Escrita e reescrita de uma memória: madre Jerónima de la Asunción (1556-1630), uma monja missionária

Abstract

In the first decades of the seventeenth century, a nun named Jerónima de la Asunción led a convent expedition of women in Manila, Philippines. She and her companions left Toledo, Spain, and traveled across the Atlantic and the Pacific for a year and a half, stopping on the way in America, in New Spain. Several texts written in the first half of that century memorialize this journey, among them, one written by a nun who was part of the expedition, mother Ana de Cristo. This dissertation focuses on the textual construction of memory around the leader of this overseas conventual founding, and in particular on the ways in which her biographers painted an image of her as a missionary nun, among other arguments put forward in support of her holiness and the case for her beautification, a process which began shortly after her death in 1630. In a world where women were left to choose between convent or marriage, the example set by madre Jerónima and her companions can be understood as part of a larger effort on the part of catholic women to outline alternatives and secure greater autonomy and freedom. Starting from the devout biographies written about Jerónima, this work seeks to understand the management of memories around her and how the topoi used in these texts responded to confessional expectations of the period. In addition, it will probe whether, even in the midst of this normalizing process, the identification and exploitation of certain loopholes enabled her and other religious women to build and access spaces of power and authority within the masculinized word of catholicism.