Convents and Nuns: New Approaches to the Study of Female Religious Institutions in Colonial Mexico

Abstract

Abstract This article serves as an introduction to the subject of the colonial Mexican convent for non‐experts, while surveying recent historiographical trends. In the past ten years, historical scholarship on nuns and convents has taken three broad directions. First, historians have begun to study other female religious institutions and other kinds of religious women than cloistered convents and nuns, though the number of works that explicitly compare these institutions and experiences is still disappointingly small. Second, historians have focused on the understudied sixteenth‐ and late eighteenth‐century convents, with the result that we are beginning to gain a textured understanding of how the convent changed over time and responded to changes in the world around it. Third, the older feminist scholarship that tended to characterize the convent as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for women – that is, either less subject to patriarchal maneuverings than the outside world, or more so – is being complicated by more subtle approaches that take nuns’ spirituality and the dynamics of community seriously. We are beginning to build a picture of a complex institution that still tells us much about women's experience in the colonial period, but also tells us a great deal about the institutional church and about the religious values of the broader society.

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