Neither Saints Nor Sinners - Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America (Paperback, New)

Kathleen Myers brings together portraits and autobiographical texts of six seventeenth century Latin American women, drawing on primary sources that include Inquisition and canonisation records, confessional and mystic journals, and legal defenses and petitions. These sources illustrate how the development of institutions that examined individual merit according to a set of guidelines resulted in an "autobiographical boom" in which people began to dictate or write their life stories for confessors, bishops, lawyers, and judges. These writings provide a window through which we can see the interaction of women with religious and civic leaders and study the voices of early modern women, voices often absent from the more formal literary and historical genres of the period. In every case, Myers finds, the women's stories are intricately interwoven with the larger political and religious movements of the period. Myers shows that the ideal model for seventeenth th century Hispanic women was that of the woman religious - silent, obedient, cloistered, and virginal. This role, which was in reality for as much as a fourth of all white urban women, is the common ground for all six women studied.