SPAN 351 - Saints and Sinners: Women in the Early Modern Transatlantic World

Targets, on the one hand, of criminalizing or pathologizing discourses that called for their exclusion from the public sphere, women were also key agents of hegemonic power in the Spanish colonial world. This course reflects on the generation of mutually conflicting female subjects in a context obsessed with the fight against religious and cultural otherness: the sinning body prone to sexual temptation and demonic possession and the saintly body, exemplary imitator of Christ’s suffering. Considering a varied corpus of Inquisition trials, spiritual autobiographies, wifely conduct manuals, mystical poetry, novellas, chronicles, paintings, and printed images from Spain and its American colonies, we think about the contradictions inherent in global Counter-Reformation gender politics and the myriad ways in which female writers and fictional personae co-opt or resist the stringent corporeal and mental discipline imposed on them. Students will, in addition, gain an understanding of the rich web of associations between religious confessional culture and emergent fictional genres. Authors studied include St. Teresa of Avila, Fray Luis de León, Christopher Columbus, Bartolomé de las Casas, María de Zayas, St. Rose of Lima, Sor María de Agreda, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Conducted in English.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Prerequisite(s): For Spanish credit: SPAN 321
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Cross-listing(s): LIT 392
Not offered: 2024-25
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).