Women of the Page: Convent Culture in the Early Modern Spanish World

The call to convent life drew women throughout the early modern Spanish world, from Madrid to Mexico City to Manila. For all the strictures these institutions placed upon their inhabitants, they also gave women opportunities to pursue vocations of the spirit and of the mind. Within convent walls, Teresa of Ávila inaugurated her groundbreaking religious reform, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz composed some of the most ingenious poems in the Spanish language, and innumerable women wrote powerful accounts of their religious journeys.

“Women of the Page” showcases the John Carter Brown Library’s extraordinary collection of images and books centered on nuns and convent life across Spain and its empire. The term “convent” is used here in a broad sense to encompass cloistered communities whose residents took the veil as well as female institutions such as beaterios, which housed lay women. Likewise, the nuns featured in the exhibition are not only women who professed (those who took full vows), but also novices, beatas (lay sisters), and others who lived in female religious communities. Included are objects that shed light on how nuns presented themselves in spiritual autobiographies and on how they were portrayed by male artists and hagiographers. In several cases, the emphasis is on women’s miraculous encounters with sacred images and their rapturous visions of divine love. Other objects provide insight into the more mundane rhythms of convent life: the sound of sacred texts read aloud; the rituals of perambulating through the cloister; and the privation and pleasure involved in fasting, feasting, and preparing meals.