Introduction
The writings of María de San José, an Augustinian nun who lived in Mexico during the
seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, provide a rich firsthand account of Catholic female
religiosity and the performance of religious identity during the colonial period of New Spain.
The reiterative nature of María de San José's painstaking descriptions of her own bodily self-
mortification and numerous visionary experiences, written at the request of her spiritual
confessors, both illuminate her techniques of religious purification, and constitute in themselves
a performance of piety.
I will examine María de San José's religious activities and writings through the lens of
performance, viewing her behaviors as a lifelong process of identity management. In so doing I
follow an approach set out by Irving Goffman, and elaborated by Richard Schechner, which
understands certain culturally-salient activities, including identity management "as
performance." My project aims not to undermine the validity of María de San José's religious
beliefs and experiences, but rather to locate hers as a pattern of behavior within a particular
historical, religious, and cultural context. In doing so I hope to demonstrate her agency in
navigating the strictly-controlled religious terrain of colonial New Spain during the Inquisition.
María de San José's role as a pious female ascetic involved ordering her daily life
according to a strict regime of privation and bodily mortification, following dietary restrictions,
wearing uncomfortable clothing, practicing physical isolation, and binding her body into
uncomfortable and restrictive postures. These practices comprise a set of specialized bodily
techniques, which María identified and performed in accordance with her religious beliefs.
Similarly, the content and descriptions of her religious visions and her very act of writing
constitute a highly structured performance of identity as a passionate and pious Christian nun.
Born into a landed but financially-burdened rural criollo family, María de San José lived
in Puebla and Oaxaca, Mexico, from 1656-1719. After an initial visionary experience at age
eleven, María followed in the footsteps of two of her older sisters, modeling her life upon the
ideals and practices of Christian ascetic piety derived from particular hagiographic and monastic
archetypes. She tried unsuccessfully to become a nun for many years, but could not afford the
necessary dowry, and met with resistance from her family. Hence, she practiced self-imposed
asceticism in her family's home, where she imitated the spiritual practices described in several
Franciscan religious publications popular at the time. Despite familial distractions and
contentions, she lived in isolation, constant prayer, and bodily self-mortification for twenty-one
years before becoming initiated as a nun.
At the age of thirty-two, María entered the newly-formed Augustinian Convent of Santa
Mónica, created for criolla girls of limited means, in 1687. Once in the convent, she came
under the constant and watchful eyes of her religious superiors, both nuns and father confessors,
and began writing her memoirs and spiritual journals at the request of her confessor and the
Bishop Manuel Fernandez de Santa Cruz. Maria's practices and writings must be understood
against the backdrop of the Inquisition and Counter-Reformation movements, as well as the
socio-political situation of New Spain, which both encouraged expressive piety among Spanish-
descended nuns to set an example for indigenous converts, and strictly monitored individuals
showing charismatic or visionary tendencies. The Inquisition dictated a very strict practice of
Christian piety, concerning itself primarily with claims of heresy but also using its position to
control the European population. Demonstrations of charismatic religious activity posed a
danger to established modes of worship, and were thus thoroughly investigated by the Holy
Office to determine their validity. Within this religio-political landscape, María de San José
composed her journals, always at the behest of her religious superiors, accumulating more than
twelve volumes of manuscripts. I will focus here on María's writings concerning her early life
and first years in the convent, during which she developed her bodily practices and began to
write her spiritual journals under the close supervision of her confessors.

Self-Mortification and Bodily Suffering
María de San José devotes a great deal of her writings to her self-imposed suffering both
during her early years at home and in her ensuing monastic career. Her spiritual journals reflect
an internalization of and response to Church views on women, the body, and asceticism. María's
bodily practices represent her interpretation of religious perfection as performed for herself, for
God, and for her religious superiors.
Particularly useful in thinking about María de San José's bodily practices is Richard
Schechner's notion of "restored behavior" as a particular type of modeled, symbolic, and
reflexive action, which views the performance of identity as a type of role-playing. The concept
of restored or reiterative behavior provides insights into practices that are adopted and displayed
in certain situations for specific audiences, such as prescribed modes of religious expression.
Understanding restored behaviors as models for action that are in some sense separate from the
individuals performing them allows for analysis of the interplay between individual agency and
culture. María de San José's writings demonstrate the reiterative nature of her bodily practices,
as they make explicit the models she used in crafting her religious life.
In a journal chronicling her call to religious life, written many years after the fact, and
specifically modeled on that of Maríana de San Joséph, the founder of her religious Order,
María describes the circumstances of her spiritual conversion at age eleven. While playing
outside of her house with several young girls, she cursed one of her playmates during an
argument, whereupon a lightning bolt struck and killed a nearby farm animal. Seeing this as a
sign of God's anger with her, she went into the house where she encountered the devil sitting on
the stairs, in the form of a naked mulatto man, who threatened her with the words "You are mine.
You will not escape my clutches." After a fearful night spent reflecting on her spiritual state, an
image of the Virgin Mary called to her and instructed the young girl how to live as a nun,
whereupon María took the vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience.
María quickly began following these vows according to available models. Her journal
describes how she took the monastic Rules of Saint Francis as an archetype for her religious
practice.
At once I stood up and went out to the sitting room. I found my brother Tomás
reading, as was his custom. I went up to him and asked him what was the book he
was reading. And he told me that it was the book of the Chronicles of the
Seraphic Saint Francis. And I asked him to read me the first Rule that our
glorious Father Saint Francis instituted and ordered for Saint Clare and her nuns.
He read it to me. I listened most attentively, and as I was hearing everything in
that Rule, it seemed it was being imprinted and stamped in my heart and my
memory; I felt the most efficacious longings and desires to follow and imitate this
very way of life, all severity and harshness, that Saint Francis instituted for his
nuns.

María's drive to "follow and imitate" the Franciscan Rules illustrate the reiterative nature of her
practices as well as her conscious choice to adopt them.
The monastic Rules set out by Saint Francis for his followers stressed above all
obedience, poverty, and chastity. Franciscan poverty is an absolute poverty, including the
renunciation of all possessions and extreme humility in the imitation of Christ. The Rules
further specify the wearing of very simple, poor clothing, constant prayer, and regular fasting.
As elaborated by Saint Clare, who founded a female monastic order in Francis' example, the
Rules take on a particularly ascetic quality, specifying that nuns should wear no shoes, should
sleep on the bare floor, and should eat only one meal per day, abstaining from meat at all times.
It is said that Clare herself practiced extreme asceticism, and this is reflected in her Rules, which
represented a radical move for female religious orders of the time, as Elizabeth Petroff asserts:
"The physical hardships of Clare's ideal life seemed excessive even in the penitential mood of
the thirteenth century."
It was this model of piety to which María de San José committed herself as a young child,
and which she continued to follow for the rest of her life. Thus from her earliest spiritual
endeavors María followed specific patterns of Christian piety that were available to her through
religious publications. Jane Schulenberg, in her study of Christian female religiosity,
emphasizes the importance of devotional texts chronicling Saints lives, called hagiographies, to
inspire pious imitation among believers: "The alleged purpose or expressed end of all saints'
lives was, however, pastoral and didactic: to edify the faithful, to teach Christian virtue, and
strengthen Christian resolve." Indeed, Myers and Powell note that devotional texts and
hagiographies comprised over seventy percent of books published in New Spain, and that stories
of the saints' lives figured prominently in children's informal education. In addition to the
writings of Saint Francis, from an early age María read many devotional texts, including the
Lives of Franciscan Saints Anthony of Padua, who she took as her patron in spiritual life, and
Saint Peter of Alcántara, as well as the Meditations and Methods for the Practice of Mental
Prayer, and Spiritual Combat. From these foundational texts María began to cultivate her
ascetic practices.
Upon hearing the Rule of Saint Francis from her brother, María began to follow the
strictures of ascetic piety within her family's home:
The very first thing I did was to take off my clothes and remove the underlinen
and dress I had worn until then. I made a shirt, or a sort of tunic of coarse cotton
cloth, and over this tunic I put some wooden panels, and on top of it all a thick
flannel skirt, very rough and heavy; all so snug that I did not fit in it very
comfortably…[At night] I would gather the bedclothes down around the nails of
my feet with a very strong sash, and I would pull it as tight as possible so that
even using a great deal of force the clothes could not come untied. I wrapped the
other end tightly around my waist over a haircloth I had put there. There I was,
all wrapped up like a ball of yarn, with my knees pressing into my chest and
unable to stir or make any movement at all. In this way, with these bonds
pressing tight as may be imagined, I slept for seven years every night without ever
skipping a single night or slackening the severity and force I used to tie these
fastenings.

Applying the tenets of asceticism to every aspect of her life, María embodied the system of
bodily expression, or what Paul Connerton calls "incorporating practices" at work in the
Christian ascetic tradition. Speaking specifically of the importance of the upright posture within
certain societies, Connerton argues that "in all cultures, much of this choreography of authority is
expressed through the body. Within this choreography, there is an identifiable range of
repertoires through which many postural performances become meaningful by registering
meaningful inflections of the upright posture." In adopting the bodily postures of asceticism,
María strove to purify her soul while evidencing her submission to the authority and obedience
of God, as prescribed in the Franciscan monastic Rules.
The bodily techniques that María adopted from her textual mentors had been refined over
centuries, originating in the ideal of Christian perfection exemplified by Early Christian
martyrdom. Once Christianity had gained a firm hold in the Mediterranean and the Roman
persecution of Christians had ceased, this ideal translated into the practice of asceticism, extolled
by the Church fathers, as spiritual martyrdom. Monasticism arose as an attempt to organize the
ascetic impulse, as Susanna Elm notes: "By moderating the physical extremes of the ascetic life,
monasticism emphasizes order, work, prayer, obedience, stability—all within the monastic
family." María's performance of accepted ascetic techniques championed by such revered
figures as Saint Francis ensured that her religious identity, while somewhat radical, fit securely
within Church precedent.
By practicing asceticism in her home, María followed a popular but problematic tradition
of "familial monasticism," in which pious members of both sexes practiced the Rules of the
monastic orders but remained in their family households. For early Christians who wished to
take vows of chastity and devotion to Christ, such domestic asceticism provided an opportunity
to live these vows without removing themselves to a monastic community, but was scrutinized
by early Church fathers, who remained suspicious of the lack of supervision in such
arrangements. María attempted to enter monastic life five times, but was prevented from doing
so by familial resistance and illness, until she finally succeeded in 1687, joining the Convent of
Santa María in Puebla.
María arrived at the convent with great anticipation, eager to enter the fellowship of a
community whose tenets she had been observing on her own for so many years: "As I stood at
last before the entrance, the door suddenly opened, and by the great joy and happiness I felt in
my soul, it seemed to me the very doors of heaven had opened to me." She continued her
ascetic practices, which went far above and beyond the requirements of cloister, often to the
consternation of the other nuns, who criticized her extremism. During her time as a novice she
maintained her accustomed method of self-imposed suffering:
One night after matins in my cell, I began to pray at the foot of my bed, which is
made up to look well and because the Constitution [of the Order] requires it, but
not because I sleep on it, for I sleep on the floor instead, with a bit of wood for my
pillow. I could not possibly tell of the great good things I recognize in my soul,
arising from the severity and harshness with which I have always abused my
body. And at times I am all in pieces, and full of such pains from head to toe,
with such anguish and mortal distress, that in this state I could not find relief or
safe rest even in a very soft and very delightful bed. So to lie down on a bed as
hard as this, is just putting myself on a torture-rack for my body; but for my soul
it is nothing but a bed of flowers. And I give my body no more rest than to lay it
on the hard ground, where I pass my days and nights tossing and turning with
anguish and mortal agony, so that it seems my life would end at any instant if God
did not give me the strength not to die…

Her anguish is constant, regular, and habitual. In addition to her bodily suffering, at this time
María was persecuted by demons sent by God to test her endurance, and which tormented her
mentally and physically, causing her great suffering and agony. The agony of her self-
mortification and persecution by demons paved the way for the purification of her soul through
constant self-surveillance. The severity of her actions and the detail in which she describes them
lend credence to her identity as a woman of exceptional piety.
Because of her active visionary and ascetic tendencies, María's confessors commanded
her to begin writing a spiritual journal to chronicle her experiences and progress. Her writings
will be discussed at length in the next section. María's ultimate acceptance into the convent and
subsequent supervision after twenty-one years mirrors the trend toward routinization, to use
Weber's term, of asceticism in Church history and reflects the Inquisitional concern with
properly controlled religious expression. I suspect that her eventual initiation as a nun signified
local religious leaders' awareness of her extraordinary spiritual life and their desire to place them
under close supervision and Church sanction. María's entrance into monastic life thus represents
a transition from her solitary practices of asceticism to her membership into a religious
community in which she was expected to conform to certain standards of monastic piety.

María de San José's Writings as Performance
In addition to her bodily practices, María de San José's writings constitute in themselves
a written performance of piety, as they were solicited by and written for the review of her male,
priestly overseers in the convent. At many instances in her journals, María explains that writing
was extremely difficult for her, and that she wrote only at the insistence of her confessors.
Indeed, María professes not to have known how to write prior to entering the convent, learning to
do so precisely in order to pen her spiritual journals. Of particular interest to her confessors
were her frequent visions and direct communications with God and the Virgin Mary, accounts of
which appear throughout her journals.
Just prior to his death, María's first Father Confessor, who had requested her to keep a
spiritual journal, asked permission to discuss her religious state with two monks who were in
close communication with the Bishop. One of these came to hear her confession in the convent,
and as she had not begun writing, commanded her to do so, this time under orders from the
Bishop:
One of them came a few times to the confessional and ordered me to give him full
accounts of everything. I did so, and although he consoled me somewhat, he
emphasized very, very much how risky is the way that I am traveling, and that I
must live with great care and watchfulness so as not to be deceived by the
enemy…He ordered me, under obedience, to give a written account of all that
happened in my soul to my spiritual Father, who as I already said was Father
Chaplain, now deceased. I already had this same order from my Father
Confessor, who had put me under obedience to start writing my life from the very
beginning.
Now that I had these two orders of obedience I began to write, trusting
entirely in holy obedience that I could make no error. And besides this, on two
other occasions Our Lord has ordered me to write down everything that happens
in my soul, telling me that He does not want the great deeds His Divine Majesty
has wrought and is working in me, unworthy creature, to be hidden and left to
silence; that through them His powerful hand may be praised, which has proved
always so generous in favoring me, when I deserve only to be loathed.

This passage highlights the place of power and authority from which María's instruction to write
her life issued: from her own Confessor, from the Bishop of Puebla, and from God. The words
"order" and "obedience" appear here many times, as they do throughout her journals. Her
religious superiors were clearly concerned about how her practices and visions fit into the
requirements of the Church and the Inquisition. Her initiation into monastic life thus signaled
the necessity for an even stricter performance of piety than she had been following at home, and
that for a very demanding audience. María's assertion that her instruction to write was echoed
by God himself gives an internal authority to her writings, investing them with divine sanction.
While she policed her body through asceticism, she was commanded to police her soul through
writing.
Clearly the writings about her life and spiritual journey that were demanded of María
were meant as a form of control and supervision. María's descriptions of her visions and
practices were expected to take a particular form and content. They were used to judge the
legitimacy of her seemingly-extraordinary piety, and how it held up in the face of the Inquisition,
as Myers and Powell note: "It was considered especially vital to obtain a written document when
a woman demonstrated signs of an extraordinary visionary life, which might lead to trouble with
the Inquisition if judged heretical, or to praise by the Church if deemed to be divinely
inspired." Thus María's detailed descriptions of her daily routines, regular visions, and
constant suffering, as well as the sheer quantity of her writing, sought to confirm the validity of
her religious calling.
As evidenced by the Franciscan Rules discussed above, monastic life constitutes a highly
ordered and controlled environment that mandates particular forms of action and expression.
María's situation within the cloister and in relation to the wider Church hierarchy in New Spain
lends itself to a performance analysis. Irving Goffman characterizes the performance of self as a
type of socialized behavior, in which the individual shapes her behavior to meet the expectations
of a particular group, and in which social discipline is often enacted onto the body in a process
of internalization. Applying the notion of identity management to certain types of groups that
operate within a closed system, he asserts: "Within the walls of a social establishment we find a
team of performers who cooperate to present to an audience a given definition of the situation."
This characterization helps to illuminate María de San José's ascetic lifestyle and life within the
convent, particularly in the ways her writing negotiates the expectations of its audience, and the
ways in which that writing was inspected for its adherence to accepted religious standards.
María's writings, like her bodily practices and the contents of her visions, followed
traditional narrative forms, such as the style of religious autobiography used by Theresa of Avila,
whose life, writings, and monastic rules were extremely popular in both Spain and the New
World at the time. Myers and Powell assert that María's writing demonstrates her awareness of
the implications of her writings, and that she managed their presentation accordingly:
María reveals the degree to which she has written with full awareness of the
guidelines by which she was to be judged; she carefully spells out how her visions
are to be assessed. Moreover, all her accounts show strong evidence of how she
wittingly or unwittingly shaped them to fall into line with Catholic teachings
about orthodoxy…

An important criterion for judging visions was that they follow scripture and Catholic doctrine,
and indeed María's accounts of her visions both followed Counter-Reformation Catholic
doctrine and supported church hierarchy. As we have seen, imitation of existing spiritual
models played a pivotal role in the religious life of María de San José, as it did with all nuns of
her time. Indeed, like the Franciscans María imitated from childhood, Carmelite nuns in New
Spain followed the reforms of Saint Theresa of Avila, which instructed them to "imitate Christ
through prayer and live in communal poverty like the early Christians." Imitation, or
reiteration, therefore lies at the heart of María's practices and provides the key to understanding
her behaviors as a type of performance.
Regarding the writings of Medieval female mystics, Elizabeth Petroff notes the radically
different portrayals of pious women in texts written by male biographers versus those written by
women themselves, asserting that texts written by women take an entirely different form and
character than religious literature traditionally authored by men. She "suggest[s] that medieval
mystical texts by women will not fit into a traditional Western notion of literature, because they
derive from a different experience of the body, a different epistemology, and a different
relationship to language." How do María de San José's journals fit into this schema?
Although autobiographical in content, María wrote them specifically for, and under the
supervision of, her male superiors. María's journals lack any notion of the female body as a
specific site for divine communion or metaphors of romantic love in union with God, as
expressed by earlier female mystics like Hildegard of Bingen and Catherine of Siena. For
María, the body endures only mortification, fatigue, and suffering; she may have anticipated
Inquisitional concern over such subjects, causing her to omit from her writings any reference to
the female body and sexuality, or this may simply reflect her ascetic leanings. Instead her
relationship with God takes the form of a stern but benevolent father towards his questioning,
self-doubting daughter, perhaps modeled upon the interactions between María and her
confessors.
María de San José's journals portray an active visionary and ascetic life, balanced
between suffering and joy, and guided by the voice of God. They reflect a profound
internalization of the tenets of Christian acetic piety, as well as an awareness of the models and
expectations against her religious life was to be measured. María's writing constitutes a double
performance, in that it describes her already-enacted bodily practices, visionary experiences, and
daily life in textual form, intended for the watchful audience of her priestly overseers.

Conclusions
In 1697, María de San José was chosen to found the new convent of Nuestra Senora de la
Soledad in Oaxaca, where she became known as an important holy woman because of her ability
to communicate directly with God. She remained at the convent in Oaxaca until her death in
1719, after which she was extolled as a visionary and mystic, thanks in part to her copious
writings, and their commendation by Church leaders. Thus María de San José became precisely
the model of Christian piety as she had undertaken to imitate throughout her life. Her popularity
as a female mystic and leadership role in the Church in later life show that her performance of
religious identity, through bodily mortification and through writing, successfully proved the
sincerity and divine inspiration of her piety to the satisfaction of her superiors during the
Inquisitional period of New Spain.
María modeled every aspect of her religious life, and hence her very identity, upon
specific models of piety from the Christian ascetic and monastic tradition. She demonstrated an
awareness of the standards against which her visionary life was to be measured by her Church
superiors and by the Inquisition, and she negotiated these expectations by imitating accepted
forms of religious expression in her daily practice and in her writing. For María de San José,
such reiterative behavior formed the cornerstone of her lifelong performance of piety, leading to
her canonization by the Church.
 

Works Cited
 
 

Clark, Elizabeth A. Ascetic Piety and Women's Faith: Essays on late Ancient Christianity.
Studies in Women and Religion, Volume 20. Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press,
1986.

Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Elm, Susanna. Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1994.

Goffman, Irving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959.

Habig, Marion, ed. St. Francis of Assisi, Writings and Early Biographies: English Omnibus of
the Sources for the Life of Saint Francis. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983.

Malone, Edward E. The Monk and the Martyr: The Monk as Successor of the Martyr. The
Catholic University of American Studies in Christian Antiquity, no. 12. Washington, D.C.: The
Catholic University of America Press, 1950.

Myers, Kathleen A. and Amanda Powell. A Wild Country Out in the Garden: The Spiritual
Journals of a Colonial Mexican Nun. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Petroff, Elizabeth Alvilda. Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Schechner, Richard. Between Theatre and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1985.

________. "Performance Studies: A Broad Spectrum Approach," 1995. Unpublished draft.

Schulenberg, Jane Tibbetts. Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500-1100.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.
In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959).
Richard Schechner, "Performance Studies: A Broad Spectrum Approach," 1995. Unpublished draft.
Kathleen A. Myers and Amanda Powell, A Wild Country Out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journals of a
Colonial Mexican Nun, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), xv.
Ibid., xv-xvii.
Ibid., xviii-xx.
Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1985), 35-36.
Myers and Powell, 309-311.
Ibid., 15.
Ibid., 20.
Marion Habig, ed. St. Francis of Assisi, Writings and Early Biographies: English Omnibus of the
Sources for the Life of Saint Francis (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983), 6-7.
Ibid., 31-33.
Elizabeth Alvida Petroff, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994), 69-70.
Ibid., 69.
Schulenberg, 22.
Myers and Powell, 260.
Ibid., 28.
Ibid., 21-22.
Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 72.
Ibid, 74.
For a discussion of the tranisition from the ideal of martyrdom to the ideal of asceticism, see Edward
Malones' The Monk and the Martyr: The Monk as Successor to the Martyr (Washington, D.C.: The
Catholic University of America Press, 1950), 1-26.
Susanna Elm, Virgins of God: the Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1994), 1.
Elizabeth A. Clark, Ascetic Piety and Women's Faith: Essays on late Ancient Christianity, Studies in
Women and Religion, Volume 20, (Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1986), 182-186.
Myers and Powell, 63.
Ibid.
Ibid., 84.
Myers and Powell discuss María de San Jose's lack of formal education, having grown up on a rural
hacienda, as compared to that of her religious contemporaries, many of whom came from more elite,
urban families. However they also point out the "hagiographic convention of miraculously sudden
literacy," which María may have been following with this claim, 312.
Myers and Powell, 104-105.
Ibid., xix.
Goffman, 35.
Ibid., 57.
Ibid., 238.
Myers and Powell, 279-80.
Ibid., 277.
Ibid., 267.
Petroff, ix.
Ibid.
Petroff focuses specifically on Hildegaard of Bingen and Catherine of Siena, among others, in her
discussion of female mysticism in the Medieval period.
Myers and Powell, xvii-xviii.
 

11

Melinda Rothouse
Performing Colonialism
Fall 2000