Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Mystic of Tunja: The Writings of Madre Castillo, 1641-1742 by
Madre Castillo and Kathryn Joy McKnight
Review by: Kenneth Mills
Source: The Americas, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Apr., 1999), pp. 649-651
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1008329
Accessed: 26-05-2022 17:31 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to The Americas

This content downloaded from 200.3.152.96 on Thu, 26 May 2022 17:31:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 649

The Mystic of Tunja: The Writings of Madre Castillo, 1641-1742. By Kathryn

Joy McKnight. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. Pp. xx,
284. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00.)

Studies which embrace the wider intellectual, economic, and social contexts
of the lives of colonial religious have not come as far in work treating the
Nuevo Reino de Granada as they have in Spain, New Spain, and Peru. Kath-
ryn Joy McKnight's study of the life and thought of the Creole visionary
Madre Castillo (1641-1742)-born Francisca Josefa de la Concepci6n-sets
out to remedy the situation with notable success.

Previous work has tended to portray Madre Castillo as either a great mystic
or as the player of "a powerful religious role." Building on their contributions,
McKnight finds a more complex figure. One example of the author's sophis-
tication in this regard comes in her treatment of the visions which Madre
Castillo received from God and recorded in Su vida, her spiritual autobiog-
raphy. A number of the visions reveal the sufferings and concerns of her
younger self-as Sor Francisca-her life lived in delicate and frequently pain-
ful balance between the contemplative's stretch towards exemplarity and the
rigors of conventual office-holding and stewardship. In one vision, the Devil
ushers the young Sor Francisca into a room filled with the faces of abbesses
and other prelates "who have been condemned by the diversions of the of-
fice" (p. 144). In another case, the vision comes as sweet relief from the
cruelty and injustice of a particularly bitter episode of convent politics. After
Sor Francisca had accused a fellow-nun of having received a male cleric in her
cell, a resentful (and perhaps implicated) servant made an attempt on Sor
Francisca's life. While the nun whom she had accused of immoral dealings was
rewarded with the care of the young novices, Sor Francisca was demoted from
her post as choir vicaress. Withdrawing deep into her devotions, she received
a peaceful vision of a group of harp-playing Dominican friars singing psalms
(pp. 146-47).

McKnight studies such experiences as integral to an understanding of Ma-

dre Castillo's simultaneous positions as both a functionary in the convent (and
to some extent "the world") and a spiritual writer. Among other things,
McKnight's Madre Castillo emerges as one who exercised the same power she
denied and deplored in her writing. And rather than distracting her or re-
vealing some worldly true self, the inner conflict only intensifies her holy
striving.

The Mystic of Tunja satisfies with the fruits of researches both into the site
of Madre Castillo's life, the Convento Real de Santa Clara in Tunja, and into
the precise rule and examples by which she and other Poor Clares sought to
live (pp. 79-100). McKnight also displays an impressive command of the nun's
principal spiritual influences, most of whom turn out to be the usual suspects
from late sixteenth-century Spain.

This content downloaded from 200.3.152.96 on Thu, 26 May 2022 17:31:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
650

Even more valuable (because the texts are so much less well known) are her
close and sometimes enthralling treatments of Madre Castillo's three princi-
pal writings from the early eighteenth century: Su vida, to which I have
already alluded; the Afectos espirituales (a series of spiritual reflections on a
variety of themes, often composed at the behest, McKnight writes, of encour-
aging confessors); and the so-called Cuaderno de Enciso (several hand-copied
poems and devotional texts, mostly by others, along with a group of both
original and revised reflections and an allegorical meditation on a soul's jour-
ney to God).

McKnight's original study of the final forty-eight pages of this last notebook
cleverly picks up on her earlier attention to the nun's conventual offices,
especially her tenures as mistress of novices. These pages show Madre Castil-
lo's conscious erasure of "her specific identity" and its replacement by "an
unnamed soul," a conduit for the knowledge of God (p. 204). They can best
be understood, McKnight contends, as a "guidebook"-both a "theology of
humiliation" and a spiritual journey-with public and instructional intent.
Cautiously, within defined limits, Madre Castillo found powerful possibilities
for spiritual exploration and expression, what the author, in the end, calls both
"afeminized hermeneutic authority" and "subtle subversion" (pp. 220-21).

McKnight writes early in the book that one of her wishes is to offer "a
representative ... view of the state of critical scholarship [essentially since
1993, when Kathleen A. Myers published an influential first volume of the
spiritual autobiography of Madre Maria de San Jose (1656-1719)] to any who
might enter the field through this book" (p. 63). From this noble intention a
problem may spring. McKnight's first three chapters consist almost solely of
a review of primary and secondary work and a discussion of theoretical and
practical considerations. While some of this material is indispensable (the
neat survey of the vidas or spiritual accounts of six male near-contemporaries,
for instance, bolsters her later assertions about female writers of vidas espiri-
tuales), the three chapters might happily have been one. The principal objects
of study, and the real contributions, await the reader for too long.

More typically, McKnight's example to her imagined reader-initiates is a

sound one. Writing a modern biography of an early eighteenth-century female
mystic throws up any number of traps, not least perhaps those of self-
indulgence and romanticization of one's subject. McKnight falls prey to nei-
ther. Nor does she waste energy tilting at the strictures imposed on Madre
Castillo by contemporary patriarchal and female traditions. The author's
awareness of her positions as a "twentieth-century critic" and "feminist
scholar" enrich rather than drown this biography (including her meditation on
a disapproving nun-biographer's watchful eye over McKnight's insistent delv-
ing into the political and economic facets of convent life [p.100]). Kathryn
McKnight's well-grounded study of Madre Castillo of Tunja brings this vi-

This content downloaded from 200.3.152.96 on Thu, 26 May 2022 17:31:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 651

sionary nun and abbess more fully into a thriving discussion of intellectual and
spiritual lives in the early modern Spanish world. Its assured performance
should inspire work on other figures and convents in the Nuevo Reino de
Granada and beyond.

Princeton University KENNETH MILLS

Princeton, New Jersey

La Nueva Espatfa y sus metales preciosos: La indu

de los libros de cargo y data de la Real Hacie
Hausberger. (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert,
Price.)

Perhaps it is unfair to characterize a book of this sort as "disappointing." Its

author, Bernd Hausberger, has obviously thought long and hard about how
best to analyze silver production in Bourbon Mexico. Using the libros de
cargo y data of the Royal Treasury, Hausberger sets out their promise-and
pitfalls-as historical evidence. Refreshingly modest, he makes no sweeping
pronouncements about methodology. Hausberger's caution and good sense
are everywhere evident. Remarkably, he has something new to say about a
subject that English-speaking historians have seemingly given up for dead. So
in what sense is the result disappointing?

Consider what Hausberger does. He makes a truly Herculean effort to

study the structure of ownership and production of the mines by tallying
individual transactions in the libros de cargo y data. He finds, quite instruc-
tively, that the big mines and grand miners of fin de siecle Mexico were less in
evidence in the 1760s. While Guanajuato and Zacatecas did account for about
a third of silver mined, it is a little surprising that production was so dispersed
and that smelting was widely practiced. Smelting of high-grade ores required
less capital than the patio process used in refining low-grade ores. There was
still room for the small miner in the 1760s. As the pressure to exploit low-
grade ores rose with the declining supply of high-grade ores, silver mining was
sensibly transformed. Since a similar consolidation was underway in agricul-
ture, in commerce, and in some aspects of manufacturing as well, we may
logically question its broader implications for popular welfare and for popular
political mobilization as well.

So then, why call this modest volume disappointing? For one thing, Haus-
berger himself had doubts about the result, choosing the period 1761-1767
because "[his] energies failed before a growing mass of numbers" (p. 14).
Losing control of the sources is a reason for framing a study with tighter
chronological limits, but it is not necessarily a good reason. What a pity. A
well-constructed sample could have supported a much broader study whose
results would have been far more useful. There is really no point to counting

This content downloaded from 200.3.152.96 on Thu, 26 May 2022 17:31:13 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms