That is, the analysis extends to how some of these women used their bodies as texts to be “read” by other believers for the materialization of religious understanding. Hinging on the question of how spiritual belief met with material realities, van Deusen argues that the women in this study exhibited a “theological literacy” that enabled them to transform everything from sacred objects to speech acts to bodily gestures into a narrative practice of sorts through which others could variously follow, learn from, and even interpret them. Each chapter peels back the documentary history (as transmitted through, for example, beatification testimonies, depositions, and religious memoirs or biographies called vidas) in order to dissect how women expressed belief in more intimate, often bodily, ways importantly, the author also situates them in the context of a colony’s maneuvering and flexing under inquisitorial scrutiny and peninsular politics. van Deusen’s book, Embodying the Sacred: Women Mystics in Seventeenth-Century Lima, presents the reader with several women mystics whose spiritual practices and involvement in el siglo, defined as the world outside their religious confines, punctuated a critical period of Christian religiosity in Lima.

In six chapters divided into two parts, Nancy E. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)ĭuring the seventeenth century, colonial Lima was characterized as the pulsing “mystical body” of the viceroyalty of Peru, an identity cultivated by particular events and spiritual figures. Reviewed by Gabrielle Greenlee (University of California, Santa Cruz)Ĭommissioned by Casey M.

Embodying the Sacred: Women Mystics in Seventeenth-Century Lima.ĭurham: Duke University Press, 2017.

Sacred woman reviews