Maria Vela y Cueto: Autobiography and Letters of a Spanish Nun

by Josh Humphrey (Editor), Tosh (Translator)

Overview

When María Vela y Cueto (1561-1617) declared that God had personally ordered her to take only the Eucharist as food and to restore primitive dress and public penance in her aristocratic convent, the entire religious community, according to her confessor, “rose up in wrath.” Yet, when Vela died, her peers joined with the populace to declare her a saint. In her autobiography and personal letters, Vela speaks candidly of the obstacles, perils, and rewards of re-negotiating piety in a convent where devotion to God was no longer expressed through rigorous asceticism. Vela’s experience, told in her own words, reveals her shrewd understanding of the persuasive power of a woman’s body.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780866985598
Publisher:	ACMRS Publications
Publication date:	11/01/2016
Series:	MEDIEVAL & RENAIS TEXT STUDIES Series , #504
Edition description:	1
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Susan Diane Laningham is associate professor of European history at Tennessee Tech University.

Jane Tar is associate professor of Spanish at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 1

Note on Translation 49

Vida of María Vela y Cueto 53

Letters of María Vela y Cueto 140

Appendix I Chronology of the Life of María Vela y Cueto 167

Appendix II Excerpt from La muger fuerte-The Grave Men Who Spoke with Doña María Vela, and Approved of Her Spirit, As Related in This Account 168

Appendix III Excerpt from La muger fuerte-To the Saintly Doña María Vela, from a Nun in Madrid Who is Much Devoted to Her 169

Bibliography 171

Index 183

Editorial Reviews

María Vela y Cueto was a controversial figure in Counter-Reformation Spain. Some of her contemporaries regarded the visions, voices, and strange maladies she received as signs of divine favor; others suspected her of fraud or even heresy. After her death, her account of her life and spiritual experiences was lost to posterity until the twentieth century. This volume allows English-readers to encounter the sometimes infuriating, always fascinating, María Vela in her own words. Susan Laningham’s insightful introduction and notes, based on years of persistent scholarship, helpfully locate Vela in historical and historiographical context. Jane Tar’s careful and sensitive translation renders the Spanish nun’s writing accessible to a modern audience. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of religion, gender, and the body in post-Tridentine Catholic culture.

Jodi Bilinkoff
Professor, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

From the Publisher