Embodying the Sacred

“Nancy E. van Deusen conjures the vibrant confessional world of Lima while conveying an extremely textured sense of women’s lives, down to the feeling of cloth and the frisson of hair and bone and blood. Beautifully written, Embodying the Sacred models a women’s history that does not make, or require, a false choice between representation and the lived experience of early modern women. This is an important book for anyone in women, gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, regardless of time and place. A fabulous read.” - Antoinette Burton, author of Africa in the Indian Imagination: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation

“No one makes colonial Spanish American spirituality as material—in all senses of the word— as does Nancy E. van Deusen. The book reanimates Lima's religiously devoted female inhabitants from spiritual autobiographies, fragmentary petitions, and beatification records: women who transmitted a gendered, colonial Catholic theology. The result is a critical intervention in the history of gender and religion, and a master class on how to read things in the past.” - Bianca Premo, author of The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire

"Important reading for those interested in women’s expressions of devotion in colonial Lima and modes of theorizing spiritual practices more generally. . . . Particularly valuable for giving voice (and body) to female figures and their devotional models." - Gabrielle Greenlee, H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews

"Nancy Van Deusen offers a suggestive and rewarding path to analyze how women felt and embodied their relation to God and the divine in seventeenth-century Lima. . . . This work is a notable contribution to understanding the complexities of women’s spirituality." - Asunción Lavrin, Catholic Historical Review

"This is a powerful monograph that creatively embraces the fragmentary and contradictory texts and objects that mystical women left behind." - Karen B. Graubart, American Historical Review

"Van Deusen is deft at uncovering fascinating and little-known women whose lives reveal a spectrum of behaviors, beliefs, and activities that shed new light on early modern devotional practices." - Erin Kathleen Rowe, HAHR