Sarah E. Owens

In Nuns Navigating the Spanish Empire, Sarah Owens recounts the story of a group of Clarissan nuns who travelled from Spain to the Philippines in the seventeenth century to found the first Catholic convent of nuns in the Far East. Owens draws primarily on a manuscript written by one of the house's co-founders, Sor Ana de Cristo, which recounted the lengthy journey of the first sisters to Manila, and detailed the sanctity of their first abbess, Sor Jerónima de la Asunción. This is an eminently readable and accessible microhistory, and one which I could see going over well in an advanced undergraduate class.

The analysis isn't particularly deep, however. Owens conclusions—about religious women's writing, trade, tensions surrounding claustration, etc—aren't particularly new, but this might not have been such a problem if those conclusions had been presented in a way which showed a deeper understanding of and grounding in the existing historiography. Owens framed some aspects of religious women's literacy as if they came about in the early modern period, rather than being deeply grounded in the Middle Ages. Her assertion that the nuns weren't racist also made my eyebrows reach my hairline, because that showed a lack of familiarity with the historiography on race in the early modern period.… (altro)