The Mystic of Tunja: Thw Writings of Madre Castillo, 1671-1742.

Kathryn Joy McKnight, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. 11 pls. + xviii + 284 pp. $45. ISBN: 1-55849-974-4.

Until recently, women in the colonial empires of Spain and especially France had received little attention from scholars. This is changing dramatically, as shown by these two books whose protagonists include women who spent most or all of their lives in the Americas.

Bruneau's study, informed by yet challenging the works of Michel de Certeau and Caroline Walker Bynum, examines two Frenchwomen: Marie de l'Incarnation and Madame Guyon. Both lived at a time when rationalism and positivism were making inroads against religious mysticism.

Marie de l'Incarnation, born Marie Guyart in Tours in 1599, is one of the most fascinating yet neglected women of the early modern world. Until Natalie Zemon Davis published an excellent study of her in Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (1995), she was almost unknown outside of Canada. In 1631, refusing offers of remarriage and leaving behind a teenaged son and her family, Marie joined the Ursuline order in Tours. Three years later, after reading the Jesuit Relations, she was inflamed by a desire to do missionary work in New France, a dream that became reality when she embarked for Quebec in 1639. Her goal was a school that would provide training for the daughters of French settlers and civilize and Christianize the natives.

During the remaining thirty-three years of her life, Marie worked toward those goals, overstepping the bounds firmly set for women during the Catholic Reformation. Besides leading her sisters and teaching children, Marie chronicled her experiences of this new world in letters, historical writings, and memoranda; she also mastered four Indian tongues and wrote dictionaries and catechisms in Huron, Algonquian, and Montagnais. In the course of her writings, she provides social and natural historical details often omitted by the Jesuits.

Ironically, it was the abandonment of her son, Claude Martin, that led to the preservation of many of her works for posterity. Once in New France, she wrote letters to her son, responding to his reproaches and urging him to follow in her footsteps by joining a religious order. When he did so, Marie not only fulfilled one of her dreams, but gained an official channel for the publication of her writings. Since the Middle Ages, most female saints and mystics had had their experiences validated through male confessors. This need for male authorization only increased with the Tridentine reforms, which more than ever before imposed clausura and silence on women. Through Claude, Marie received official recognition for her efforts and authorization of her mystical calling while at the same time deflecting the anger of her son. Bruneau sees Marie as an active agent in the process: "Marie de l'Incarnation accomplished this reversal by playing on, and twisting, two topoi that are characteristic of the female mystic autobiographical tradition: the abandonment of children for the love of God and the authorization to write based on a clerical injunction" (59).

Bruneau demonstrates that once she was "on her own" in New France, Marie's mysticism changed dramatically. She had not merely left her son in the Old World, but also the ecstasies and visions that had characterized the first part of her life; she eventually expressed contempt for such manifestations. Bruneau argues that "... because she had chosen a rhetoric of health and ordinary obedience in order to legitimate her call to the mission, she could no longer negotiate her sufferings against the authority that constrained her will nor assign a theological meaning to them as female mystics of previous centuries had done..." (50). At least in this particular case, the author is able to refute effectively the hypotheses of both Bynum and de Certeau.

Because of her connections to Bossuet and Fenelon, the case of Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Mothe-Guyon is much more well known. Mme. Guyon did not play the game so well. While Marie had managed to use clerical and familial conventions to her advantage, Mme. Guyon shunned both, calling down on her the wrath of both Church and family. "Guyon's apostolic desire fitted no existing, established institutions. She understood her mission as the teaching to everyone of the 'interior path'..." (142). Guyon's audacious defense of her freedom to write and preach the Quietist message brought her into conflict with a patriarchal church that saw only subversion. Moreover, her disciples were men - men who had been trained outside of the Catholic Church. Unlike Marie de l'Incarnation, Guyon continued to experience the bodily manifestations of the mystic throughout her life, attempting to use them to legitimize her authority. This may have worked well in the Middle Ages, but no longer. Guyon was portrayed by Bossuet as a dangerous madwoman, a laughingstock, and was imprisoned in the Bastille. Yet she was not easily silenced. In her Autobiography, published in 1720 and immediately translated into several languages, Guyon used the genre "as a place of uncovering and covering, a place to negotiate conventions, a place where one tries to give to oneself and to the reader an acceptable image of oneself' (219). Although she eventually offered her external obedience, Guyon's was a resistance made effective by faith in her beliefs.

Like Marie de l'Incarnation, Madre Castillo is little known outside of her native Colombia, eclipsed by the more famous American writer Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. The author of numerous works, including an autobiography, Madre Castillo is described by McKnight as "both a product of the ideologies and practices of her time and an agent who interprets herself within and against them" (3). McKnight breaks the book into three parts: a theoretical framework, contexts for religious women's writings in Spain and Spanish America, and a discussion of the texts themselves. In many ways, part one is the most interesting. Using feminist literary criticism, McKnight suggests that Madre Castillo expressed an agency of resistance and creativity in her writings brought about in part by the Catholic Reformation's ideology of self-representation. Some parallels with Marie de l'Incarnation immediately come to mind when McKnight suggests that "Madre Castillo could write herself into an orthodox representation and at the same time open a space for her creativity and power within official male territory" (27). The author argues that it was the genre of the spiritual vita itself that permitted the development of a subjectivity that challenged the Church, although doing so successfully required walking a tightrope.

Weaving in and out of "degradation and elevation," Madre Castillo's autobiography details her troubles with her nuns and servants as well as her spiritual and physical tribulations. Although she employs the humility topos, her writing is often self-congratulatory in that she recognizes the meanings of her visions and experiences. It was the act of writing itself that was transformative. Although Madre Castillo often derogates women with her language, she also allows strong female characters to emerge from the pages, in the process narrowing the gap between authority and woman. As with so many of her predecessors, Madre Castillo suffers, but her suffering comes from her fellow creatures, whereas her mystical engagement with God is above that, allowing her to bear the slings and arrows. In fact, McKnight argues that Madre Castillo found her authority in the great female mystics who had come before her. Often, like them, her message is amenable to patriarchal ideology, yet McKnight concludes: "The patriarchy of her discourse also has its chinks.... These holes in the containment field allow her to find satisfaction - comfort she calls it - in a feminized intellectual encounter with a dangerous text and to speak about its relevance to her experience, if in a voice that is not entirely free. She writes in her papeles a message of submission, and yet she lives in those papers an experience of subtle subversion" (221).

Both Bruneau and McKnight, using feminist theory, have thrown new light onto texts and authors who have been neglected. They have shown how the frontiers of the "New World" offered possibilities, however briefly, to women. They have also shown how these women both internalized and interrogated the paradigms of the past. In the process, the authors challenge many of the theories about mysticism and women's devotion that recent scholarship has produced. Not everyone will agree with these interpretations, but they will do what all good scholarship does - make its readers think.

LARISSA JULIET TAYLOR Colby College