A Wild Country Out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journals of a Colonial Mexican Nun.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

A Wild Country Out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journals of a Colonial Mexican Nun, Ed. and Trans., Kathleen A. Myers and Amanda Powell. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000.

The last twenty years have seen an explosion of interest in early modern women's writing. New studies of Saint Teresa of Avila and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz abound, but research has not been limited to these two luminaries. Modern scholars working in Spain and Latin America have explored convent archives and retrieved manuscripts by an impressive number of writing nuns. Kathleen Myers and Amanda Powell have made a major contribution to the growing body of early modern women's literature by bringing to light the spiritual journals of Maria de San Jose (1656-1719) and translating them into English.

Sister Maria belonged to the order of Augustinian Recollects, followers of the reforms of Saint Teresa of Avila. At age thirty-two she entered the Convent of Santa Monica in Puebla, Mexico. Like most other female religious, she wrote at the behest of a spiritual director. Her first notebook found favor with influential officials, who encouraged her to continue writing. After she left Santa Monica in 1697, Sister Maria founded the Convent of Nuestra Senora de la Soledad in Oaxaca, where, at the request of her confessors, she continued her journals, producing over two thousand pages of manuscript.

Volume I recounts her early years. A criolla raised on her family's hacienda in central Mexico, Maria--born Juana Palacios Berruecos--experienced a spiritual conversion at age eleven. She was, she says, a "girl of bad habits," and one day at play she cursed another child who had done her a "bad turn." Suddenly lightening struck in the midst of the group of playmates. None of the children were hurt, but the bolt broke through the corner of a wall and killed an animal. Juana understood that God was telling her that "as He took the life of that animal, He could with much greater cause have taken [her] own." She ran into the house, where she experienced a vision of the Devil, who claimed her as his own. Then the Virgin appeared and offered her Jesus in mystic marriage.

Shaken, Juana privately took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but did not officially become a nun until twenty-one years later because her family could not pay the large dowry required of novices. However, she constructed a hut for herself in the garden, where she could meditate and pray, and...