Quill and Cross in the Borderlands

Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue, 1628 to the Present

Anna M. Nogar

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780268102166
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Quill and Cross in the Borderlands examines nearly four hundred years of history, folklore, literature, and art concerning the seventeenth-century Spanish nun and writer Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda, identified as the legendary "Lady in Blue" who miraculously appeared to tribes in colonial-era New Mexico and taught them the rudiments of the Catholic faith. Sor María, an author of mystical Marian works, became renowned not only for her alleged spiritual travel from her cloister in Spain to the New World, but also for her writing, studied and implemented by Franciscans on both sides of the ocean. Working from original historical accounts, archival research, and a wealth of literature on the legend and the historical figure alike, Anna M. Nogar meticulously examines how and why the legend and the person became intertwined in Catholic consciousness and social praxis. In addition to the influence of the narrative of the Lady in Blue in colonial Mexico, Nogar addresses Sor María's importance as an author of spiritual texts that influenced many spheres of New Spanish and Spanish society. Quill and Cross in the Borderlands focuses on the reading and interpretation of her works, especially in New Spain, where they were widely printed and disseminated. Over time, in the developing folklore of the Indo-Hispano populations of the present-day U.S. Southwest and the borderlands, the historical Sor María and her writings virtually disappeared from view, and the Lady in Blue became a prominent folk figure, appearing in folk stories and popular histories. These folk accounts drew the Lady in Blue into the present day, where she appears in artwork, literature, theater, and public ritual. Nogar's examination of these contemporary renderings leads to a reconsideration of the ambiguities that lie at the heart of the narrative. Quill and Cross in the Borderlands documents the material legacy of a legend that has survived and thrived for hundreds of years, and at the same time rediscovers the historical basis of a hidden writer. This book will interest scholars and researchers of colonial Latin American literature, early modern women writers, folklore and ethnopoetics, and Mexican American cultural studies.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. As quoted in Kate Risse, “Strategy of a Provincial Nun: Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda’s Response,” Ciberletras 17 (2007): 8.

2. Alonso de Benavides, The Memorial of Fray Alonso de Benavides, 1630, trans. Emma Augusta Burbank Ayer (Chicago: Priv. Print. [R. R. Donnelley and Sons Co.], 1916). Cited hereafter as 1630 Memorial. Translations in the text are mine unless otherwise indicated.

3. The 1916 edition of Fray Benavides’s 1630 Memorial (notes by Frederick Webb Hodge and Charles Fletcher Lummis, translation by Emma Ayer) is the most frequently cited English language version of the narrative. In its notes, editors Hodge and Lummis dismiss Sor María’s travel to New Mexico out of hand: “The miracles she claimed to have performed were marvelous in the extreme. . . . Some of the tribal names mentioned by Mother María de Jesús, as might be expected, were, like the journeys themselves, creations of the imagination” (Benavides, 1630 Memorial, note 2 on 189–90). They cast aspersions on the nun’s temperament using a strange and recursive logic that attributes to Sor María far more agency than historical documents indicate she exerted: “The so-called mystical manifestations of Maria de Jesú as set forth in her La Mística Ciudad are characteristic of those she professed to have had in connection with the Indians of New Mexico. We have an inkling of these in the Memorial of Benavides, and have already seen that he visited the nun at Ágreda in 1631 where he had every opportunity to hear from the lady’s own lips of her marvelous ‘flights’ to New Mexico. . . . This no doubt will prove sufficient to indicate the mental character of his nun. For other performances to which she laid claim, see the letter of Benavides, together with her own communication” (ibid., note 55 on 276, 278). In Mexican historian Fernando de Ocaranza’s 1934 transcription of the 1631 letter written by Fray Benavides and Sor María to the friars in New Mexico, in which Sor María’s travels to New Mexico are described, Ocaranza derisively comments at the document’s conclusion: “Así terminó el ‘translado’ de la carta, donde nos refiere Fr. Alonso de Benavides, su maravilloso cuento de hadas” (Thus concluded the “excerpt” of the letter, in which Fray Alonso de Benavides recounts for us his marvelous fairy tale); Fernando Ocaranza, Establecimientos franciscanos en el misterioso reino de Nuevo México (México, 1934), 84. Even Sor María’s earliest English-language biographer and advocate, T. D. Kendrick, viewed her travels with misgivings: “All this means that it is not unfair to suggest that the gullibility of Father Benavides [in believing Sor María had traveled to New Mexico] must almost have equaled that of Father Marcos of Nice [Fray Marcos de Niza], and that the tale of their nun told by the Jumanos, assuredly with the Virgin Mary in mind, was as fictitious as a tale told by the Turk”; T. D. Kendrick, Mary of Ágreda: The Life and Legend of a Spanish Nun (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1967), 55.

4. As historian Ronald Rittgers has critically commented of historical scholarship on miracle narratives: “We can allow that people in the past believed in such things, and we can concede that some of our colleagues do as well, but we insist that such beliefs have no place in the modern historian’s craft. . . . Our culture will not abide intrusions of the transcendent and the supernatural into the interpretation of history. Our purview and our methodology are both strictly mundane, that is, this-worldly; we operate in a closed universe”; Rittgers, “‘He Flew’: A Concluding Reflection on the Place of Eternity and the Supernatural in the Scholarhip of Carlos M. N. Eire,” in A Linking of Heaven and Earth: Studies in Religious and Cultural History in Honor of Carlos M. N. Eire, ed. Emily Michelson, Scott K. Taylor, and Mary Noll Venables (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 205–6.

5. Studies of this nature include Marilyn H. Fedewa, María of Ágreda: Mystical Lady in Blue (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009); Servite Fathers, The Age of Mary: An Exclusively Marian Magazine, “The Mystical City of God” Issue (January-February 1958); see http://www.bookemon.com/flipread/681374/the-age-of-mary-magazine-january-february-1958#book; Zótico Royo Campos, Agredistas y antiagredistas: Estudio histórico-apologético (Totana: Tipografía de San Buenaventura, 1929).

6. Maria de Jesús de Ágreda and Joseph Ximénez Samaniego, Mystica ciudad de Dios . . . : Historia divina, y vida de la Virgen Madre de Dios . . . : Manifestada en estos ultimos siglos por la misma Señora à su esclava Sor María de Iesus . . . “Prologo galeato” and “Relación de la vida de la venerable madre Sor María de Jesus” (Madrid: B. de Villa-Diego, 1670).

7. A representative selection of such studies of early modern women’s writing in Spanish America might include the following: Ellen Gunnarsdøttir, Mexican Karismata: The Baroque Vocation of Francisca de los Ángeles, 1674–1744, Engendering Latin America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Nora Jaffary, False Mystics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Electa Arenal, Schlau Stacey, and Amanda Powell, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works, rev. ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010); Kathleen Ann Myers and Amanda Powell, A Wild Country Out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journals of a Colonia...