La religiosa real y la inventada: diálogo entre dos modelos discursivos

• Autores: Asunción Lavrin
• Localización: Historia y grafía, ISSN 1405-0927, Nº. 14, 2000, págs. 185-206
• Idioma: español
• Títulos paralelos:
  • The Real Nun and the Invented One: Dialogue between Two Discursiveness Models
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• Resumen

  • This research deals with the intellectual creation of the spiritual prototype of a "model" nun, and the theological discourse that delineated that practice and purpose of religious life in the seventeenth century. Its sources are pastoral letters, funeral sermons, the conventual Rules and Constitutions, a treatise "on the observance" of religious life and the biographies of nuns. The pastoral letters are those of Bishop Palafox, whose picture of spiritual life also includes daily onservance. Both contain elements of the perfection to which all nuns should aspire. The Rules established the daily routine of conventual life, the hours devoted to devotional practices, the discipline followed throughout the day, and the ceremonial observed on special occasions, all of which contain a symbolic message of religious perfection expressed as activities within the cloisters. The funeral sermon reminded the listeners of the virtues of the deceased nun, whose memory begins to be reconstructed as "exemplary" through the transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary. The Directorio para religiosas of Dominican Thomas Morales, published in 1722, portrays perfections and imperfections in conventual observance. Finally, I examine the most complex form of mixing the invention of a model of religious perfection with reality, the biography. The writing of conventual biographies partakes of two genres: one was old, history; the other was new, the novel. That leap between verifiable reality to the idealization of reality transforms biography into hagiography. The authors of the texts examined in this work, carved an image of cultural and spiritual perfection which they offered to the world as "the invented nun".