Diálogos espirituales, the second compilation edited by Asunción Lavrin and Rosalva Loreto López dealing with women’s writing in a religious context, features the work of scholars from both history and literary studies. (The first collection, Monjas y beatas: La escritura femenina en la espiritualidad barroca novohispana, was published in 2002.) The combination represents the interdisciplinary nature of Latin American colonial studies, along with that of the growing subfield of convent studies, first crystallized by the groundbreaking publications of Josefina Muriel in Mexico, and in the United States by Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau’s lamentably out-of-print Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works.
The volume includes excerpts from a variety of original documents accompanied by essays written by the scholar who discovered them in the archives. The editors hope to inspire further investigation of unedited women’s writings, most of which, as they correctly point out, are often...
