LAUSR

In the spirit of the now-substantial body of scholarship that reveals the feistiness and political savviness of people formerly thought to have none, this article focuses on the ways that cloistered religious women argued with ecclesiastical officials using vocabularies of rights and constitutions during the late colony and the early post-independence era in Mexico (Caplan 2009; Chambers 2000; Ducey 1999; Echeverri 2016; Ferrer 2014; Guardino 1996; Guardino 2005; Mallon 1994; Premo 2017; Schaefer 2017; Thomson 1998; Voekel 1992; Warren 2001). Most of what we know about nuns ‘talking back’ comes from studies of major convent crises. Even experts on convent life, then, may not realize that nuns argued with priests regularly on matters of seemingly trivial importance, nor may they know that this was a practiced mode of interaction on the part not only of educated and entitled nuns, but also of the generally poorer and less literate women living in beaterios (houses where pious women lived in semi-enclosure) and colegios (boarding schools/cloistered retreats). Further, convent scholars are likely unaware of the extent to which a language of rights, as established in institution-specific written constitutions, seeped into cloistered communities in the late eighteenth century and began to pervade written communications with ecclesiastical officials. The article, then, gives us a new perspective not only on female religious and their interactions with priests, but also on the impact of enlightened and republican discourses among women living in cloistered communities. The evidence presented strongly suggests that these discourses resonated among religious women, giving them new tools with which to advance the interests of their communities, and seemingly emboldening them to challenge authority more than they had in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. But I also argue that in most cases the impact of these discourses on religious women was limited. The use of new vocabularies did not imply a profound change in ways of thinking or internalization of new concepts such as individualism, individual freedom, universality, rule of law, contracts, or even equality (though there was certainly a powerful element of anti-hierarchical thinking at work in many of the cases we will examine). Rather, the constitutional rights that were more and more frequently invoked over time were social rights that defended the community, not the individual. The article is based on correspondence between religious women and ecclesiastical officials dispersed in boxes of administrative documents for the seven convents and twelve beaterios or colegios in the archive of the large and important archbishopric of