Embodying the Sacred: Women Mystics in Seventeenth-Century Lima.

• Author: Rothera, Evan C.

Van Deusen, Nancy E. Embodying the Sacred: Women Mystics in Seventeenth-Century Lima. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

Nancy E. van Deusen, currently a professor of history at Queen's University, has published extensively on the history of colonial Latin America. In particular, her The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Ursula de Jesus (2004) offered an accessible translation of the spiritual diary of the Afro-Peruvian donada Ursula de Jesus and extensive discussion of her world. In Embodying the Sacred, van Deusen analyzes women's spirituality and early modern Iberian Catholicism by examining "the variety and complexity of the individual and collective spiritual pathways taken by renowned and lesser-known women religious figures" in seventeenth-century Lima (1-2). Some of the women in this book have been written about at great length. Nevertheless, she offers many innovative ideas about both well-known and more obscure women. The trenchant analysis in this volume will fascinate readers and will stimulate additional study of the subject...