Women's Spiritual Autobiography in
Colonial Spanish America
by
Kristine Ibsen
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this Book now
Kristine Ibsen studies
women’s personal narrative in colonial Spanish
America, focusing particularly on the spiritual
autobiography of the 17th and 18th centuries and offering
revealing insights into the social and political position
of cloistered women.
In Spanish American literature, women's autobiography is
rooted in the hagiographic tradition of vitae in
which, at the request of a confessor, nuns wrote about
their spiritual lives in an autobiographical form.
Although not intended for publication, these narratives,
or ,vidas, often circulated informally among
other religious women, and were indeed often written with
this in mind. Simultaneously written for their male
confessor(s) and their female peers, such texts
illustrate a fascinating exercise in double-voiced
discourse.
Placing these works in historical context, Ibsen examines
them in terms not only of their discursive strategies but
also of how these strategies incorporate and question
prevailing social, rhetorical, and cultural structures.
On the margins and between the lines, the vida
has the potential to effect a profound renegotiation of
the terms and forms of self-representation.
Kristine Ibsen, associate professor of Romance languages
and literatures at the University of Notre Dame, is
editor of The Other Mirror: Women’s Narrative in
Mexico, 1980-1995 and author of Author, Text and
Reader in the Novels of Carlos Fuentes.
1999. 288pp. 6 X 9.
ISBN 0-8130-1727-0 Cloth, $55.00
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"A
comprehensive and original examination of colonial Latin
American religious women’s spiritual
autobiographies, Ibsen’s book widens and deepens our
vision of these texts, their authors, and the world in
which they were produced."--Stacey Schlau,
West Chester University
"In its fascinating discussion of mediated
authorship in the spiritual autobiographies of the
colonial period in Spanish America, Ibsen’s study
illuminates for us the discursive strategies used by
religious women to reinforce as well as subvert power
relations in the convent."—Sherry
Velasco, University of Kansas
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