Ineffable Knowing: Sor Maria de Jesus de Agreda in the Early Modern Spanish World

Abstract

This dissertation examines early modern Spanish understandings of the world and a colonial imagination through the singular figure of Sor María de Jesús (1602-1665). Sor María lived all sixty-three years of her life in Ágreda, a village in northeastern Spain. She first rose to prominence in the 1630s in the wake of circulating reports of her ability to “bilocate,” or be in two places simultaneously. Investigations by the Franciscan order and the Inquisition revealed several claims, not least that Sor María made over 500 “visits” to preach to the Jumanos, a group of Indigenous peoples in northernmost New Spain, in what is now New Mexico and west Texas. While she is principally known for these mystical bilocations, I consider the entire body of her other writings, experiences, and activities. I position Sor María as an integral thinker and presence in a trans-oceanic composite monarquía and Catholic thoughtworld. This dissertation understands Sor María’s manifold physical, visual, and aural experiences as invaluable points of entry into a widening world of Spanish colonization and evangelization. In her written recollections, she describes flights across the earth, touching the heavenly elements, and witnessing the suffering of souls in purgatory. She sensed the physical pain of martyrdom, distributed rosaries carried in her pockets, and pressed Indigenous bodies toward the baptismal font in the New World. Sor María presented these and other experiences to others, describing what she saw, felt, heard, and tasted. In letters to religious and political officials, reported conversations with other nuns, an array of published and unpublished spiritual writings, renderings by her hagiographers, autobiographical accounts, and embroidered textiles purportedly representing her miraculous visions, Sor María’s engagements with the world and the otherworldly in her early modern moment emerge with uncommon force. By examining the Spanish world through Sor María and in light of her writing and expression— challenging gendered categories such as “theologian,” “advisor,” “missionary,” “martyr,” and “explorer”— I contend that Sor María’s life and legacy reveal women’s participation in spirituality and politics of religion, and in knowledge production about an empire, the world, and a larger cosmos. Sor María’s adherence to and transcendence of both the physical boundaries of the convent and the Atlantic Ocean, and of the ideological boundaries of gender and early modern theology rest at the center of my analysis. This dissertation contributes the first sustained investigation into the abbess’s mystical discourse, her narrations of interior process and mystical experience, placing them within the context of her predecessors in the peninsular Spanish kingdoms and western Europe and key contemporaries in Spanish America. I argue that Sor María’s “ineffable knowing,” through modes of engagement directly related to her status as a woman, demonstrates an under-appreciated yet integral aspect of a Spanish colonial imaginary and Catholic evangelizing purpose. Within and beyond realms of masculinized dominance such as the theological library and mission field, Sor María’s experiences beg a treatment of contemplative prayer and mysticism that recognizes the construction of spiritual and political authority that became tangible, effective, and wide-rangingly engaged. I demonstrate how Sor María’s experiences and her ability to describe them for others combined to craft her authority, creating an uncommon vantage that enabled her to transcend enclosure and, as a woman and mystical-intellectual force, to negotiate broad and traditionally masculine spaces.