Outputs

Juan de Santo Domingo, OP, Breve relación de la fundación y progreso del beaterio de Santa Catalina de Sena de esta ciudad de Manila (1711), ms | Juan Amador, OP, Monasterio Senense y fundación canónico-legal del de Santa Catarina de Sena de Manila (c. 1775), ms | Benno M. Biermann, OP, Die Anfänge der neuren Dominikanermission in China (1927).

Its documentary importance is very high because it offers a first-person institutional memory of the origins and early consolidation of the Beaterio of Santa Catalina, covering the emergence of the first Dominican tertiaries in Manila, the gathering of the earliest beatas, the organisation of the beaterio in 1696, the role of benefactors such as Juan de Escaño, the introduction of enclosure, the periods of crisis and displacement, and the return to the beaterio under a new institutional framework. It is, in effect, one of the most direct and substantial surviving testimonies for the internal history of a female Dominican community in the Philippines at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

For EVANFE, the manuscript is especially valuable because it illuminates a female religious world structured by the Dominican Third Order, yet shaped by local negotiation, pastoral direction, urban sociability, and institutional fragility. The text provides evidence not only for the spirituality and discipline of the first women associated with the house, but also for the ways in which tertiary women, confessors, ecclesiastical authorities, governors, and benefactors interacted in order to define the beaterio’s identity. In this respect, the manuscript is indispensable for understanding how women’s religious communities in Manila could move between the categories of beata, tertiary, quasi-monastic religious, enclosed community, and educational institution.

Its relevance is heightened by the broader historical trajectory of the institution. The present Congregation of the Dominican Sisters of St Catherine of Siena traces its origin to the Beaterio de Santa Catalina de Sena de Manila, definitively established in 1696 with the profession of Mother Francisca del Espíritu Santo de Fuentes and seven other beatas, while Santa Catalina College identifies 1706 as the beginning of the community’s educational mission and one of the earliest sustained forms of female religious education in the Philippines. The manuscript therefore stands at the heart of a long institutional history that links the first tertiary women of Manila with later Dominican congregational and educational developments.

The source is also methodologically rich. It contains not only narrative chapters on the foundation, growth, crises, and personnel of the beaterio, but also highly valuable evidence on the education of girls, the organisation of the Dominican Third Order, the role of lay and clerical patronage, and the community’s fraught relationship with episcopal jurisdiction and royal authority. Particularly notable are the appended documents concerning the authorisation of the beaterio, the archbishop’s decrees, the educational mission of the house, and later institutional justifications. These materials make the text important not merely as a devotional or internal history, but as a source for the legal and administrative construction of female religious life in colonial Manila.

From EVANFE’s perspective, the value of a new full transcription is all the greater because the rare edition prepared by Fr Pedro Rosa, O.P., in 1911 cannot be treated as a definitive substitute for the original manuscript. Rosa himself states that, although he copied the manuscript and presented it to the public, he regularised orthography, expanded abbreviations, and adjusted the scribal presentation, since he was publishing it not as a strict bibliographical reproduction but as a pious and readable text. The 1911 volume is therefore extremely useful, but it is not a diplomatic edition; and if, as archival comparison suggests, it is also incomplete, the case for a fresh transcription becomes even stronger. A complete scholarly transcription would allow researchers to recover the manuscript’s exact textual texture, authorial voice, scribal practices, and documentary integrity.

The manuscript is particularly important for EVANFE because it gives access to women’s agency and subaltern memory in a form mediated, but not erased, by clerical narration. Through Juan de Santo Domingo’s account, we glimpse the actions, aspirations, visions, conflicts, ascetic practices, devotions, illnesses, deaths, and reputations of women such as Francisca del Espíritu Santo, Antonia de Jesús María, and Sebastiana de Jesús, as well as the collective discipline of the early sisters. The text thus contributes directly to one of EVANFE’s central aims: to recover the lived religious experience of women whose voices often survive only in fragmentary, indirect, or juridically filtered forms.

In summary, the transcription and study of this manuscript would be of outstanding scholarly importance for EVANFE. It is a foundational source for the history of the Beaterio of Santa Catalina de Sena in Manila, for the study of Dominican tertiary women, and for the wider history of female religious institutions, education, and ecclesiastical negotiation in the early modern Philippines. A complete and critically framed transcription would not only restore the text to full scholarly usability, but would also provide EVANFE with a source of first-order importance for the study of women’s religious life in the transcontinental Dominican world.

· Juan Amador, OP, Monasterio Senense y fundación canónico-legal del de Santa Catarina de Sena de Manila (c. 1775), ms. The transcription and critical study of the manuscript Monasterio senense y fundación canónico-legal del de Santa Catarina de Sena de Manila would be of very considerable value for the EVANFE project. Even in its present, incomplete digital form, the text already reveals itself to be an exceptionally rich source for the legal, institutional, spiritual, and memorial history of the Beaterio–Monastery of Santa Catalina de Sena in Manila, as well as for the wider history of Dominican tertiary women in the early modern and eighteenth-century Ibero-Asian world. The manuscript is explicitly concerned with the canonical and legal defence of the community’s status, arguing for the legitimacy of its solemn profession, enclosure, religious condition, and right to be recognised as a true monastery of Dominican tertiaries. In doing so, it preserves a level of juridical and theological argumentation that is indispensable for understanding how female religious communities negotiated recognition, authority, and institutional permanence within the ecclesiastical and royal frameworks of the Spanish empire.

For EVANFE, the source is especially important because it brings into focus a female religious world that was neither marginal nor merely derivative, but deeply embedded in Dominican structures of observance, spirituality, and education. The manuscript not only defends the canonical standing of the Manila community, but also constructs a genealogy of Dominican tertiary women by invoking numerous venerable, beatified, and saintly tertiaries, together with examples drawn from other monasteries across the Catholic world. It also includes translated necrologies of sisters from Santa Catalina itself, thereby preserving a precious internal memory of holiness, discipline, suffering, and exemplary conduct. This combination of institutional apology, spiritual memorialisation, and transcontinental comparison makes the text particularly valuable for EVANFE’s interest in recovering female agency, subaltern memory, and the religious experience of women whose presence is often only partially visible in more conventional archival series.

The manuscript is also of outstanding documentary significance because it reproduces and discusses a sequence of royal decrees and legal arguments concerning the foundation, regulation, and public standing of the house, including the decrees of 1703, 1714, 1716, 1731, 1732, and 1762. These materials are crucial for tracing the long and contested process through which the community’s identity was defined in relation to royal patronage, episcopal oversight, Dominican jurisdiction, female education, and the management of vows and enclosure. As such, the volume provides direct evidence for the tension between beaterio and monastery, between simple and solemn profession, and between local opposition and institutional consolidation—issues central not only to the history of the Manila house, but also to the broader study of women’s religious life in the Hispanic world.

Its importance is further enhanced when set against the known history of the institution. The present-day Congregation of the Dominican Sisters of St Catherine of Siena in the Philippines identifies the original Beaterio de Santa Catalina de Sena de Manila as having been definitively established on 26 July 1696, with the profession of Mother Francisca del Espíritu Santo de Fuentes and seven other beatas. The later educational development of the community is likewise well attested: the institution that became Santa Catalina College traces its origin to the beaterio and identifies 1706 as the beginning of its educational mission, while royal recognition followed in 1716. This long continuity from beaterio to educational and religious institution gives the manuscript a significance that is not merely local or antiquarian, but foundational for understanding the emergence and endurance of one of the earliest Dominican women’s communities in the Philippines.

Modern scholarship and institutional histories also confirm the relevance of the issues treated in the manuscript. Accounts of the beaterio’s history emphasise both the early failed attempts to establish a Dominican female foundation in Manila and the later success of the community under Mother Francisca del Espíritu Santo and her companions, as well as the tensions generated by jurisdictional disputes, the claims of other convents, and the wider social implications of founding a new women’s house in the city. The manuscript’s sustained defence of the community’s canonical status therefore does not stand in isolation: it corresponds to a real and prolonged process of negotiation in which the identity of the community—as a beaterio, a monastery, an educational institution, and a house of Dominican tertiaries—remained historically contested.

From the perspective of EVANFE, the complete transcription of this manuscript is thus of high scholarly importance, especially given that the currently available file is only partial. A full transcription would secure access to the entirety of a text whose evidential value lies precisely in its cumulative structure: the unfolding juridical argument, the embedded citations, the lists of revered tertiaries, the memorial passages, and the appended royal decrees all contribute to its interpretative weight. Producing a complete transcription, and accompanying it with a critical study, would therefore not simply recover an obscure text, but would make available a major source for the history of female Dominican life, legal identity, and educational mission in Manila, while also opening important comparative perspectives for the study of tertiary women across the global Catholic world.

In short, the value of this undertaking for EVANFE is exceptionally high. The manuscript offers a rare convergence of canonical reasoning, institutional memory, devotional culture, and female self-legitimation. Its full transcription and scholarly study would significantly strengthen the project’s documentary basis and would provide an essential tool for investigating the place of tertiary and quasi-monastic women in the evangelising, juridical, and cultural worlds of Ibero-Asia.

· Benno M. Biermann, OP, Los inicios de la nueva misión dominicana en China. Spanish edition and translation of Die Anfänger der Neueren Dominikanermission in China, Münster (Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1927, xxiv+239 p). Die Anfänge der neueren Dominikanermission in China is of considerable interest for the EVANFE project, both because of its subject matter and because of the scholarly qualities of the work itself. As a rare and still insufficiently accessible study, it offers a foundational account of the beginnings of the modern Dominican mission in China, while also documenting the wider missionary networks linking China, Formosa, the Philippines, and Rome. 

Its value lies not only in the historical narrative it reconstructs, but also in the richness of its documentary basis. Biermann drew extensively on archival and printed sources, including missionary correspondence, annual letters, polemical writings, and materials from the archives of Propaganda Fide, and he organised this material into a work that combines chronological reconstruction with sustained reflection on missionary method, cultural accommodation, women’s ministry, and the Chinese Rites controversy.

For EVANFE, the publication of a Spanish edition is especially justified by the fact that this is a work of clear historiographical importance which remains little known and difficult to consult, despite its relevance for the study of Catholic missions, intercultural exchange, and the religious history of early modern and modern Asia. A Spanish edition, accompanied by a substantial introductory study, would make the book available to a much wider scholarly readership and provide the critical framework necessary to assess both its documentary value and its interpretative limits.

Such an introductory study would be particularly valuable in situating Biermann’s work within the historiography of the Dominican missions, evaluating its treatment of inter-order conflict and missionary practice, and clarifying the significance of the sources on which it relies, many of which remain scattered, unpublished, or otherwise difficult to access. In this sense, the proposed edition would not merely reproduce an important text, but would actively restore it to scholarly circulation as a tool for renewed research.

The project is therefore of high academic value: it would recover and contextualise a little-known but important work, facilitate critical engagement with a complex missionary past, and strengthen the documentary and historiographical foundations for future research on the Dominican world, the evangelisation of China, and the broader transcontinental framework in which EVANFE is situated.