The religious dimension of secular women, especially mestizo, native or colonial women, has rarely been actively presented. The analysis of the tertiaries, beatas or consecrated virgins in the mission experiences of the Order of Preachers during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries allows us to address a reality beyond stereotyped identities based on individual experiences or on the simple model of patriarchal imposition and colonial rule exercised by the court and the papacy through the friars.
With sufficient spiritual, social, or intellectual capital, women were able to consciously participate with their strategies in the scenarios of the Christianization of the new worlds. The way in which ethnicity, gender, and religion intertwined in their lives in the America and Asia can be better understood by analyzing how the paradigms of feminine spirituality that emerged in late medieval Europe took root locally and produced an abundant theological, confessional, and missionary literature, as well as pragmatic juridical and canonical writing. Undoubtedly, there was a concrete evangelizing strategy for the female world in the various religious orders and in the framework of Propaganda Fide that will be investigated in a comparative way.
The themes focus on the remarkable impact of women’s agencies (beatas, tertiary, consecrated virgins) in the evangelization of the New World and in Asia, in a perspective of transcontinental continuity thanks to the systematic study of the documentary sources of the Dominican Province of the Holy Rosary, created at the end of the sixteenth century and which unfolded over the Asian territories (Philippines, Taiwan, Fujian, Tonquin), in addition to the later emergence, from the beaterio of St. Catherine of Manila, of an specific female congregation for evangelization (Tertiary Religious Sisters of the Province of the Rosary, Religious Missionaries of Santo Domingo). The precedents of the Peninsula, New Spain and Peru are the basis of the analysis. Although consecrated virginity predates even the first forms of monastic life and was a precursor of most disciplined orders, the women’s spirituality movement that emerged in medieval Europe initiated the religious coexistence of celibate women dedicated to prayer and contemplation, but who also wanted to get involved in everyday society and practice evangelical charity. In contrast to the narrative of exceptional religious women, especially around the learned beatas, the proposal focuses on more diverse everyday groups and also connects with an imagological and discursive dimension neglected by women in their age groups as ambiguous subjects of oppression-freedom (colonial black legend, Tridentine dispositions, enlightened and nineteenth-century anticlericalism) or racialization-identity (from orientophilia to orientophobia, from sublimation to degradation).
Our research, based on the Dominican scenario, also highlights that much of modern Catholicism was not completely new in its relationship with women, but it was innovative when it was placed in a context of challenges activated by the transcendence of women’s capacity for action. The trajectory of religious women provides exceptional information to analyze originally a common experience in the Catholic world, with episodes of germinating autonomy, but also of hurtful subjugation.