Folios against the Light: Anthology and Study of Spiritual Autobiographies of Spanish American Creole-Mulatto Female Mystics in Colonial Spanish America

FAIN: HB-288498-23

Emilio Ricardo Báez-Rivera
University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus (San Juan, PR 00925-2512)

Research and writing to complete an anthology and study of autobiographical writings by Spanish-American female mystics in colonial Latin America. 

My book project deals with a chronologically structured anthology and study of the writings of Spanish American Creole-Mulatto female mystics in colonial times, still a huge gap in available scholarship, to be completed over the course of twelve months of full-time work. This will be a full reworking of my 600 page doctoral dissertation, although I have been revising it for the past three years. Devoted to the spiritual autobiographies only of Creole mystics from the first three viceroyalties of Spanish America, the study took as its point of departure the earliest authors whose extant works constitute the beginnings of this mostly conventual tradition: María Magdalena de Lorravaquio Muñoz (New Spain); Saint Rosa de Lima (Peru), and Jerónima del Espíritu Santo (New Grenade). This book will be the first comprehensive study on the development of this discourse as a genre and its most significant continuators in each of the viceroyalties, adding the viceroyalty of Río de la Plata.