‘¡O estado altísimo!’: Resounding Virginity in New Spanish Convent Sources

Abstract

If virginity had a sound, it would sound like the Virgin Mary, according to devotional sources from New Spain intended for the indoctrination and spiritual contemplation of cloistered nuns. This article traces that allegory from its inception in reflections on biblical narratives of Mary’s life to some of the most complicated theological musings on the nature of the Virgin’s soul. Through the lens of gender and voice studies, this essay examines rare literature, music manuscripts, and visual art of New Spain and shows how virginity was socially constructed and deployed as a type of sonic instruction of Mary’s essence.

Keywords:

• Convents
• Marian devotion
• Music
• New Spain
• Nuns
• Virginity
• Voice

Notes

1 Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 43.

2 Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, Regla y constituciones que han de guardar las religiosas de los conventos de Nuestra Señora de la Concepción y la Santísima Trinidad de la Ciudad de los Ángeles (1641), fol. 5^r. Biblioteca Nacional de México Fondo Reservado. Signatura BNMFR, RSM 1641 M4CON.

3 Palafox, Regla y constituciones que han de guardar las religiosas, fols 5^r–v.

4 By exploring the physical aspects of human speech in early modern England, Bruce Smith has noted that such ‘O’ exclamations in print evince a ‘semantic emptiness […] a testimony to their embodied fullness’. Smith draws on Shakespearean plays to exemplify that such exclamations denote a character’s urgent need to find listeners with whom to communicate. See Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 14.

5 Religiosas Jerónimas de Puebla, Regla y constituciones que han de guardar las religiosas del convento del glorioso padre san Jerónimo de la ciudad de los Ángeles (Puebla: Seminario Palafoxiano, 1773), 46–47. On auditory imagination see Stephen H. Webb, The Divine Voice: Christian Proclamation and the Theology of Sound (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2004), 201–06. This essay draws on a range of primary texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to give a sampling of the sonic implications mapped onto virginity. I am not arguing for a progression of this notion over time, and, therefore, many of the sources do not appear in strict chronological order. Still, I mention the reprint to make the point that Palafox’s message was relevant over one hundred years later and, conversely, that instructions associating sound and virginity published in the eighteenth century might have also resonated with previous generations.

6 Webb, The Divine Voice, 35 & 40.

7 Webb, The Divine Voice, 69.

8 Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans. Paul Kottman (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2005 [1^st Italian ed. 2003]), 21.

9 Cavarero, For More Than One Voice, 21.

10 James M. Córdova, The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico: Crowned-Nun Portraits and Reform in the Convent (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2014), 86.

11 See María Lugones, ‘Toward a Decolonial Feminism’, in Feminist Legacies/Feminist Futures, ed. Lori Gruen & Alison Wylie, Hypatia, 25:4 (2010), 742–59 (pp. 744–45); Nicole von Germeten, Profit and Passion: Transactional Sex in Colonial Mexico (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2018); Zeb Tortorici, Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2018); Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America, ed. Zeb Tortorici (Oakland: Univ. of California Press, 2016); Pete Sigal, The Flower and the Scorpion: Sexuality and Ritual in Early Nahua Culture (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2011), 217–29; Pete Sigal, From Moon Goddess to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2000), 111–19; Sarah E. Owens & Jane E. Mangan, ‘Women of the Iberian Atlantic: Gender Dimensions of Empire’, in Women of the Iberian Atlantic, ed. Sarah E. Owens & Jane E. Mangan (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U. P., 2012), 1–17 (p. 1); and Allyson M. Poska, ‘An Ocean Apart: Reframing Gender in the Spanish Empire’, in Women of the Iberian Atlantic, ed. Owens & Mangan, 37–56 (p. 41).

12 Colleen Reardon, Holy Concord within Sacred Walls: Nuns and Music in Siena, 1575–1700 (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2002), 58–74; Craig A. Monson, Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995), 194–98; James Borders, ‘Gender, Performativity, and Allusion in Medieval Services for the Consecration of Virgins’, in The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music, ed. Jane F. Fulcher (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2011), 17–38; Suzanne G. Cusick, ‘He Said, She Said? Men Hearing Women in Medicean Florence’, in Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, ed. Olivia Bloechl, Melanie Lowe & Jeffrey Kallberg (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2015), 53–76; Helen Hills, ‘Veiling the Voice of Architecture’, in Hearing the City in Early Modern Europe, ed. Tess Knighton & Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 117–31; Robert L. Kendrick, Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Kelley Harness, Echoes of Women’s Voice: Music, Art, and Female Patronage in Early Modern Florence (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006), 64–67; Kelley Harness, ‘Chaste Warriors and Virgin Martyrs in Florentine Musical Spectacle’, in Gender, Sexuality, and Early Music, ed. Todd C. Borgerding (London: Routledge, 2002), 73–122; Wendy Heller, Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2004), 28; Laurie Stras, Women and Music in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2018), 110–11; Eroticism in Early Modern Music, ed. Bonnie J. Blackburn & Laurie Stras (New York: Routledge, 2016); Jennifer Saltzstein, ‘Rape and Repentance in Two Medieval Motets’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 70:3 (2017), 583–616; Lydia Hamessley, ‘Lost Honor and Torn Veils: A Virgin’s Rape in Music’, in Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Kathleen Coyne Kelly & Marina Leslie (Newark, NJ: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1999), 165–78; Ulrike Strasser, State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2004); Anke Bernau, Virgins: A Cultural History (London: Granta Books, 2007); and Medieval Virginities, ed. Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans & Sarah Salih (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2003).

13 Hanne Blank, Virgin: The Untouched History (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), 3.

14 Real Academia Española, Diccionario de Autoridades (1726–1739), Vol. VI (1739), s.v. ‘Virginidad’; available at <https://apps2.rae.es/DA.html> (accessed 17 February 2023).

15 Santa Arias & Raúl Marrero-Fente, ‘Negotiation between Religion and the Law’, in Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World, ed. Santa Arias & Raúl Marrero-Fente (Nashville: Vanderbilt U. P., 2014), ix–xxiv.

16 María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2008), 20–21.

17 See Nora E. Jaffary, Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2016), 24; and Lugones, ‘Toward a Decolonial Feminism’, 743. Men’s virginity seemed less important outside moral theology on the priesthood, for which virginity was optimal. See Asunción Lavrin, ‘The Erotic As Lewdness in Spanish and Mexican Religious Culture during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Eroticism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Magic, Marriage, and Midwifery, ed. Ian Moulton (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), 35–57 (pp. 49–53).

18 María Lugones, ‘Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System’, in Writing Against Heterosexism, ed. Joan Callahan, Bonnie Mann & Sara Ruddick, Hypatia, 22:1 (2007), 186–209 (p. 196); Mónica Díaz, Indigenous Writings from the Convent: Negotiating Ethnic Autonomy in Colonial Mexico (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2010), 62.

19 Julia Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, in The Female Body in Western Culture: Semiotic Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Poetics Today, 6:1–2 (1985), 133–52 (p. 135).

20 Jaffary, Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico, 20–21. See also, Mónica Díaz & Rocío Quispe-Agnoli, ‘Introduction: Uncovering Women’s Colonial Archive’, in Women’s Negotiations and Textual Agency in Latin America, 1500–1799, ed. Mónica Díaz & Rocío Quispe-Agnoli (New York: Routledge, 2016), 1–16 (p. 2).

21 See Jessica L. Delgado, Laywomen and the Making of Colonial Catholicism in New Spain, 1630–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2018), 86–110; Jaffary, Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico, 29–30; Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, 1531–1706 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2018), 150–51; Lee M. Penyak, ‘Incestuous Natures: Consensual and Forced Relations in Mexico, 1740–1854’, in Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America, ed. Tortorici, 162–87; Richard Boyer, Lives of the Bigamists: Marriage, Family, and Community in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2001), 87–88; Asunción Lavrin, ‘Sexuality in Colonial Mexico: A Church Dilemma’, in Sexuality & Marriage in Colonial Latin America, ed. Asunción Lavrin (Lincoln, NE: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1989), 47–93 (pp. 70–72); and Germeten, Profit and Passion: Transactional Sex in Colonial Mexico, 130–51.

22 Asunción Lavrin, Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2008), 28.

23 Josefina Muriel, Cultura femenina novohispana (México D.F.: Univ. Nacional Autónoma de México, 2000), 433–34; Delgado, Laywomen and the Making of Colonial Catholicism, 4; Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 5.

24 Matthew D. O’Hara, A Flock Divided: Race, Religion, and Politics in Mexico, 1749–1857 (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2010), 3–4.

25 On convents founded for noble Indigenous women, see Díaz, Indigenous Writings from the Convent; Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 20 & 244–74; Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 200–26; Patricia Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574–1821 (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 1988), 25.

26 Manuel Ramos Medina, ‘De cómo eran tratadas algunas viudas en el convento novohispano’, in Viudas en la historia, ed. Manuel Ramos Medina (México D.F.: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Condumex, 2002), 81–89; Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 23–24.

27 These notions were exaggerations, and hence symbolic, conveying the patriarchy’s illusion of moral excellence. Kathleen Ross has noted the advocacy of such ideals within seventeenth-century convent chronicles, referring to their rhetoric as ‘Baroque narrative’ (Kathleen Ross, The Baroque Narrative of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora: A New World Paradise [Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1993], 65–69). See also Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 21; Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, Chapter 8; Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey, 25; and Pamela Voekel, ‘The Baroque Church’, in The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America, ed. Virginia Garrard-Brunett, Paul Freston & Stephen C. Dove (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2016), 160–72 (pp. 166–67).

28 John Caldwell & Joseph Dyer, ‘Benedictus’, Grove Music Online (New York: Oxford U. P., 2001), n.p.; available at <https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.02667> (accessed 30 June 2019).

29 Ruth Steiner, Keith Falconer, Winfried Kirsch & Roger Bullivant, ‘Magnificat’, Grove Music Online (New York: Oxford U. P., 2001), n.p.; available at <https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.40076> (accessed 30 June 2019).

30 On the Old Testament origins of the Magnificat from Hannah’s prayer in the Book of Samuel, see Paul Haupt, ‘The Prototype of the Magnificat’, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 58:3 (1904), 617–32.

31 Brandon LaBelle, Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary (New York/London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 6.

32 Franciscanos, Instruccion, y doctrina de novicios: sacada de la de San Buenaventura, con que se crian los novicios de la santa provincia de San Diego de Mexico, de la mas estrecha observancia regular de Nro. S. P. Francisco (México: Joseph Bernardo de Hogal, 1738), 256–57.

33 Laurie Stras, ‘Voci pari Motets and Convent Polyphony in the 1540s: The materna lingua Complex’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 70:3 (2017), 617–96; Christine Getz, Mary, Music, and Mediation: Sacred Conversations in Post-Tridentine Milan (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 2013), 123–27; David J. Rothenberg, ‘The Most Prudent Virgin and the Wise King: Isaac’s Virgo prudentissima Compositions in the Imperial Ideology of Maximilian I’, in Absorbing Heinrich Isaac, ed. David J. Burn, Blake Wilson & Giovanni Zanovello, The Journal of Musicology, 28:1 (2011), 34–80 (p. 70); Magnus Williamson, ‘Royal Image-Making and Textual Interplay in Gilbert Banaster’s O Maria et Elizabeth’, Early Music History, 19 (2000), 237–78; Michael Alan Anderson, ‘The One Who Comes after Me: John the Baptist, Christian Time, and Symbolic Techniques’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 66:3 (2013), 639–708 (pp. 690–91); and Michael Alan Anderson, ‘Fire, Foliage and Fury: Vestiges of Midsummer Ritual in Motets for John the Baptist’, Early Music History, 30 (2011), 1–53 (p. 14).

34 Cristina Diego Pacheco, ‘Música y religiosidad laica: el caso de las cofradías penitenciales de Valladolid durante el siglo XVI’, Revista de Musicología, 37:2 (2014), 441–60 (pp. 454–55).

35 Fernando Horcasitas, Teatro náhuatl: épocas novohispana y moderna, con prólogo de Miguel León-Portilla, revisor del texto náhuatl Librado Silva Galeana (México D.F.: Univ. Nacional Aútonoma de México, 2004 [1^st ed. 1975]), 277–78.

36 María Luisa Vilar-Payá, ‘Lo histórico y lo cotidiano : un juego de libretes de coro para la consagración de la catedral de Puebla y la despedida del Obispo Palafox (1649)’, Revista de Musicología, 40:1 (2017), 135–76 (p. 149).

37 Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531–1797 (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1995), 187.

38 Ira Westergård, Approaching Sacred Pregnancy: The Cult of the Visitation and Narrative Altarpieces in Late Fifteenth-Century Florence (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2007), 52–67.

39 Samuel Y. Edgerton, Theaters of Conversion: Religious Architecture and Indian Artisans in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2002), 107–27; Jeanette Favrot Peterson, The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco: Utopia and Empire in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1993), 29–56.

40 This particular image reflects standard iconographical convention from the Netherlands, especially the prints of Rogier van der Weyden. See, for example, Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, 2 vols (New York/London: Routledge, 2018 [1^st ed. 1947]), II, plate 311. I thank Savannah Esquivel for informing me of this connection.

41 Alonso Franco, Segunda parte de la historia de la provincia de Santiago de México, Orden de Predicadores en la Nueva España (1645) (México D.F.: Imprenta del Museo Nacional, 1990), 42–51.

42 Franco, Segunda parte de la historia de la provincia de Santiago de México, 45.

43 Franco, Segunda parte de la historia de la provincia de Santiago de México, 45.

44 Franco, Segunda parte de la historia, de la provincia de Santiago de México 45. Mary’s name as music also made its way into actual music, particularly the Marian villancicos of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. See Ricardo Miranda, ‘Aves, ecos, alientos y sonidos: Juana Inés de la Cruz y la música’, Revista de Musicología, 19:1–2 (1996), 85–104 (p. 101).

45 Franco, Segunda parte de la historia de la provincia de Santiago de México, 45.

46 Franco, Segunda parte de la historia de la provincia de Santiago de México, 45.

47 Joelle Mellon, The Virgin Mary in the Perceptions of Women: Mother, Protector and Queen since the Middle Ages (Jefferson: McFarland, 2008), 25.

48 LaBelle, Lexicon of the Mouth, 4.

49 Franco, Segunda parte de la historia de la provincia de Santiago de México, 45.

50 Lavrin, ‘The Erotic As Lewdness in Spanish and Mexican Religious Culture’, 51–52.

51 Franco, Segunda parte de la historia de la provincia de Santiago de México, 460.

52 Francisco Manso y Zúñiga, Regla y ordenaciones de las religiosas de la Limpia e Inmaculada Concepción (México: por Juán Ruiz, 1635), fols 32^r–v.

53 Manso y Zúñiga, Regla y ordenaciones de las religiosas, fols 32^r–v.

54 Franciscanos, Instrucción, y doctrina de novicios, 260–62.

55 ‘Christum regem adoremus dominantem gentibus, qui se manducantibus dat spiritus pingudeninem’, in Anonymous, Mary and Joseph en route to Bethlehem with choir book donors in foreground (c.1800). Vísperas de la fiesta de la Expectación de Nuestra Señora en su advocación de la O, ex-Libris Franz Mayer, No. X543., fol. 17^v.

56 Franciscanos, Instruccion, y doctrina de novicios, 261.

57 Franciscanos, Instruccion, y doctrina de novicios, 260.

58 Pedro de Ribadeneira, Flos Sanctorum, o libro de las vidas de los santos (Madrid: por Luis Sanchez, 1604), 1027.

59 Ribadeneira, Flos Sanctorum, 1027. See also Craig Wright, Music and Ceremony at Notre Dame of Paris, 500–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2008 [1^st ed. 1989]), 106.

60 Joaquin Lorenzo Villanueva, Viaje literario á las iglesias de España, 22 vols (Madrid: La Imprenta Real, 1803), I, 140; Prosper Guéranger, ‘Las antífonas mayores’, in Las antífonas de la ‘O’: del siglo VI al XXI. Documentos y comentarios, ed. Josep Urdeix (Barcelona: Centre de Pastoral Litúrgica, 2007), 59–70.

61 James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (New York: Routledge, 2018 [1^st ed. 1974]), 121. On ‘the female body as a site of divine knowledge’, see Sarah Finley, Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Lincoln, NE: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2019), 165.

62 Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 26–34.

63 Juan de Ávila, Pureza emblemática discurrida en la profession de la M. Mariana de San Francisco, religiosa de Santa Clara (México: Viuda de Juan de Ribera, 1686), fols 3^v–4^r. This source is also discussed by Asunción Lavrin in a wider commentary on the nature of these sermons relative to conventual life. See Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 77–78.

64 Ávila, Pureza emblemática, fols 3^v–4^r.

65 Ávila, Pureza emblemática, fol. 4^r.

66 Ávila, Pureza emblemática, fols 3^v–4^r. I am grateful to Mark Lomano for his assistance with this translation. See also Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 79.

67 Ávila, Pureza emblemática, fols 4^r–v.

68 Ávila, Pureza emblemática, fols 4^v–5^r.

69 Cesar D. Favila, ‘The Sound of Profession Ceremonies in Novohispanic Convents’, Journal of the Society for American Music, 13:2 (2019), 143–70 (p. 157).

70 This is the typical iconographic representation of the Immaculate Conception standardized in the seventeenth century from descriptions in the Book of Revelation. See Díaz, Indigenous Writings from the Convent, 48–58.

71 Díaz, Indigenous Writings from the Convent, 54–55. See also Bernard L. Fontana, A Gift of Angels: The Art of Mission San Xavier del Bac (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2010), 171–72.

72 Louis Marin, On Representation, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2001), 348.

73 Córdova, The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico, 60.

74 Fernando Lanzi & Gioia Lanzi, Saints and Their Symbols: Recognizing Saints in Art and in Popular Images (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2004), 96 & 108.

75 Marcos Jaramillo de Bocanegra, Sermon en la annual, solemne fiesta, que a la Concepción Purísima de María, con título del choro alto (México: Herederos de la Viuda de Francisco Rodriguez Lupercio, 1713), fols 5^v–9^r.

76 LaBelle, Lexicon of the Mouth, 129–30.

77 Jaramillo de Bocanegra, Sermon en la annual, solemne fiesta, fol. 10^r.

78 Jaramillo de Bocanegra, Sermon en la annual, solemne fiesta, fol. 10^r.

79 Jaramillo de Bocanegra, Sermon en la annual, solemne fiesta, fol. 1^r. Sarah Finley traces the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century concern for sympathetic resonances between earthly and celestial harmonies based on the works of the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher and their dissemination and reception in New Spain. Finley then turns to the Marian harmonies evinced in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s villancicos for the Assumption, which resonate with the divine portrayal of the Virgin Mary that Jaramillo presents for the Immaculate Conception. It is plausible that Jaramillo was familiar with Kircher, whose works circulated widely in New Spain. See Finley, Hearing Voices, Chapters 2–3.

80 The Santa Clara convent had royal designation and was supported by numerous servants, making it particularly wealthy compared to most convents. See Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 164; Sister Ann Miriam Gallagher, ‘The Family Background of the Nuns of Two Monasterios in Colonial Mexico: Santa Clara, Querétaro; and Corpus Christi, Mexico City (1724–1822)’, Doctoral dissertation (The Catholic University of America, 1972), 120–21.

81 Tess Knighton & Álvaro Torrente, ‘Introduction’, in Devotional Music in the Iberian World, 1450–1800: The Villancico and Related Genres, ed. Tess Knighton & Álvaro Torrente (London/NewYork: Routledge, 2007), 1–14 (p. 1).

82 The reference number for Luz de las luces is CSG.280 in the catalogue of the Colección Sánchez Garza. See Aurelio Tello Malpartida et al., Colección Sánchez Garza: estudio documental y catálogo de un acervo musical novohispano (México, D.F.: Apoyo al Desarrollo de Archivos y Bibliotecas de México [ADABI], 2018), 165.

83 While it is not common to address the Virgin informally among the Sánchez Garza villancicos, this type of rhetoric is not unique when considering the broader villancico repertory. The poetry in Luz de las luces participates in the tradition of calling the listener(s) to hear the doctrinal message at hand by employing various forms of the verb oír in the imperative, typically oíd, oigan, oiga, óyeme, what Andrew Cashner calls the ‘ “Listen!” exordium’, in his Hearing Faith: Music As Theology in the Spanish Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 51. See also Anastasia Krutitskaya, ‘Los villancicos y sus oyentes’, in Celebración y sonoridad en las catedrales novohispanas, ed. Anastasia Krutitskaya & Édgar Alejandro Calderón Alcántar (México D.F.: Univ. Nacional Autónoma de México, 2017), 55–72.

84 On nautical themes in villancicos, see Anastasia Krutitskaya, Villancicos que se cantaron en la Catedral de México (1693–1729) (México D.F.: Univ. Nacional Autónoma de México, 2018), 384.

85 See Álvaro Torrente & Miguel Ángel Marín, Pliegos de villancicos en la British Library (Londres) y la University Library (Cambridge) (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2000), 121, 128 & 148; and Enrique A. Eguiarte Bendímez, ‘El púlpito y el convento: dos sermones en los conventos novohispanos de Regina Coeli (1699) y Valvanera [sic] (1706)’, Mayéutica, 42:94 (2016), 263–344 (p. 299).

86 Eguiarte Bendímez, ‘El púlpito y el convento’, 311–28.

87 Eguiarte Bendímez, ‘El púlpito y el convento’, 311–28.

88 Finley, Hearing Voices, 95–104.

89 Jaffary, Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico, 20–21.

90 The rule books and/or ceremonials consulted are as follows: for Conceptionist and Hieronymite, see Orden que se ha de guardar con la que entra en religion y modo con que se ha de vestir el abito a las religiosas de la regla de la Purissima Concepcion de Nuestra Señora, y de San Geronymo, sujetas al ordinario de este arzobispado de México (reimpressa) (México: En la Imprenta Nueva de la Bibliotheca Mexicana, 1756), fol. 2; Ceremonial para las religiosas geronimas de México (c.17^th century), in the collection of The Hispanic Society of America, New York; for Dominicans, see Regla y constituciones para las religiosas Recoletas Dominicas del sagrado monasterio de la gloriosa y esclarecida virgen Santa Rosa de Santa María (Puebla: Oficina del Real Seminario Palafoxiano, 1789), 145–65; and Ceremonial Dominicano en el cual se trata de las cosas que conducen al modo uniforme y orden de celebrar los oficios divinos con las ceremonias del orden de predicadores (Madrid: por la viuda de D. Francisco Nieto, 1694), 193^r–95^v. The Carmelites, the Company of Mary and the Franciscans did not emphasize the virginity status of their initiates, nor did male religious orders. Every order in New Spain, with the exception of the Carmelites, incorporated Veni sponsa in one or both of its initiation rituals. On the Carmelites, see Manual o procesionario, de las religiosas Carmelitas descalzas (Madrid: Imprenta de Joseph Doblado, 1775), 216–27. For the Company of Mary, see Ceremonial para la admisión y dar el hábito a las religiosas, del Órden de la Compañía de María Santísima, llamadas de la Enseñanza (México: Oficina de Arizpe, 1811), 9–14; and Ceremonial para la profesión de las religiosas, del Órden de la Compañía de María Santísima, llamadas de la Enseñanza (México: Oficina de Arizpe, 1812), 6–10. For Franciscans, see Regla de la gloriosa Santa Clara, 75–97; and the facsimile of Ordo ad induendum novitiam Monialem, in Rosalva Loreto López, Tota Pulchra: historia del Monasterio de la Purísima Concepción de Puebla, siglos XVI–XIX (México D.F.: Benemérita Univ. Autónoma de Puebla/Instituto de Ciencias Sociales/Ediciones EyC, 2017), 123–32. The male religious ceremonial books consulted, and some of their idiosyncrasies, are as follows: the Augustinians did not allow men to profess if they had been married less than two months at the time they wished to join a monastery. See Regla de N. P. S. Augustin, obispo, y doctor de la iglesia (México: Imprenta de Joseph Jauregui, 1774), 137–49; Carmelites did not allow eunuchs or previously married men to profess without express permission of the prior general. See Regla primitiva, y constituciones de los religiosos descalzos del orden de la bienaventurada Virgen María del Monte Carmelo (Puebla: Imprenta de la viuda de Miguel de Ortega y Bonilla, 1756), 158–67. On Dominicans, see Ceremonial Dominicano, fols 189^v–193^r. The Franciscans specifically mention that previously married men are allowed to profess. See Estatutos, y ordenaciones de la Santa Provincia de San Gregorio de religiosos descalzos de la regular, y más estrecha observancia de N. S. P. S. Francisco de Philipinas (Manila: Convento de Nuestra Señora de Loreto, 1753), 2. On Jesuits, see Reglas de la Compañía de Jesús, y la carta de la obediencia de nuestro glorioso padre S. Ignacio (Sevilla: s.n., 1735), 362–71. All orders prohibited former criminals of any sort to join their ranks. Thus, the specification of eunuchs in the Carmelite ceremonial could derive from the fact that castration was sometimes a punishment for various sexual crimes, not least for sodomy, bestiality and rape of virgins. See Tortorici, Sins against Nature, 72 & 125–27; and Katherine Crawford, Eunuchs and Castrati: Disability and Normativity in Early Modern Europe (London/New York: Routledge, 2019), 51–52.

91 Kathleen Ann Myers, Neither Saints Nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2003), 4–6.

92 Díaz, Indigenous Writings from the Convent, 94.

93 Miguel de Torres, Vida ejemplar y muerte preciosa de la Madre Barbara Josepha de San Francisco, religiosa de velo, y coro del Convento de La Santísima Trinidad, de la Puebla de los Ángeles (México: Por los Herederos de la Viuda de Francisco Rodríguez Lupercio, 1725), 154–57.

94 Torres, Vida ejemplar y muerte preciosa de la Madre Barbara Josepha de San Francisco, 160.

95 Torres, Vida ejemplar y muerte preciosa de la Madre Barbara Josepha de San Francisco, 161–62.

96 Torres, Vida ejemplar y muerte preciosa de la Madre Barbara Josepha de San Francisco, 163.

97 Torres, Vida ejemplar y muerte preciosa de la Madre Barbara Josepha de San Francisco, 164. The tradition of allegorizing the cross as a cithara has been examined in Ronald E. Surtz, The Guitar of God: Gender, Power, and Authority in the Visionary World of Mother Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534) (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Luis Robledo Estaire, ‘El cuerpo y la cruz como instrumentos musicales: iconografía y literatura a la sombra de San Agustín’, Studia Aurea. Revista de Literatura Española y Teoría Literaria del Renacimiento y Siglo de Oro, 1 (2007), 1–27; and Monson, Disembodied Voices, 87–88 & 108–09.

98 Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia U. P., 2002), 202–05.

99 Cristina Cruz González, ‘Beyond the Bride of Christ: The Crucified Abbess in Mexico and Spain’, The Art Bulletin, 99:4 (2017), 102–32; Ewa Kubiak & Juan Gómez Huasco, ‘La muerte simbólica: el cuadro con la representación de Silencio y Monja crucificada del Beaterio del Carmen de San Blas en Cusco’, Sztuka Ameryki Łacińskiej, 9 (2019), 95–126; and Nuria Salazar Simarro, ‘El papel del cuerpo en un grabado del siglo XVIII’, in Cuerpo y religión en el México barroco, ed. Antonio Rubial García & Bieñko de Peralta (México D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2011), 109–44.

100 Pedro Salmerón, Vida de la venerable madre Isabel de la Encarnación, Carmelita descalza, natural de la ciudad de los Ángeles (México: Francisco Rodriguez Lupercio, 1675), folio 103^v.

101 Salmerón, Vida de la venerable madre Isabel de la Encarnación, fols 103^v–04^r.

102 Finley, Hearing Voices, 157; Webb, The Divine Voice, 69.

103 Palafox, Regla y constituciones que han de guardar las religiosas, fol. 5^v.

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.