The religious dimension of lay women, especially mestiza, indigenous, and colonial women, has rarely been brought to the fore. An analysis of tertiaries, beatas, and consecrated virgins within the missionary experience of the Order of Preachers between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries allows us to address a reality that goes beyond stereotyped identities constructed either from isolated individual experiences or from a reductive model of patriarchal imposition and colonial rule exercised by the Crown and the papacy through the friars. When endowed with sufficient spiritual, social, or intellectual capital, women were able to participate consciously and strategically in the processes of Christianisation in the New Worlds.
The ways in which ethnicity, gender, and religion were intertwined in women’s lives in the Americas and Asia can be better understood by examining how paradigms of female spirituality that emerged in late medieval Europe took root locally and generated an abundant body of theological, confessional, and missionary literature, as well as pragmatic juridical and canonical writing. There was undoubtedly a specific evangelising strategy directed towards women within the various religious orders and within the framework of Propaganda Fide, and this will be investigated comparatively.
The project focuses on the remarkable impact of women’s agency—particularly that of beatas, tertiaries, and consecrated virgins—on evangelisation in the New World and in Asia, from a perspective of transcontinental continuity grounded in the systematic study of the documentary sources of the Dominican Province of the Holy Rosary. Founded at the end of the sixteenth century, the Province expanded across Asian territories including the Philippines, Taiwan, Fujian, and Tonkin. The study also takes into account the later emergence, from the beaterio of St Catherine of Manila, of a specific female congregation devoted to evangelisation: the Tertiary Religious Sisters of the Province of the Rosary, later known as the Religious Missionaries of Santo Domingo. Precedents in the Iberian Peninsula, New Spain, and Peru provide the basis for the analysis.
Although consecrated virginity predates even the earliest forms of monastic life and served as a precursor to many regulated religious orders, the movement of women’s spirituality that emerged in medieval Europe fostered forms of communal religious life among celibate women dedicated to prayer and contemplation, while also seeking involvement in everyday society through the practice of evangelical charity. In contrast to narratives centred on exceptional religious women, especially learned beatas, this project focuses on more diverse and ordinary groups. It also engages with an imagological and discursive dimension that has often been neglected: the representation of women of different ages as ambiguous subjects situated between oppression and freedom—within the frameworks of the colonial Black Legend, Tridentine prescriptions, and Enlightenment and nineteenth-century anticlericalism—or between racialisation and identity, from orientophilia to orientophobia, and from sublimation to degradation.
Our research, grounded in the Dominican context, also highlights the fact that much of modern Catholicism was not wholly new in its relationship with women; rather, it became innovative when placed in contexts shaped by the far-reaching implications of women’s capacity for action. The trajectories of religious women provide exceptional evidence for an original analysis of a shared experience across the Catholic world, marked by episodes of incipient autonomy, but also by painful subjugation.