2023-11-24 12:59:04
“I would like to know what my condition will be: single, married, widow or nun“, the girls sang on the rope in the 60s, when the religious vocation was still considered an option to be taken into account and nuns were not imported from other latitudes so as not to close institutions. Although since then we have lived through decades and decades of secularization, the old idea of convent as a space of confinement for single mothers, women fleeing abusive husbandsor that were directly a nuisance for family members, is undergoing a new consideration in recent times through a curious, vindictive look and feminist.
Of course the convent was, in many cases, a place of punishment for them, but not always. Today the perspective on those forgotten women has changed. Suddenly, in the 21st century and Metoo Through it, the old monastic life is being shown to be attractive or at least the nun is being seen from a new historical perspective. Different novels and even a podcast, ‘Philip’s Daughters’, directed by two thirty-something women with PhDs in Baroque Literature from Brown University, vindicate women and specifically nuns during the Counter-Reformation in a style that is as erudite as it is fun. that is, the 16th and 17th centuries, which was the time in which they acquired the most power. Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita recount what current feminism can rescue from those religious: “There are many things, for example, the way to relate to each other, to care for each other and visit each other. They also represent a genealogy of celebration between them that encourages us to do the same now.”
Freedom in confinement
The thesis is that the nuns, despite their seclusion, knew how to create a paradoxical space of freedom in confinement. Within the convents the nuns could have their share of power and if they wanted to dedicate themselves to writing, music or research. The Argentine writer Mariana Cabezón Cámara, whose recent novel ‘The Naranjel Girls’ is inspired by the figure of Catalina de Erauso, a nun who dressed as a man fought as an ensign during the conquest of America, assures that the choice of the convent “was the only way to escape from the condition of a birthing machine to which marriage led you, a way of dedicate yourself to what you choose”.
Latin America also has an indisputable icon, the Mexican Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, a 17th century nun who turned her cell into one of the great philosophical libraries of the time, not beholden to the dictates of the Church, and into a center of intellectual debate. From her we now rescue ‘Against the Ignorance of Women’ (Taurus), a little book that brings together two incontestable letters, one to Sister Filotea de la Cruz, pseudonym of a bishop who rejected philosophical studies for women, and another, “ loaded with feminist demands” to the Portuguese Jesuit António Vieira. Her well-known poem “Foolish men who accuse / women without reason, / without seeing that you are the occasion / of the same thing you blame” already places her ‘avant la lettre’ in this field. Furthermore, her figure has also been contemplated from the perspective LGTBI when reading through that prism the numerous poems addressed to the vicereine of New Spain, the Countess of Paredes, friend and protector. “Sor Juana was capable of saying the most forbidden and inconvenient things for a woman of the time with the old trick of presenting herself as the ‘worst of all’. This is what has come to be called the tricks of the weak,” adds Cabezón Cámara.
Teresa of the roads
In Spain and a century before, the great icon is Teresa de Jesús, of whom ‘Teresa’, a film adaptation of the play by Juan Mayorga, will be released this weekend. She is an intellectual of the first magnitude and a saint who was also persecuted by the suspicions of the Inquisition for her resolution and her independence. In 2015, the date on which the 500th anniversary of her birth was celebrated, the saint acquired such a presence in bookstores that there were five novels about her. The most original and radical view was that of the anti-system author Cristina Morales who got into the shoes of the Ávila mystic in ‘Bad Words’ (later recovered by Anagrama as ‘Últimas afternoons con Teresa de Jesús’) to write an apocryphal diary in which she thinks about the place she has had as a woman in a society ruled with an iron fist by men and forces religious women to submit to obedience. How was it possible to create an order in such adverse conditions? “The convents were extremely porous places – maintain ‘The daughters of Felipe’ – in which through letters you could metaphorically break the walls. There were many more visits to the parlors than is believed. Saint Teresa herself, despite founding an order of closure, did not stop traveling throughout her life.
Returning to Latin America, the Peruvian Santiago Roncagliolo in his recent novel ‘The Year the Devil was Born’ (Seix Barral) follows another saint, Rosa de Lima, patron saint of the new world, who in viceregal Peru narrowly escaped a conviction for witchcraft, without this later being an impediment to his sanctification. Roncagliolo’s intramural drawing does not leave aside uncomfortable aspects such as sexual life in the cloister, which sometimes becomes a male fantasy, has little to do with reality. All you have to do is watch ‘Benedetta’, Paul Verhoeven’s latest film that takes aim at the old fashion of ‘nunsploitation’ that proliferated so much in movie theaters in the 70s. “They were spaces of female alienation, lust and demonic possession, created for the male gaze. In the case of ‘Benedetta’, it is inspired by a real possession case, because that is how they lived. From our podcast we have tried to reconstruct that simplistic view. In the case of demonic possessions we try to see beyond the instrumentalization that has been made of the nuns.”
The most desired book
Urbita and Garriga are preparing a book ‘Convent wisdom’ on the subject that will appear in early 2025 on the Blackie Books label and which at the last Frankfurt Fair was one of the most desired projects, since received more than 25 offers, in eight different countriesin addition to an auction of seven American publishers.
“Not all the nuns came to the convent to let their vocation shine, others simply wanted to live quietly,” they say. Right now we are investigating the case of some saints, the Cañitas, who had a relationship, which forced them to flee from town to town. One of them created a house of saints that allowed them to have an independent life outside the obligations of marriage and the dangers of childbirth.
#nuns #told