly secularized lifestyle. And yet, hundreds of women in Mexico, as elsewhere in Spain and Spanish America, chose profession and perpetual enclosure over marriage or life as a secular single woman. Only a few of them left testimonies to explain their decisions or disclose their feelings about taking the veil. We have to explore many sources to re-create not just the world in which they lived but also the social circumstances, religious convictions, and faith that encouraged them to enter a convent and remain in it. The recorded official request to enter a convent as a novitiate stated that the petitioner had always had an inclination for living a religious life, but this formulaic pattern does not necessarily cast light on the personal motives behind the decision. However, the validity of the vocation should not be dismissed simply because it was expressed following a legal formula. It is true that while some nuns confessed they had suffered while adapting to what originally appeared as a compelling choice to them, others considered themselves happy and privileged by professing. In trying to understand the world of female cloisters between the late sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries we have to accept that the resolution to enter into a convent remains a complex historical problem, the result of multilayered economic, familial, religious, and personal circumstances. What a novice was bound to accept when she took her final vows of profession was a way of life, a world with a culture of its own, quite different from that awaiting those who chose marrying and mothering children. The lives of those who entered the convent were not typical and the cloisters were special places to which only a chosen few could aspire. However, this exceptionality does not make conventual life less important than the life of laywomen. The cloisters were unique female worlds with an idiosyncratic blend of beliefs and religious observance, social consciousness and social practices, that were highly valued and respected in their own time.
QUALIFYING TO BECOME A NUN
Wanting to be a nun was not enough to gain access to a convent. Whether a young woman was fulfilling a vocation or simply being carried into the cloister by family ties or social pressure, the first consideration that she and her family had to bear in mind was whether or not she could fulfill the prerequisites demanded for profession. Factors of race and status in New World society had as much weight as the personal vocation of a potential novice. If the former did not meet specific standards, the doors of the convent remained closed to her regardless of the intensity of her desire or her faith. Because professing in a convent was thought to be as much a social issue as a personal one, race became a critical signifier in becoming a member of a religious community. Those aspiring to take the veil had to satisfy at least four requirements. Spanish descent expressed as "cleanliness of blood" (limpieza de sangre) was the first prerequisite. Race was a concern as early as the mid-sixteenth century, when it first became apparent that the unbridled sexuality of Spanish males was helping to create a racially diverse world by mating or marrying indigenous women. In those days, any woman of Spanish descent had high expectations of marrying well to a man of equal or better status than her own. But, adverse circumstances could thwart such aspirations. Too many poor men and women who arrived in the New World with hopes of climbing the social ladder and reaching an elite position in a rapidly evolving society were disappointed by their lack of success. Women whose parents or relatives never realized that dream were often regarded as endangered, and their virtue at stake, as they could potentially marry below their perceived station in life. They became candidates for protection in a religious community. In a letter to the Council of the Indies dated March 10, 1566, the Bishop of Tlaxcala, Fernando de Villagómez, pleaded for financial support for a house of "religious maidens" (doncellas religiosas), known as the beaterio of Santa Catalina de Sena. He argued that "maiden daughters of conquistadors, and honest Spanish people" were numerous and unable to marry their equals, because dowries were immoderately high. Being women, and thus fragile, it would be a good thing for the land to have a convent, "where the daughters of the good, could serve God, retaining their honor (honra)." The success of the Spanish settlement was linked to the preservation of the sexual purity of those descendants of Spaniards who wished to retain their honor by refusing to marry down. This was a compelling argument, almost a declaration of social policy.
It was also a forceful act of self-definition for the colonial elite, hardly thirty years after the conquest of Tenochtitlán. The top families of the emerging society were, according to the bishop, able to afford large dowries for their daughters. However, for those who were poor, the convent was a solution to their social predicament. For this sixteenth-century bishop, money was obviously important, but status mattered more. Shelter and virginity at the service of God were the venues to maintaining social standing if money was missing. The dual path of the "two states" for women, marriage or religious vows, was already in place and, apparently, as firmly rooted as it was in Spain. Whether or not the situation of women was exactly as depicted in the sixteenth-century document, and whether the choice between marriage and convent may have been exaggerated by the Bishop, the fact still stands that the official "construct" of women as weak and threatened, and the beaterios and convents as sites of shelter, was part of the mind-set of those who were shaping New Spain's society. That the idea had enough purchase among first settlers is proven by the arguments used by the founders of the convent of Jesús María in Mexico in 1581. Its proponents and supporters, all men of mature age and some social rank, stated that they wished to found an institution that would receive descendants of conquistadors, young maidens willing to serve God but lacking money to pay for the dowry they required for their spiritual marriage. It was offensive to God that their nobility would be defiled by unequal marriages, especially if the beauty of some was likely to lead them into undesirable social situations. Thus, the honor of those women was emblematic of the honor of the new society. Men, and other women, understood that it was their moral duty to account for those in whose honor rested theirs, and began to dispense money for religious foundations.
The concern about women's fate that so preoccupied sixteenth-century society began to be shaped when they were between twelve and fourteen years old. That was the threshold of maturity, when families began to think about placing their girls "en estado," in the state of either marriage to a human husband or marriage to a divine one, Christ. While there were white women who did not marry and/or lived in concubinage, especially by the mid-seventeenth century, this did not change the social and personal expectations of self-respecting families . In the case of desirable girls, such as those whose parents would endow them with appealing goods and cash, suitors appeared as soon as they entered into adolescence and marriages would be celebrated between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Girls born in a large family or who had lost either mother or father at an early age were highly susceptible to being catapulted into marriage or sent to a convent to be raised until they were marriageable.
In a society fast becoming aware of its racial diversity, patrons willing to found either nunneries or beaterios soon defined these institutions as an enclave for their women folk to the almost complete exclusion of Indians or mixed-bloods. Exceptions to the rule of racial exclusion were few. Racial consciousness was in place by 1540, when Nuestra Sra. de La Concepción, the first convent of Mexico City, was founded. The first bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga, and some of his companions of the Franciscan Order had hoped that eventually Indian women would become such good Christians that some day they could be the brides of Christ. However, his first attempts at enclosing young indigenous women for indoctrination by devout women coming from Spain were a complete failure. Indian parents were reluctant to let their daughters enter such institutions. Once nunneries began to be founded in New Spain, they became bastions of racial selection which, reinforced by legitimacy of birth, made the cloisters almost impermeable to any other ethnic intrusion but that of the founders. Even though the granddaughters of Moctezuma, good Christian ladies, were admitted in La Concepción, their presence did not create a precedent for others of their racial provenance. Neither did the foundation of Santa Clara, in Querétaro in 1607, by a wealthy Indian, Diego de Tapia, who demanded that his only daughter be appointed as abbess, change the situation in the seventeenth century. His wish was granted by the city worthies eager to have a nunnery in their town, but after her death no other Indian was ever allowed to profess. Archbishop Moya de Contreras explicitly rejected the possibility of admitting mestizas (mixed-bloods of Indian and Spaniards) in the convent of Jesús María. Founders and patrons who protected women's convents and helped them survive for nearly three hundred years followed to the letter the founding fathers' stated wishes. The mid-sixteenth-century exclusionary rule was not broken until a convent for full-blooded Indian nuns opened its doors in 1724.
Behind the foundation of nunneries was also the desire to replicate the Iberian world in New Spain. One of a number of key institutions that Spain transplanted to the New World, the nunnery was part of a world of belief, social ranking, and gender roles developing in Spain in the sixteenth century. Cloistering women was part of the paradigm of observance built by the reform of the religious orders that began late in the fifteenth-century Spain, and was strengthened by the challenge of Protestantism after 1530. In the New World, the cloister had an added symbolic meaning: the triumph of Christianity over the pagan beliefs of the indigenous peoples. Every nunnery erected in the viceroyalty of New Spain was a symbol of power and triumph. Planting spiritual and social values in the New World was the most important task after the military conquest, and one that involved women, whether married or cloistered, because women were in charge of helping to shape the early beliefs and behavior of children. The experience of a land populated by unfamiliar people who had practiced religions so alien and even antithetical to Christianity seemed to some men to offer incalculable dangers to the female sex. Christianity was a fragile flower blooming under unfavorable circumstances in the New World, and the Christian women who would help root and strengthen it deserved the utmost protection. This spiritual message, while not necessarily spelled out in the arguments of the proponents of women's cloisters, was an implicit and forceful assumption for all of them. Chroniclers who later on looked back at the foundation of convents tried to infuse their histories with an aura of religious significance. The seventeenth-century savant, Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora, preceded the story of the foundation of the convent of Jesús María, with information about the existence of temple virgins among the gentile Mexicans, and tied it to the triumph of Christianity as the true religion. A similar discourse of Christian flowering among the Tarascans was made by Jesuit Juan Uvaldo de Anguita, on the celebration of the foundation of the Indian convent of Nuestra Señora de la Concepción de Cosamaloapán in March 1737.
To restrict convents to the descendants of those who had earned a kingdom for the Crown seemed eminently just for sixteenth-century people insofar as they would protect those in need of help and who bore the emblem of social and spiritual order by respecting the laws of king and God. Race was the most stringent of criteria devised by conventual patrons, but by no means the only one. Legitimacy of birth followed very closely in second place. During the sixteenth century illegitimacy was commonly associated with the birth of mestizos, although by the seventeenth century, births out of wedlock were commonplace even among those of Spanish descent. Legitimacy of birth was the result of conception within the boundaries of a marriage sanctified by the church and a sign of compliance with social order. Thus, legitimacy was closely scrutinized and verified at profession by a copy of the baptismal record or the sworn testimony of reliable witnesses. In theory, only those conceived within the boundaries of a Christian marriage were good enough for the loftiest of husbands.
This social circumstance was, however, liable to some interpretation that made room for human weakness. Hijas naturales, the offspring of a union of single parents outside marriage, were sometimes allowed to profess, but only after their "defect of birth" was "excused" by the bishop or archbishop. There was some poetic justice in recognizing that even kings incurred this weakness of the flesh and begot children outside the mandates of the church. Of course, only hijas naturales of white parentage were ever allowed this exemption. Their origin was perceived as a youthful mistake among unwed parents. It was different for children conceived by a couple in which one of the partners was married to somebody else. That was adultery, and it carried heavy moral and social penalties for the offspring. However, many a high-born single man had carried affairs with a single woman of his social class whom, for many circumstances, he did not marry. As long as the father raised that child, or acknowledged her and assumed the responsibility to provide her with a dowry, the girl may have had a chance of being accepted into a convent. This was not a frequent practice, but an exception only possible under negotiated circumstances. Whiteness, financial support, and social leverage were necessary to achieve the acceptance of a natural child. If necessary, witnesses broke the silence of the birth registers that could state "of unknown parents" and disclose provenance. Thus, Juana de Sandoval, who wished to be admitted in the convent of San Lorenzo of Mexico in 1728, was acknowledged to be the natural daughter of Doña Antonia de Arenas y Tapia and Don Andrés Muñoz de Sandoval, who was a member of the family of the Duke of Linares, former Viceroy of New Spain. For her profession she was endowed by her uncle. Clearly, the result of a social misstep, the girl had been cared for by the family and her lineage was only "somewhat" stained by her birth. The nuns did not object to her joining their ranks. In October 1746, Isabel Agustina de Zurricalda, backed by Domingo García Sáenz, a merchant who offered her 4,000 pesos' dowry, asked to be relieved from her "defect of birth" to enter as a black-veiled nun in La Concepción, the oldest convent in the kingdom. Having verified that although of "unknown parents" she was "española" (white), honest, and virtuous, she was granted permission to enter. She was thirty-four years old at the time, already too old to marry, but not too old to take the veil. Despite exceptions, the weight of respectability was hard to dismiss. When a young woman born in Nepantla decided to enter the convent of San Jerónimo in Mexico City, in 1669, her powerful patrons forged a legitimate birth document and declared her born within wedlock. Later known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, she became the most notable poet of the colonial period, and the truth about her being hija natural remained unknown until the twentieth century.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Brides of Christ by Asunción Lavrin. Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Page,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
CHAPTER ONE - The Path to the Convent,
CHAPTER TWO - The Novice Becomes a Nun,
CHAPTER THREE - The Spiritual Meanings of Religious Life,
CHAPTER FOUR - Government, Hierarchies, and Ceremonials,
CHAPTER FIVE - Daily Life in the Convent,
CHAPTER SIX - Body, Soul, and Death,
CHAPTER SEVEN - Sexuality: A Challenge to Chastity,
CHAPTER EIGHT - Indian Brides of Christ,
CHAPTER NINE - The Struggle over Vida Común,
CHAPTER TEN - Writing in the Cloisters,
Epilogue,
Reference Matter,
Appendix - Convents of New Spain: Foundation Date and Religious Affiliation,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,